Chapter 8 - The Viper's Last Strike
The war with the Marcones reached its bloody conclusion three weeks later. Silvio Marcone, desperate and broke in Miami, sent a crew of foreign mercenaries to New York with one instruction: take out Don Valenti and anyone associated with him.
They didn't strike at the docks or the penthouse. They chose the road to Westchester, ambushing my car as Marco and I were returning from a meeting with our legal counsel.
The attack was sudden—a heavy delivery truck rammed our sedan at an intersection, followed by a spray of automatic gunfire from a trailing SUV. Marco was hit in the shoulder during the initial volley, his blood soaking the leather seats as he threw himself over the wheel to keep the car from flipping.
I didn't panic. The training of a lifetime took over. I cleared my weapon from beneath my coat, kicked the passenger door open, and returned fire through the shattered glass of the windshield.
The skirmish lasted less than three minutes on a deserted stretch of highway. By the time the sirens began to wail in the distance, the delivery truck was crashed into a ditch, the mercenaries were neutralized, and I was standing in the road, my hands covered in gunpowder and grease, my suit jacket torn to ribbons.
Marco survived, the bullet passing clean through the meat of his shoulder, but the attack made one thing clear: as long as the Valenti name carried the crown, the danger would never stop.
Two days later, while Marco was recovering in a secure private clinic, I drove back to the Westchester estate. I didn't enter the house with anger this time; I entered with an absolute, chilling finality.
Vittorio sat in his library, looking older, his skin translucent in the pale autumn light. He looked at my torn clothes, the small cut along my jawline from the flying glass, and he let out a dry, rattling breath.
"You're still alive, I see," he muttered. "The Marcones always were poor marksmen."
"It's over, Vittorio," I said, standing near the door, not even stepping inside the room. "The Marcone family has been completely dismantled by the commission this morning. Their captains have sworn fealty to New Jersey under my name. There is no one left to fight your old wars."
Vittorio looked down at his ledger, his old fingers trembling slightly. "Then you have secured the empire. You should be thanking me, Dominic. I gave you the strength to do what had to be done."
"No," I said, pulling a folded legal document from my breast pocket and tossing it onto the table beside his coffee cup. "You gave me a graveyard. That document is a formal dissolution of the Valenti corporate structure. I am liquidating the shipping networks, closing the private lending accounts, and handing the keys to the docks over to the port authority under a federal compliance agreement arranged by Julian Vance."
Vittorio froze, his face turning an ashen white that made him look like a corpse already. He stared at the papers as if they were a death warrant. "You're destroying the family? You're giving away what took three generations to build?"
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"I'm ending the curse," I said clearly. "I am leaving the commission. The Valenti name is no longer a title, Vittorio. It's just a name. I've taken everything that was clean and put it where you can never find it. You will live out your remaining days in this house with your books and your tea. But you are the last Don. There will be no successor."
He began to shout, his voice cracking with an old, useless fury, but I didn't listen. I walked away from the library, out of the heavy stone house, leaving the ghost of the Valenti empire behind me in the dust.
