Chapter 1 - The Blood Card
The kitchen floor was ice cold.
The woman lay on her side, her hair matted with sweat, her face hollowed out by starvation. Her breathing was so faint I had to lean down to hear the tiny, rattling gasps escaping her dry lips. Next to her outstretched hand, soaked in a puddle of rainwater leaking from the cracked ceiling, lay a thick, black velvet card.
I picked it up with two fingers.
stamped into the black card in gold foil was the crest of the Moretti family—a double-headed raven perched on an iron anchor. Below it, written in sharp, precise cursive, were the words: Paid in Full. Property of the Don.
A cold, heavy stillness settled over my chest.
In Chicago, no one used my name without my express permission. If a street crew collected a debt in the name of Rocco Moretti, fifty percent went to the syndicate's bank, thirty went to the local captains, and twenty went to the earners. But more importantly, the Moretti code had been written in blood by my grandfather fifty years ago: We do not war with women. We do not starve children. We do not touch the weak.
Whoever had done this hadn't just robbed this family; they had used my name as a shield while breaking the absolute law of my house.
"Mommy?" Emma’s voice cracked from the doorway. She stood clutching her rusty pink bicycle, her torn shoes caked with mud, her eyes wide with terror as she looked at her mother’s motionless body. "Mommy, wake up... I brought help. He didn't buy the bike, but he came..."
I dropped the black card into my pocket and knelt beside the woman. I pressed two fingers against her neck. Her pulse was threadbare, a thready flutter that threatened to stop at any second.
"Luca," I said into the radio clip pinned to my collar.
Outside, the door of the black SUV slammed. My caporegime and right-hand man, Luca Vance, stepped into the stripped kitchen within three seconds, his hand already resting on the grip of his heavy dark pistol beneath his coat.
When Luca saw the bare room—the missing baseboards, the wires pulled from the walls, the starving woman on the floor—his eyes darkened. Then he saw the child standing by the door.
"Boss?" Luca asked softly.
"Call Dr. Mercer," I ordered, my voice dangerously calm. "Tell him to bring a full trauma kit, saline IVs, and high-calorie nutritional fluids directly to this address. Tell him if she dies before he gets here, I'll tear his license to shreds."
"Right away," Luca said, pulling his phone out.
"And Luca?" I added, turning my head slightly.
"Yeah, Rocco?"
"Look on the floor behind the refrigerator space."
Luca took two steps over, his heavy boots echoing off the bare subfloor. He looked down and froze. There, tucked into the dark corner where a baby's crib had clearly been dragged away, was a tiny, frozen blue blanket, torn into rags.
Luca looked back at me, his jaw clenching so hard the muscles in his neck strained against his collar. "Who did this?"
"Someone wearing our colors," I said, rising to my full height. "Someone who thinks I'm too busy managing the harbor trade to notice what happens on the East Side."
I walked back to Emma, crouching down until I was eye-level with her. The little girl flinched slightly, but she didn't run. She was too exhausted to run.
"Emma," I said softly, reaching out to gently touch the dark purple bruise blooming on her thin forearm. "Who gave you this?"
She swallowed hard, looking down at her torn shoes. "The man with the loud ring. He said if Mommy didn't sign the paper giving them the house, he'd take my brother to the farm."
"Where is your baby brother now?"
"They took him yesterday," she whispered, a single hot tear cutting a clean line through the dirt on her cheek. "They said he was collateral. Mommy fell down after that and didn't get back up."
A dark, towering rage swelled in my chest, hot and thick as molten lead.
They hadn't just stolen furniture. They had kidnapped a nursing infant from a starving mother and used my family crest to validate the crime.
Luca stepped back into the room, his face pale. "Rocco, Mercer is two minutes out. But I just checked the local captain log for this district. This block falls under Sal 'The Vulture' Marcone's territory."
Sal Marcone. A mid-level crew leader who had been lobbying for a seat at the high table for two years. A man who was supposed to be managing local loan sharks, but had clearly turned to human trafficking and street extortion behind my back.
"Luca," I said quietly.
"Yes, Boss?"
"Bring the car around. Once Mercer stabilizes the mother, we are taking Emma with us."
Emma looked up, her eyes wide with fear. "Where are we going?"
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I stood up, adjusting the cuffs of my tailored coat, looking down at the little girl who had offered her rusty pink bike to save her dying mother.
"We are going to find your brother, Emma," I said. "And then I am going to burn Sal Marcone's world to the ground."
