Chapter 12 - The Fall of the Traitor
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The fog rolled thick and heavy off Boston Harbor, swallowing the abandoned shipping warehouse at Pier 44 in a ghostly, damp chill.
The only sound was the rhythmic lapping of the dark, frigid tide against the rusted pilings beneath the floorboards.
Mateo Moretti knelt on the wet wooden planks, his expensive suit soaked with dirty seawater and grease.
His hands were zip-tied behind his back, and a deep bruise darkened his right cheek where Carmine’s men had subdued him during his desperate escape attempt.
A pair of headlights cut through the swirling fog as Anias’s black Lincoln pulled into the cavernous warehouse.
The engine died, leaving only the sound of Anias’s heavy leather shoes clicking against the wet timbers as he approached.
Anias stopped five feet from his cousin, looking down at the man who had torn his family apart for half a decade.
Anias held no weapon in his hands; he carried only a manila legal envelope stamped with official federal seals.
Mateo looked up, his arrogance entirely replaced by the sniveling terror of a cornered rat.
“Anias, please!” Mateo begged, tears carving pale tracks through the grime on his face.
“We’re blood, cousin!”
“We grew up together in the North End!”
“Uncle Leland wouldn’t want you to kill your own family!”
At the mention of his grandfather’s name, Anias’s eyes darkened into a terrifying, bottomless void.
“You dare speak my grandfather’s name?” Anias whispered, his voice colder than the Atlantic wind howling outside.
“My son carries his name, Mateo.”
“The boy you tried to erase before he took his first breath.”
“The boy you sent assassins to murder while he was feeding ducks in the sun.”
Mateo sobbed, bowing his forehead against the damp floorboards.
“I was jealous, Anias!” Mateo cried out, his voice echoing off the corrugated metal walls.
“It was always you! You were the chosen one, the golden boy, the one Uncle Leland gave the empire to!”
“When Nancy got pregnant, I knew I would spend the rest of my life bowing to your line!”
“I just wanted my share! That’s all it was, Anias! Just business!”
Anias knelt down on one knee, his wounded shoulder throbbing with a dull ache that he barely registered.
He tossed the manila envelope onto the floor in front of Mateo’s face.
“You think I came here to put a bullet in your head, Mateo?” Anias asked with bitter contempt.
Mateo blinked through his tears, looking at the legal documents scattered before him.
“What... what is this?”
“Those are comprehensive federal indictments,” Anias explained, his voice entirely devoid of pity.
“Complete financial records of every illegal operation you ran behind the syndicate’s back.”
“Every bribe, every extortion, every shipment of contraband you skimmed.”
“The FBI has been building this file for three years, waiting for the final piece of evidence.”
“I just handed it to them on a silver platter an hour ago.”
Mateo’s jaw dropped in absolute horror.
A quick death by a mob bullet was mercy compared to spending the rest of his natural life in a maximum-security federal penitentiary, marked as a traitor to the mob and despised by the inmates.
“You gave me to the feds?” Mateo screamed, his voice cracking into high-pitched hysteria.
“You’re a mob boss! You don’t cooperate with the government!”
Anias stood up, looking down at the broken man with utter indifference.
“I am not just a mob boss anymore, Mateo,” Anias said quietly.
“I am a father.”
“And a father protects his family by ensuring the threat is buried where it can never, ever return.”
Sirens began to wail in the distance, their red and blue lights flashing through the foggy windows of the warehouse.
Anias turned on his heel, walking calmly toward the side exit where Carmine waited with the car.
May you like
“Goodbye, cousin,” Anias said without looking back.
“May God have more mercy on your soul than you had on my child.”
