Chapter 13 - The Spoiled Heir’s Gambit
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When Vance Hollis returned to his gated estate on the East Side at noon, he found Preston sitting by the indoor pool, drinking Scotch with his good hand while watching sports on an eighty-inch screen.
Without a word, Vance walked across the limestone tiles and slapped his son across the face hard enough to knock the crystal glass out of his hand. It shattered across the pool deck.
"Ten years in the ACI!" Vance roared, grabbing Preston by the collar of his cashmere sweater as the younger man gaped in shock. "That is what your little rooftop stunt just cost you, and fifty-one percent of my company is what it just cost me! Pack a bag. Tonight we go down to Pier 9, you get on your knees in front of Dante Ferraro, and you sign the confession before he puts us both in oil drums!"
"Are you out of your mind?!" Preston shrieked, scrambling backward out of his father’s reach, clutching his stinging cheek. "State prison? Do you know what Ferraro’s inmates will do to me in maximum security? I won't last a week!"
"You should have thought of that before you touched his sister!" Vance shouted, turning back toward the main house to meet with his accountants. "Security is locking the estate gates. Don't even think about running."
Left alone by the pool, Preston shook with a mixture of terror and venomous rage. Go to prison for ten years over a violin teacher and a bartender? Never.
As soon as his father’s study door slammed shut upstairs, Preston sprinted into the ground-floor library, used his father’s birthday to unlock the hidden wall safe behind the oil paintings, and stuffed three stacks of untraceable bearer bonds and two hundred thousand dollars in cash into a leather duffel bag.
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Then he pulled out a burner phone he used for high-stakes underground poker games and dialed a Boston number belonging to Viktor Voronin—a ruthless ex-spetsnaz mercenary whom Dante Ferraro had kicked out of New England two years prior.
"Viktor?" Preston whispered feverishly into the receiver. "It’s Preston Hollis. I have two million in bearer bonds if you want a shot at Dante Ferraro. All we have to do is grab his little sister after her three o'clock violin lesson."
