He Thought I Was Nobody Until My Five Brothers Erased His Empire

By noon that same day, Julian Vance sat in his high-rise office at the St. Regis, tapping his gold pen against his mahogany desk, waiting for the confirmation call from his legal team in D.C.

His phone rang. He snatched it up immediately. "Is it delivered?"

"Julian Vance?" a smooth, unfamiliar voice asked on the line.

Julian paused. "Who is this? Where is my transport team?"

"Your transport team is currently sitting in a diner near South Bend, enjoying hot soup," Luca Moretti replied smoothly from his executive suite at the Citadel. "As for your ledger, it’s currently being fed into an industrial shredder in our furnace room."

Julian’s blood ran cold. He stood up, knocking his leather chair backward. "You intercepted a federal shipment? That’s highway robbery! I’ll have the FBI on your doorstep within an hour!"

"You won't call the FBI, Julian," Luca said, his tone as pleasant as an afternoon breeze. "Because while Matteo was securing that ledger, Gabriel was doing a deep-dive audit into your hedge fund's offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands."

Luca paused, the faint sound of a fountain pen clicking echoing over the receiver.

"It turns out," Luca continued, "that seventy million dollars of the money you lost in the Cole Infrastructure collapse didn't belong to your fund investors. It belonged to the pension fund of the Chicago Transit Workers Union. You gambled their retirement money on Adrian Cole's port development without authorization."

Julian felt the air leave his lungs. "That... that’s a misinterpretation of our investment mandate—"

"The union trustees don't care about investment mandates, Julian," Luca interrupted coldly. "They care about their money. I have a draft of your complete transactional audit sitting on my desk. If you make one more move toward Elena, her project, or any assets associated with the Moretti family, I will forward this file directly to the union’s executive board."

Julian gripped the edge of his desk, his hand shaking uncontrollably. "What do you want?"

"A full release of all legal claims against the riverfront property, signed and notarized within forty-five minutes," Luca said. "And after that, you will resign from your fund and leave the Midwest entirely. Do we have an understanding?"