Chapter 6 - The Council of Blood
The basement of the Bellini Cafe was a room that didn't exist on the city’s official blueprints. It was accessed through a narrow steel trapdoor beneath the potato bins in the dry storage, opening into an old limestone vault that had been used to store beer during the Prohibition days. The walls were damp, smelling of old masonry, starch, and the cold iron of the pipes that ran overhead.
Victor Moretti sat in a straight-backed wooden chair in the center of the room, his tailored blue suit wrinkled, his hands cuffed behind his back with industrial zip-ties. His red-stone ring had been removed, sitting on the corner of a raw wooden table next to a single glass of water.
Around the room stood six men—all of them gray-haired, broad-shouldered, wearing the heavy wool coats of the old union guard. They didn't have their weapons drawn; they stood with their hands in their pockets, their eyes fixed on Victor’s face with a heavy, judgmental silence.
Nathan walked down the stone stairs, his boots clicking firmly against the wet flagstones. He didn't look angry; he looked like a landlord who had come to collect an overdue rent check.
"Adrian," Victor said, his voice carrying a sharp, desperate tremor that he tried to mask with a patronizing smirk. "You’re making a tactical error. The New York families... they’re already moving their capital into the northern suburbs. If you kill me, you’re cutting off the family’s access to the international shipping routes. I did what I had to do to keep the organization liquid."
"You sold two nine-year-old children to a New York freighter, Victor," Nathan said, stopping three feet from the chair. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out the contract Grant Mercer had signed, and dropped it onto the table next to the red ring. "That’s not liquidity. That’s garbage. My father didn't build this organization so we could act as customs brokers for human cargo."
"They were just Daniel’s kids!" Victor shouted, his face turning a deep, angry purple as he strained against the zip-ties. "Daniel owed three hundred thousand dollars! He signed the security note! I was just enforcing the collection!"
"Daniel owed the money to a shell company you registered in the Caymans, Victor," Nathan said, his voice dropping to a low register that made the limestone walls hum. "You let him borrow from the pits so you’d have an excuse to take his shop and his family when the Rotterdam containers arrived. You’ve been planning this since last winter."
He turned to Artie Pendelton, the senior enforcer standing by the door.
"Artie," Nathan said. "Take the ring."
Artie walked over, picked up the red-stone ring from the table, and dropped it into a heavy iron mortar. He picked up a three-pound smith’s hammer and brought it down with a single, deafening blow. The red stone didn't just crack; it shattered into a hundred tiny pieces of red glass and dust, the silver band flattening against the iron bottom.
May you like
Victor let out a low, dry gasp, his head hanging low as the symbol of his authority was reduced to scrap metal.
"You’re stripped, Victor," Nathan said, turning back toward the stairs. "The family trusts have been moved to a public-interest transport cooperative managed by the union drivers. You have twenty-four hours to pack your bags and leave the state of Illinois. If I see your face or your cars within five hundred miles of this city after sunrise... the next hole we dig won't be in the Calumet mud."
