Chapter 7 - Confession in the Glass Tower"Kill them!" Vincent shrieked, his face turning a sickly shade of purple as panic overwhelmed his composure. "What are you waiting for? Kill them both right now!"
None of the twelve enforcers moved.
They looked at Vincent, then looked at me, and finally glanced at the suppressed barrel of Elizabeth's submachine gun trained dead-center on the room's primary exit. In the underworld, loyalty is only as strong as the man holding the reins. And right now, the men recognized the apex predator standing before them.
"Sit down, Vincent," I commanded, my voice echoing off the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that offered a panoramic view of the awakening Manhattan skyline. "Before I decide to skip the conversation entirely."
Vincent slowly lowered himself back into his leather chair, his hands trembling violently as he gripped the armrests. "Andrew, listen to me... this is all a misunderstanding. The board... we were just organizing your assets while you were away! We thought you were losing your mind after Emma died!"
"You didn't just organize my assets, cousin," I said, stepping closer to the table, pulling out the photograph Elizabeth had dropped on the kitchen floor hours earlier, and slamming it down onto the polished wood right in front of him. "You organized my wife's murder."
Marcus Thorne flinched, taking a half-step backward toward the panoramic window.
Vincent stared down at the photograph, his eyes darting frantically across the faces of Emma, Elizabeth, and Julian. The color completely drained from his face until he looked like a corpse carved out of marble.
"I... I don't know what you're talking about," Vincent stammered, though his voice cracked miserably.
"Marcus," I said, turning my gaze slowly toward my second-in-command. "You want to tell him, or should I let Elizabeth handle the interrogation? She's been waiting six years for this chat."
Marcus looked trapped. He glanced at the window behind him—65 stories straight down to the concrete street below—and then looked at Elizabeth’s unrelenting stare. Slowly, his hands rose into the air, and his weapon slipped from his fingers, clattering loudly against the hardwood floor.
"It was Vincent," Marcus whispered, his voice shaking. "He ordered the hit on Emma's car. He said if you kept letting Emma soften your edges, the syndicate would fall apart. He said we needed a leader with steel, not a family man."
"And Alex?" I growled, taking a sudden, violent step toward Marcus, grabbing him by the throat and slamming him against the glass window. The glass bowed outward slightly under the impact, making a sickening, groaning sound. "What about my son? Why did you terrorize a four-year-old boy?"
"He... he walked into the study!" Marcus choked out, clawing desperately at my hand around his windpipe. "He saw the flash drive with the wire transfers from Vincent's offshore accounts! He didn't understand what he was seeing, but he looked right at me with your eyes, Andrew. I couldn't... I couldn't bring myself to kill a child, so I threatened him. I told him if he ever spoke a single word about what he saw in that study, you would be next."
The silence in the boardroom was absolute.
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I could feel the blood roaring in my ears. Every fiber of my being screamed to snap Marcus's neck right then and there, to throw him through the glass and let gravity finish the job.
Behind me, Vincent suddenly lunged across the table, grabbing a heavy silver letter opener and diving straight toward my back.
