Chapter 6 - The UnravelingOMG
Dante stood on the cold metal terrace of Bennett Mercantile, his hand holding the open velvet box, freezing as Ivy’s words hung in the sea air.
I already own the ocean.
Before Dante could find his voice, his phone vibrated violently in his pocket. He pulled it out, answering with a dark snarl. "What?!"
"Boss!" Marcus’s panicked voice blasted through the speaker, loud enough for Ivy to hear. "We’ve got a massive breach! The syndicate heads from New York and Philadelphia just called an emergency tribunal! They're pulling all security personnel from our Rhode Island territory!"
Dante’s eyes flared with anger. "On whose authority?!"
"On the authority of the High Commission, sir!" Marcus stammered. "They say our supply lines are dead. The federal government seized our primary customs office an hour ago because someone handed over the digital encryption keys for our shipping vaults!"
Dante’s head snapped toward Ivy.
She met his gaze calmly, taking a slow sip from a white porcelain coffee cup she was holding.
"You gave them the encryption keys?" Dante asked, his voice barely a breath.
"I didn't give them anything, Dante," Ivy replied smoothly, her voice cool and steady. "I simply stopped updating the firewall bypass protocols. You see, for three years, I was the one who manually rotated the security ciphers every twenty-four hours from the router in the butler’s pantry. I did it on my own time, after my evening cleaning shift, because your IT department was too lazy to run manual overwrites."
She took another sip of coffee.
"When I left, I stopped doing it. The system defaulted back to the factory factory settings. The federal cyber-crimes unit didn't need a master key. They just used the standard admin password that came with the hardware five years ago."
Dante felt the ground beneath his feet tilt. His entire multi-billion-dollar empire—a dark machine built on fear, violence, and bribery—had fallen to pieces not from a military assault, but because a maid had stopped performing an unwritten, uncompensated daily task.
"Ivy..." Dante whispered, his pride completely shattering into dust. "Please."
It was a word Dante Morelli had never spoken in his entire life. He had never begged his father, he had never begged his enemies, and he had certainly never begged a servant.
Ivy stepped closer to him. The breeze caught her chin-length hair, pushing it across her face. She looked at him with neither hatred nor love—only the cold, distant clarity of someone who had completely moved on.
May you like
"Go home, Dante," she said softly. "Save what little you have left of your family’s legal assets. Because by tomorrow morning, the Morelli syndicate won't exist."
She turned her back on him and walked through the heavy glass doors into her bustling, modern office, leaving the great mob boss standing alone on the cold loading dock while his phone continued to scream with news of his falling kingdom.
