Chapter 6 - The King of Columbus
The warehouse on the industrial riverfront of Columbus was a massive, cavernous brick structure built in the late 19th century, smelling of damp concrete, diesel fuel, and river silt.
Inside the reinforced basement holding cells, Arthur sat shivering on a metal stool, nursing a swollen lip and a black eye. Across from him, Martha—who had been picked up by Moretti operatives an hour earlier—was sobbing uncontrollably, wrapped in a coarse woolen blanket.
Heavy footsteps echoed down the concrete stairs.
Arthur looked up with watery, bloodshot eyes as Vincent Moretti walked into the holding cell area. The quiet chauffeur was completely gone. In his place stood the undisputed king of the Midwest underworld—a man whose very presence commanded absolute, suffocating terror.
Sal unlocked the heavy iron gate and swung it open, stepping back to let Vincent enter.
Arthur fell off the stool, crawling backward across the concrete until his back hit the cold brick wall. "V-Vincent! Please! We're your family! Have mercy!"
Vincent stopped a few feet away, looking down at them with eyes as cold as arctic ice. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.
"Family," Vincent said softly. "You kept repeating that word. Yet when Emily was running a 104-degree fever and Noah was starving in his crib, you sat downstairs eating takeout and playing poker."
"We were desperate!" Martha wailed, covering her face with her hands. "Arthur's debts... the loan sharks said they were going to kill us if we didn't pay—"
"And so you decided to kill my family instead," Vincent finished for her.
He pulled a thick manila folder from under his arm and tossed it onto the concrete floor between them. The pages spilled out, revealing bank statements, wire transfers, and encrypted call logs.
"You didn't just borrow money from local thugs, Arthur," Vincent said calmly. "You took fifty thousand dollars from a front company owned by the Cincinnati Syndicate. In exchange, you agreed to let them use my home as an observation post, and you agreed to drug Emily so she wouldn't notice when their operatives copied the security access codes to my estate."
Arthur’s face turned the color of ash. He stared at the documents in absolute horror. "How... how did you find that? That's classified—that's through the Syndicate—"
"The Syndicate?" Vincent let out a short, cold laugh that held no humor at all. "Arthur, do you have any idea who you were dealing with? Do you know who owns the shipping lines, the financial clearinghouses, and the drug pipelines across this entire state?"
Arthur blinked, trembling violently. "You're... you're just a chauffeur..."
"I was a chauffeur," Vincent corrected quietly. "Because I wanted a quiet life. I wanted a normal wife, a normal home, and a normal child. I gave up the throne so I could live in the light."
Vincent stepped closer, towering over the shaking couple.
"And you idiots tried to plunge me back into the dark by hurting the only two people in this world I care about."
"Please, Vincent—what are you going to do to us?" Martha sobbed, clutching her husband's arm.
"I'm not going to kill you," Vincent said evenly. "Killing you would be too easy. It would release you from the nightmare you created."
He turned to Sal, who stood waiting by the open gate.
"Sal. Take everything they own. Every car, every bank account, every piece of jewelry, every square inch of property they possess. Strip them down to the clothes on their backs. Then, put them on a bus to the middle of the Nevada desert with one hundred dollars in their pockets and a one-way ticket to nowhere."
"And if they ever come back to Ohio?" Sal asked with a grim smile.
"If they ever set foot in this state again," Vincent said, his voice dropping into a lethal whisper, "feed them to the fish in the river."
Arthur and Martha opened their mouths to scream, to beg, to plead, but Sal’s men were already moving, hoisting the weeping couple to their feet and dragging them out of the holding cell toward the loading dock doors.
The basement grew dead silent once more.
Vincent stood alone in the center of the damp room. He pulled out his satellite phone, dialed a secure number, and waited for the connection to patch through to the federal prosecutor in Washington who owed him an unpayable debt.
"This is Moretti," Vincent said into the receiver.
"Mr. Moretti," a cautious voice replied on the other end. "We heard about the raids in Cincinnati. The federal grand jury is ready to sign off on the RICO indictments against the entire Syndicate leadership whenever you give the word."
May you like
Vincent looked up toward the iron-grated window high on the basement wall, where the first pale rays of dawn were beginning to cut through the heavy river mist.
"Give the word," Vincent said. "Tear them down to the foundations."
