Chapter 23 - The Second Stitch
The room grew dead silent except for the crackle of the woodstove in the corner. Sarah walked over from the kitchen, holding a steaming mug of tea, and leaned against the back of Lily’s chair.
"Vincent knew Sterling and the board wouldn't stop with the first ledger," Sarah said, blowing gently on the surface of her tea. "He spent the last six months of his life tracking every single dummy corporation our father set up across the Midwest. He knew that if the feds only found the first book, the rogue elements within the syndicate would still hunt us down to recover the missing assets."
"And he hid the rest of it in plain sight," I said, running my thumb over the silver rose stitched into the blue cloth. "In the patterns."
"Not just patterns," Lily corrected me, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a small, flat metallic disc—a micro-SD card no bigger than a fingernail. "Uncle Vinny gave me this the night before we left the city. He said if anything happened to him, I was to give it to the only person with our blood who wasn't afraid of the dark."
I took the micro-SD card from her small palm. It felt impossibly light, yet it carried the weight of an entire criminal empire that had terrorized Chicago for half a century.
"What's on it?" I asked.
"Everything," Sarah answered softly. "Every bank routing number, every offshore holding, every name of every politician, judge, and police commander who took a bribe from the Moretti family since nineteen-eighty. It’s the master key to the entire underground economy of the state."
"And Sterling?"
"Sterling is currently sitting in a federal holding cell downtown, trying to figure out which of his high-priced lawyers is going to turn on him first," Sarah said with a thin, bitter smile. "Without these files, his defense team can claim the first ledger was illegally seized. With this... the entire house of cards comes crashing down permanently."
I stood up, walking to the cabin window and looking out into the pitch-black woods. Out there, beyond the trees, the world was moving on—people waking up, going to work, trusting systems that were built on sand. But here, in this small wooden cabin in Galena, the cycle was finally stopping. The ledger was complete. The debt was accounted for.
May you like
"What do we do with it?" I asked, turning back to face them.
"We don't give it to Vance," Sarah said firmly. "We give it to the public record. No redactions. No deals with federal prosecutors. We burn the whole system to the ground, once and for all."
