Chapter 13 - The Final Stand at the Waterfront
With Chloe safe, stable, and resting peacefully in the pediatric ICU under heavy guard, Dominic had one final debt to settle.
At 1:00 p.m., the sun was high over the South Boston Marina.
Don Antonio Rossi stood trapped on the wooden dock beside his eighty-foot luxury yacht, surrounded by thirty armed Salvatore enforcers with weapons drawn. His remaining bodyguards had already surrendered their weapons and were kneeling on the asphalt with zip-ties around their wrists.
Dominic walked down the dock, his black coat fluttering in the sea breeze.
Rossi looked like a cornered rat. His expensive suit was wrinkled, his hair disheveled, and the arrogance that had defined him for decades had completely evaporated into sheer terror.
"Dominic... please," Rossi begged, raising his trembling hands. "We can negotiate! We can split the southern port revenues fifty-fifty! The Commission doesn't need to hear about this! It was Marco’s idea! Marco pushed for the hit on the girl!"
Dominic stopped five paces away. He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't shout. He simply looked at the man who had ordered an assault on an innocent child in a hospital.
"You broke the oldest rule of our world, Antonio," Dominic said, his voice echoing over the gentle lapping of the harbor waves. "You targeted children. You brought war into a sanctuary of healing."
"I will leave the country!" Rossi cried desperately. "I will take my family to Sicily! You will never see me again!"
"No," Dominic said coldly. "You will not see Sicily."
Dominic raised a single hand.
Two federal agents from the Department of Justice—accompanied by the newly appointed Special Prosecutor—stepped out from behind the Salvatore vehicles, holding a thick stack of federal arrest warrants.
Rossi blinked in utter disbelief. "Feds? You... you called the Feds?"
"I bought your banking records from Marco’s encrypted servers last night," Dominic explained calmly. "Every offshore account, every bribe to state judges, every contract killing you ordered over thirty years is on that hard drive. You are not dying today, Antonio. That would be too quick. You will spend the rest of your natural life in a supermax federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, in an eight-by-ten concrete box."
The federal agents stepped forward, snapping heavy steel handcuffs around Rossi’s wrists and reading him his rights as they dragged him away.
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Dominic turned toward the water, taking a deep breath of the salty ocean air.
The blood feud was over. The shadows were lifting.
