Chapter 8 - The Council's Traitor
The golden liquid poured in a steady, relentless stream over Julian Corvin’s lips.
Julian thrashed violently, his eyes bulging in sheer, primal panic as the bitter, monkshood-laced champagne flooded his mouth. He tried to spit, tried to clamp his teeth shut, but Dante’s iron fingers gripped the hinges of his jaw like hydraulic clamps, forcing the liquid down his throat.
Julian coughed, choked, his body arching off the shattered glass frame as he swallowed the lethal dose.
Dante pulled the bottle away, rose smoothly to his feet, and stepped back.
Julian rolled onto his side on the black granite, retching violently, clawing at his throat with bloody fingernails. "You... you bastard..." Julian wheezed, his face turning an unnatural, mottled gray as the aconite alkaloids hit his bloodstream, attacking the neuro-cardiac receptors within seconds. "The... the antidote... there has to be..."
"There is no antidote for monkshood, Julian," Dante said, pulling a fresh linen handkerchief from his pocket and slowly wiping a drop of champagne from his sleeve. "You bought the finest batch your money could procure. Be proud of your investment."
Julian’s chest seized. A ragged, choking gasp tore from his lungs as his heart rhythm began to fracture into ventricular fibrillation. His limbs jerked involuntarily, knocking the shattered pieces of the glass table across the floor.
Dante didn't watch him die.
He walked over to the open laptop on the side credenza.
The screen was still illuminated with the flight plan for the Gulfstream G650 at O'Hare. Beside it sat a digital encrypted ledger containing the offshore banking routing numbers that Arthur King had provided to Julian—the accounts meant to receive the eighty-two percent controlling interest in the Port of Chicago once Mia was locked inside Blackwood Crest.
Dante inserted a black thumb drive into the laptop’s USB port.
"Marcus," Dante said over his shoulder.
"Sir?"
"Upload the Vance defensive protocol into Julian’s network. Drain the Corvin escrow reserves into our primary maritime holding accounts in the Caymans. When the New York families wake up to find Julian dead, they will find his personal war chest has completely vanished. They won't have the cash to buy a single box of ammunition, let alone hire hitmen to come west."
"Done in ninety seconds, Boss," Marcus said, stepping up to the keyboard and rapidly keying in the authorization overrides Sarah Jenkins had extracted from the transit documents earlier that night.
Behind them, the violent thrashing on the floor slowly subsided into a series of shallow, rhythmic twitches. Then, with a long, final exhalation, Julian Corvin lay completely still, his unblinking eyes staring up at the twenty-foot vaulted ceiling of the penthouse.
Dante looked at his watch.
Two-fifteen in the morning.
"Marcus," Dante said, turning away from the corpse. "Call the estate. Put Dr. Wallace on the line."
Marcus pressed his earpiece, waited three seconds, and handed the tactical radio to Dante.
"Wallace," Dante spoke into the mic. "Report."
*"Dante,"* the doctor’s calm, clinical voice came through the speaker. *"Mia woke up twenty minutes ago. She asked for water and her bear. The toxicology screens are completely clean—the sedative has cleared her liver with zero secondary effects. Miss Jenkins is sitting with her now, reading her Clara’s old fairy-tale book. The child has not cried once."*
A profound, physical relief seemed to wash over Dante’s face, softening the terrifying angles of his features for the first time in five hours.
"And Sarah?" Dante asked.
*"The leg is stabilized,"* Wallace replied. *"She refused to take the morphine until she was certain you had secured the hotel. She’s a tough girl, Dante. A true dockworker's daughter."*
"Keep her comfortable, Wallace. I will be back within forty minutes."
Dante handed the radio back to Marcus.
He looked around the pristine penthouse suite—at the priceless art, the rain-lashed floor-to-ceiling windows, the lifeless body of the man who had thought he could tear apart the Vance family from eight hundred miles away.
"Marcus," Dante said.
"Yes, Boss?"
"Leave Julian’s burner phone on his chest. Send a single text message to every capo in the Corvin syndicate."
Marcus pulled up the interface on the terminal. "What’s the message, sir?"
Dante looked out across the glittering expanse of Chicago, the city he had bled for, the city that belonged to him and him alone.
May you like
"Tell them: *The Port of Chicago is closed to visitors. If another Corvin crosses the Indiana border, I won't send an overcoat. I will send an army.*"
***
