Chapter 12 - SHADOWS AT THE BORDER
While the riverfront project flourished under Elena’s direction, the vacuum left by the sudden collapse of Cole Infrastructure triggered quiet seismic tremors in neighboring jurisdictions.
In the private cigar lounge of the St. Regis in Chicago, three men sat around a low marble table. At the center was Julian Vance, a high-stakes hedge fund manager and distant cousin of the Cole family trust, whose off-shore funds had lost nearly eighty million dollars during the terminal impoundment.
"The Morettis played us," Julian snarled, swirling his glass of scotch. "They didn't just ruin Richard and Adrian. They wiped out the entire liquidity buffer for the Midwest Development Syndicate. They took the riverfront, they took the port rights, and now they’re building public housing on land we were supposed to turn into luxury casinos."
Across from him sat Marcus Sterling, the estranged younger brother of Arthur Sterling, the Coles' disgraced former legal counsel.
"You can't move against Dominic Moretti with conventional litigation, Julian," Marcus warned, his voice low. "Luca froze every legal loophole before the ink on the divorce decree was dry. And Gabriel controls every digital gateway between here and Geneva. If you try to file a suit, your fund’s tax irregularities will end up on the desk of the IRS by noon."
"I don't intend to use lawyers," Julian said smoothly, reaching into his inner jacket pocket and pulling out a leather-bound ledger. "The Coles were sloppy, but old Richard kept a secondary set of books off the main server. Physical ledgers. Details of transport routes through Terminal 4 that the Moretti family used long before Elena ever married into that house."
Marcus raised an eyebrow. "Smuggling?"
"Leverage," Julian corrected. "If the Federal Maritime Commission gets a look at these historical manifest records, the port lockdown won't just apply to steel. It will freeze every vessel the Moretti family operates across the Eastern seaboard."
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"And who is going to deliver those books to the commission?" Marcus asked.
Julian smiled coldly. "Someone who still has access to the Citadel's old network records. Someone who wants revenge just as badly as we want our eighty million back."
