Chapter 15 - The Reckoning on the Terrace
The storm had unleashed its full fury. Wind screamed off the Atlantic, whipping rain across the slippery terrace flags. Silas had Moretti’s brother by the throat, hoisting him completely off the deck with one arm, pressing him against the low stone balustrade over the three-hundred-foot drop into the crashing waves below.
"Cassian Moretti," Silas growled, his voice a vibration of gravel and death. "You should have stayed in Genoa."
Cassian coughed blood onto Silas’s soaked white shirt, laughing through shattered teeth. "You think... this ends with me, Silas? You built your little empire of longshoremen and orphans... but the Consortium wants Berth Nine. The freighter out there... she’s not carrying guns. She’s carrying enough ammonium nitrate to level the entire lower Manhattan shoreline!"
My breath seized in my throat as I stepped onto the terrace, Clara clinging tightly to my waist, Barnaby limping beside us, growling through his teeth.
"Where is the detonator?" Silas tightened his grip until Cassian’s eyes bulged with burst capillaries.
"It’s keyed... to my pulse, Marcone," Cassian wheezed, tapping the glowing black wristband strapped to his forearm. "My heart stops... the Atlantic Shoals burn. You let me walk... or your whole sovereign harbor becomes an ash heap."
Silas didn't waver. His cold, calculating tactical mind was racing against the countdown of a ticking bomb. He looked back at me and Clara. In his eyes was the agony of a protector caught in the ultimate trap.
"He's lying, Silas!" I called out, remembering the manifest logs I had analyzed for the harbor union earlier that week. "The ammonium nitrate freighter requires a relay station on land to bridge the detonator signal across the salt spray! He can't trigger it without the beacon antenna!"
Cassian’s smug smile vanished. Terror finally cracked through his aristocratic facade.
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Silas smiled—a slow, terrifying grin that made Cassian's blood run cold. "You underestimated my wife, Cassian. She doesn't just run my home. She runs the port."
With a ruthless twist of his arm, Silas snapped the wristband off Cassian’s arm before he could react, then hurled the mafia prince back onto the stone flags like a sack of garbage.
