“Pull the cranes, growth becomes decay. Freeze the escrow on your Midtown expansion, growth becomes a hole in the ground with your name on it. Lose union cover at the docks, your shipping schedule becomes nothing.”
He knew all of that already. I said it for the room.
Because I wanted them to watch him break.
“I’ll need a revised docks packet by tomorrow morning,” I keeping my tone bored. “This time with the offload tax, accurate berth windows and without pretending you can move steel without our escorts.”
“I’ll have my team?—”
“Your team lied to you,” I said, meeting his eyes. “They lied because you like the numbers clean more than you like them true.”
A vein started at his temple. I could have stopped. I wasn’t finished.
“You’ve got a nine-figure hole in your construction front your auditors missed. Six shell companies out of Ashgate, all funneling invoices through the same two banks. Clean way to hide overruns. Sloppy way to hide losses.”
His stare didn’t move. The room stopped breathing.
“Fix it,” I said. “Or I fix it for you.”
“And if you ‘fix’ it,” he asked, his voice steady by force, “what does that mean?”
“It means,” I said, “your contractors discover that every concrete pour in Villain now requires a Crow security sign-off. It means your inspectors retire early. Your glass doesn’t arrive. Your steel sits on water. And your lenders re-price you overnight because someone quietly downgraded your risk.”
I butted the cigarette out on his precious desk. “It means you stop confusing a chair at this table with power.”
He looked like a man standing at the edge of a cliff and pretending it was a step. “You think this is leverage.”
“No,” I said. “This is mercy.”
I hated him. He was ordinary in a city that required monsters.
And I was annoyed with myself, furious, at how close the Vales had gotten to my wife.
Our legacy.
Close enough to breathe the same air.
My jaw tightened until it hurt. Jealousy wasn’t the word. Possession came closer. Obsession was honest. But even those weren’t enough for what we felt for her.
And this fucker who can’t even calculate offload tax thought he held her future.
When she was out of his control and back where she belonged. I would rip his legacy apart, slowly.
Chapter Thirteen
BASTION
The tunnels weren’t meant for meetings. They were arteries—meant to move product, not men. But someone had decided to test the family. Push weight through my ground without permission.
I was tired. Cigarette between my fingers. The De’Valours stood across, talking too loud, threatening like they’d earned the right.
Rome leaned against the steel door to my right, face still, shoulders relaxed. But I saw the twitch in his hand—the one he only got when his jaw was locked tight.
“Ports aren’t yours forever,” one of them said. “This city doesn’t belong to only one family. Not anymore.”
I dragged smoke deep, let it burn in my chest. Didn’t answer. Because weak men always showed themselves in noise.
“Careful.” Rome said, keeping his tone low. “You’re forgetting who built these walls.”
