Chapter 9 - The Package at the Gate
The package sat in the center of the heavy oak study table, wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied with coarse hemp twine.
No return address. No stamps. Just my name scrawled across the front in thick, familiar handwriting that I hadn't seen in over a decade.
Alessandro.
I stood over the table, my hand resting near my holster, while Marco and two of my enforcers stood guard near the door with submachine guns ready. Camille stood a few feet back, her arms crossed tightly, her eyes locked on the parcel like it was a live grenade.
“Step back,” I told them.
I pulled a folding knife from my pocket, sliced through the hemp twine with a single sharp motion, and peeled back the brown paper.
Inside was a single, old-fashioned cassette tape and a small, tarnished silver pocket watch—the exact pocket watch my grandfather had given to Viktor on his fiftieth birthday before the family tore itself apart.
“A tape?” Camille frowned, stepping slightly closer. “Who even uses cassette tapes anymore?”
“Old men who don't trust digital encryption,” I muttered.
I picked up the heavy microcassette recorder resting on the desk shelf, popped open the back compartment, inserted the tape, and pressed Play.
The machine clicked, hummed with a harsh hiss of magnetic static, and then a raspy, gravelly voice filled the quiet study:
“Well, nephew. I hear you’ve gone legitimate. Shipping containers, real estate, philanthropy. You built yourself a very pretty cage in Manhattan.”
Viktor’s voice. Older, harsher, but dripping with the same toxic arrogance I remembered from my youth.
“You thought you killed me in Palermo. You thought you could inherit the throne and lock the doors behind you. But a Vitali never truly dies until the blood debt is settled in full. I watched you at the airport today. I saw the little girl with your eyes and your mother’s hair. Such a pretty little target... wandering around New York with no protection at all.”
My jaw clenched so hard I thought my teeth might crack.
“Here is my offer, Alessandro. You come alone to Pier 42 at midnight tonight. No guards. No guns. Just you and your conscience. You hand over the remaining corporate restructuring shares of the shipping syndicate to my proxy, and maybe—just maybe—I’ll let the artist and her little bastard child catch a flight back to Paris in one piece. If you don't show... well, accidents happen in big cities all the time. Ask your father.”
The tape clicked loudly as the end of the spool was reached, the magnetic hiss fading into dead silence.
Nobody in the room breathed for five seconds.
Camille’s face had gone completely white. She looked at me, her eyes wide with sheer horror. “He’s going to kill us, Alessandro. Even if you give him the shares, he won't let us walk away. You know he won't.”
“He won't get the chance,” I said, my voice dropping into a dark, absolute freezing calm that meant someone was about to die.
I reached out, picked up my Walther PPK, and checked the magazine.
“You’re not going alone,” Marco insisted, stepping forward from the door. “Boss, it’s a trap. Pier 42 is an open concrete slab surrounded by container cranes. It’s a slaughterhouse.”
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“I’m not going to negotiate with him, Marco,” I replied, sliding the pistol back into my holster and buttoning my wool coat. “I’m going to finish what I should have finished in Palermo six years ago.”
“And what about us?” Camille demanded, her voice cracking as she stepped directly into my path, forcing me to look down at her. “What happens to Sophie and me while you’re out playing executioner?”
