Chapter 3 - The Confession in the RainThe phone slipped from Damian’s fingers.
It hit the mahogany desk with a sharp clatter, the screen glowing faintly against the dark wood before going black.
Victor Salazar didn’t move. But the color drained entirely from his face, leaving his skin the shade of wet lime. Even without hearing the voice on the other end, Victor knew the exact cadence of a nightmare coming home to roost.
“What did you say?” Damian whispered.
His voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t roar with the fury of a mob boss whose throne had just been kicked out from under him. It was terrifyingly quiet. The kind of quiet that precedes a hurricane.
Victor forced a thin, trembling smile. “Boss? What is it? Some crank caller from out of state? You know how many weirdos try to—"
Damian stood up.
At six-foot-two, with his broad shoulders filling out the charcoal suit, he looked less like a businessman and more like an executioner who had just been handed a list of the damned. He rounded the desk in two strides, his hand shooting out to grab Victor by the lapels of his expensive Italian suit.
The force of the grip lifted Victor an inch off the carpet.
“Who?” Damian hissed, his face inches from his underboss. “Who switched the envelopes, Victor?”
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about—!”
“Who?!”
Damian slammed Victor’s back against the reinforced glass of the floor-to-ceiling window. The heavy glass groaned under the impact, spider-webbing slightly at the corners while the Chicago rain lashed against the exterior forty floors up.
Victor choked for air, his hands clawing uselessly at Damian’s wrists. “Damian... nine years... we won... we protected the family—!”
“You protected yourself,” Damian snarled, his eyes blazing with a demonic fury. “You wanted me isolated. You wanted me paranoid, alone, and completely dependent on your loyalty. You didn't just steal my wife... you stole my son.”
“She would have ruined you!” Victor gasped, spitting blood as Damian’s grip tightened around his throat. “A woman like that—she softens a man! She makes him weak! I did it for the Moretti name!”
Damian’s face contorted into something inhuman. For a fraction of a second, he considered throwing Victor through the glass and watching him fall four hundred feet into the Chicago concrete.
Instead, he let go, dropping Victor onto the floor like a sack of garbage.
Victor collapsed, coughing violently, clutching his throat while gasping for air.
Damian turned away, wiping his hands on his handkerchief as if touching a disease. He walked over to the private wet bar in the corner of the office, grabbed a bottle of neat scotch, and poured a glass. His hand didn't shake. Not a single drop spilled.
“Colton Briggs,” Damian said coldly, his back still turned to his groveling underboss.
Victor looked up, wiping blood from his lip. “Briggs... Briggs is dead, Damian. Heart attack three years ago in Florida.”
“Convenient,” Damian murmured.
He swallowed the scotch in a single burn, set the glass down, and reached for his leather overcoat draped over the back of the sofa.
“Where are you going?” Victor rasped from the floor.
Damian stopped at the heavy double doors of his office. He didn’t turn around.
“To Harrow Falls, Pennsylvania.”
“Damian, you can’t! The syndicate meeting with the New York crew is tomorrow night—!”
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“Let them burn,” Damian said softly. “My son is nine years old. And for nine years, I’ve been living in a graveyard that you built for me.”
He walked out, slamming the heavy oak doors behind him with a finality that shook the entire forty-second floor.
