Chapter 7 - THE TRIBUNAL AT THE TABLE
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Vanessa dropped to her knees on the marble floor, her knees pressing directly into the sharp shards of broken crystal.
She didn't feel the glass cutting into her skin; she only felt the suffocating, paralyzing terror of her exposure.
“Luca, please... listen to me,” she wept, her hands raised in desperate supplication.
“I did it for us!”
“I did it to protect our future!”
“To protect our future?” Luca repeated, his tone so quiet and calm it was unnatural.
“You hid my firstborn son in a shuttered house on West Addison for six years.”
“You told me our baby died in an incubator while I was weeping in a chapel in Rome.”
“And you paid an agency to keep him locked inside so you could trigger my father’s inheritance clause the second we signed our wedding registry.”
Salvatore Bellini leaped to his feet, knocking his heavy chair backward onto the Persian rug.
“That is enough, Moretti!” Salvatore roared, his face purpling with rage as he pointed a shaking finger at Luca.
“You have no right to interrogate my daughter in front of this assembly!”
“We are the Bellini family! We control forty percent of the northern shipping channels!”
“If you break this alliance tonight, the Five Families will consider it an act of unprovoked war!”
Luca did not even blink at the threat.
He slowly turned his head toward the arched side gallery where his head of security, Marco, stood in the shadows.
“Marco,” Luca commanded softly.
Marco stepped out into the light, holding a heavy black leather briefcase.
He walked over to the head of the table and laid it flat before Commissioner Vance and the senior family elders.
“Open it, Commissioner,” Luca instructed without looking away from Salvatore.
Commissioner Vance snapped the brass latches open, pulling out thick reams of bank wire statements, surveillance photographs, and medical records.
“These are the financial records of the Bellini Maritime Foundation,” Luca declared, his voice carrying to every corner of the vast room.
“For six years, Salvatore Bellini has been siphoning thirty thousand dollars a month from our shared port revenues to fund Leo’s isolation.”
“He paid off two doctors at Northwestern to falsify fetal death certificates.”
“And yesterday afternoon, he finalized an agreement with the Russian syndicate in Detroit to sell our father’s rail lines the moment Vanessa secured the majority shares.”
Commissioner Vance looked up from the documents, his face pale with utter, profound disgust.
He turned his gaze onto Salvatore Bellini as if looking at a piece of decaying garbage.
“You falsified county vital statistics, Salvatore,” the commissioner said, his voice trembling with legal wrath.
“You committed federal fraud, wire extortion, and child endangerment across state lines.”
Salvatore backed away, his hands twitching toward his inner jacket pocket.
Before his fingers could even clear his lapel, Sal Russo moved with the lightning speed of a man who had survived three decades of street warfare.
The seventy-one-year-old driver lunged forward, grabbed Salvatore’s wrist, and twisted it downward with an iron, bone-snapping wrench.
A small silver semi-automatic pistol clattered loudly against the porcelain dessert plates.
Sal slammed the older mobster face-down onto the mahogany table, pinning Salvatore’s arm behind his back with effortless veteran authority.
“Not in front of the kid, Salvatore,” Sal growled into the man’s ear.
“Not in this house.”
The thirty guests gasped, several men standing up in shock as Luca’s armed sentries swarmed the room, surrounding the perimeter.
Luca walked over to where Vanessa was weeping among the glass shards.
He reached down, taking her left hand in his firm, unyielding grasp.
With cold, surgical precision, he pulled the six-carat diamond engagement ring from her finger.
He dropped the ring into the half-empty bowl of cold soup on the table.
“The Bellini name is stripped of all rank, all territory, and all honor in this city,” Luca announced with finality.
“Your shipping licenses are forfeit to the Moretti trust.”
May you like
“Your accounts are frozen by federal order.”
“And you will spend the rest of your natural lives answering to a grand jury for what you did to my son.”
