Chapter 9 - The Reckoning of Dominic Moretti
Seventy-two hours after the siege on the Hale estate, Dominic Moretti sat in the leather-paneled office of his private club in Little Italy, swirling a glass of twenty-year Scotch, listening to the end of his empire.
The phone on his desk buzzed with a frantic, high-pitched frequency.
He picked it up. "Talk."
“Boss!” a terrified voice screamed over the encrypted line. “They hit the Cicero rail yards! The federal marshals are seizing our import licenses, and the banks just froze all three of our primary corporate accounts! Adrian Hale didn't just retaliate—he legally dismantled us!”
Moretti’s hand shook so violently the scotch splashed over the rim of the crystal glass onto his expensive silk tie.
"That's impossible," Moretti choked out, standing up so fast his chair crashed backward onto the floor. "Hale’s logistics network is tied up in federal court—he couldn't liquidate us without a judge's sign-off!"
“The judge signed it this morning, Boss! Hale owns the circuit court! He owns the port authority! We’re finished—!”
The line went dead with a sharp click.
Moretti stared at the phone in his hand, the blood draining entirely from his face. He finally understood what every old-school mobster in Chicago had known for a decade:
You could shoot at Adrian Hale. You could blow up his gates. You could try to burn his house down.
May you like
But if you laid a finger on the people he decided to protect, he wouldn't just kill you.
He would erase you from the history books.
