Chapter 14 - The Ring in the Pocket
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"What do you want done with her and her brother, Ma?" Lucas asked, nodding toward the bleeding Ricky Vane, whom two of Sal’s dockworkers had dragged back up from the cellar steps and zip-tied beside Valerie on the floor.
"Please!" Valerie sobbed, looking up at Evelyn with her left hand raised, her face smeared with soot, tears, and blood as she cradled her shattered right hand. "We’re blood, Aunt Evelyn! My father was your cousin! Don't kill us—I’ll go back to Canada and you’ll never hear our names again! I swear on my mother’s grave!"
"You forfeited the Conti name the day you conspired with Luan Krasniqi to ambush my sons in a warehouse rigged with C4," Evelyn said, her voice devoid of anger—only the final, implacable judgment of a judge handing down a life sentence. "And if I kill you here today, the federal task force investigating Luan’s dead body over there will spend the next two years subpoenaing Julian’s books looking for a gang war."
Evelyn turned slightly toward Julian. "How much cocaine did Lucas recover from Ricky’s floor safe in Bridgeport this morning before returning Luan’s three kilos?"
"Two more kilos of uncut fentanyl-laced product that Ricky and Valerie were holding in her Oak Street boutique vault to distribute through the Gold Coast clubs," Julian replied smoothly. "Along with the unlicensed automatic rifles Marc Conti brought across the Canadian border in a truck leased under Valerie’s Vault LLC."
Valerie’s eyes went wide with horror. "No—wait—!"
"Damon," Evelyn ordered calmly. "Have the boys load Luan’s body and Marc Conti’s dead mercenaries into the back of their own Range Rovers with the unlicensed rifles and the two kilos of fentanyl. Leave Valerie and Ricky zip-tied in the back seat of the lead truck at the 47th Street precinct drop-zone with an anonymous tip to the DEA and the ATF that an Albanian-Canadian drug deal went bad in the Stockyards."
"Federal mandatory minimum for two kilos of fentanyl plus machine guns across international borders and seven bodies in the yard," Julian calculated coolly, "is thirty-five years to life in federal supermax without parole—and since Luan’s surviving cousins in prison will know Valerie and Ricky survived the shootout while Luan died, they’ll have to spend every single day of those thirty-five years begging the warden for solitary protective custody."
"No! Kill me instead! Arthur—tell her!" Valerie screamed as Big Sal’s men hauled her and her screaming brother off the floor, taped their mouths shut, and dragged them out toward the waiting Range Rovers.
Nobody looked at her as the steel warehouse doors clanged shut behind them.
Inside the vast, quiet cavern of Warehouse 9, only five people remained: Evelyn, her three sons, and fifty-four-year-old Arthur Sterling, who was standing beside the iron column where Lucas had just sliced the last of his chains loose with a bolt cutter.
Arthur didn't look like the untouchable Don of Chicago anymore.
His white shirt was soaked in his own blood and sweat, his left eye was swollen half-shut, and his wrists were raw and bleeding from where he had torn his own skin open on a rusted bolt to lunge forward and kick Valerie’s leg out when she aimed at Evelyn’s head.
Julian, Damon, and Lucas stood in a silent line six feet behind their mother—not stepping toward their father, waiting strictly for Evelyn’s word.
Slowly, Arthur took two halting steps away from the iron pillar and stopped five feet in front of Evelyn.
He didn't try to puff his chest out. He didn't mention the corporate accounts, or the docks, or the throne.
With his bruised, bleeding right hand trembling slightly, Arthur reached inside his torn trouser pocket, pulled out the five-carat emerald-cut diamond wedding ring he had fished out of the champagne glass at the Palmer House the night before, and held it on his open palm.
"When you walked through that door ten minutes ago, Evie," Arthur whispered, his gravelly baritone breaking into raw pieces that none of his sons had ever heard in their lives, "and I saw Valerie aim that gun at your face... I would have traded every dollar, every pier, and every breath I had left in my body just to put myself between that bullet and you."
A single drop of blood from his split brow fell onto the concrete at his feet.
"Twenty-eight years ago, when your father ordered me to take out Victor in Boston because Victor was selling heroin on our streets, Lorenzo made me swear on his deathbed never to tell you your favorite cousin died a traitor," Arthur rasped, looking straight into her eyes without flinching from his own shame. "So I sent Claire the money every December out of my own pocket so you’d never find out. And last year, when I turned fifty-three and started feeling like an old man living in the shadow of Lorenzo Conti’s name and Julian’s brain... Valerie walked into my club, flattered my ego, and I became the biggest, blindest fool who ever lived."
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Arthur slowly lowered himself down onto both knees on the freezing, dirty concrete floor in front of his wife and his three sons, bowing his silver head and holding the wedding ring up in both bleeding hands.
"You don't owe me a second chance, Evelyn," Arthur whispered to the floor. "Keep the company. Keep the docks. Keep the house. I’ll sign over my remaining forty-nine percent non-voting shares tonight and disappear if that’s what you want. Just know that in thirty-two years, the only thing I ever truly loved in this world was you and those three boys."
