“Hire Me—I May Be Able to Help Your Sight,” She Told a Blind Man—Unaware He Was a Feared Mafia Boss

Gregor’s hand never completed the movement.

Anton stepped forward with blinding speed, grabbing Gregor’s wrist and twisting it downward with a sickening crunch. A small, titanium-framed automatic pistol clattered out of Gregor’s coat and slid across the polished hardwood floor.

Gregor let out a muffled scream of pain, dropping to one knee as Anton pinned his arm behind his back.

“Victor! Listen to me!” Gregor gasped, his face pressed against the floorboards. “The syndicates from Newark and Philadelphia have already signed the transfer agreements! Vance has the medical board locked down! You are a blind relic! You cannot hold the ports!”

Victor did not raise his voice. He did not flinch. He walked slowly across the room, his shoes making no sound on the rug, until he stood directly above his former lieutenant.

“Eleven years, Gregor,” Victor said softly. “I gave you the northern terminals. I bought your home in Alpine. I paid for your daughter’s schooling in Switzerland.”

“You became weak!” Gregor spat, blood dripping from his lip onto the wood. “A blind boss is an invitation to war! I saved the organization by making a deal with Newark before they slaughtered us all!”

“You did not save the organization,” Victor said, his voice dropping into a chilling whisper. “You sold it for thirty pieces of silver.”

Victor turned his head toward Anton.

“Lock him in the wine cellar beneath the carriage house. Strip his communications. If a single message leaves this property, Anton, you will join him.”

“Yes, Boss,” Anton grunted, hauling Gregor to his feet like a sack of grain and dragging him toward the service stairs.

Nina stood by the shattered teacup, her chest heaving, her hands covered in cold sweat.

Victor turned his sightless gaze toward her.

“The Newark and Philadelphia syndicates will not wait for Friday,” Victor said, his analytical mind processing the betrayal in seconds. “Gregor’s silence will alert them within three hours. They know our primary transshipment hub at Bay 40 contains the quarterly payroll and the customs manifests.”

“What does that mean?” Nina asked.

“It means we move now,” Victor replied. “If they seize Bay 40, they control the maritime access to the entire city. And Dr. Vance will erase any remaining surgical records at Meridian Park before we can secure them.”

“You cannot go out there!” Nina protested, grabbing his sleeve. “Your intracranial pressure is dangerously high! Any blunt trauma or hypertensive crisis could cause the tumor to bleed—a pituitary apoplexy! It would kill you instantly!”

Victor reached down, took her hand from his arm, and held it firmly.

“In my world, Nina, retreating to a hospital bed before securing your borders is an immediate death sentence,” he said. “You wanted to be my neurocritical nurse. Get your trauma bag and get in the car.”

Twenty minutes later, two black SUVs tore out of the Sea Gate gates, heading east along the Belt Parkway toward the industrial shipping yards of Bay 40 in Brooklyn.

The sky had turned dark iron-gray, unleashing a torrential downpour that blurred the city skyline.

Victor sat in the rear of the lead vehicle, an encrypted tactical radio resting on his lap. Nina sat beside him, clutching her trauma kit containing emergency mannitol, IV cannulas, and coagulant agents.

As the convoy turned into the narrow, container-lined access road of Bay 40, a heavy flatbed truck suddenly slammed through the side intersection, T-boning the trailing SUV and flipping it onto its roof in a shower of sparks and shattered glass.

“Ambush!” Anton roared from the front seat, slamming the brakes and spinning the steering wheel.

Automatic gunfire erupted from the shadows between the stacked shipping containers. High-caliber rounds punched through the armored windshield of their SUV, creating spiderweb fractures across the ballistic glass.

“Down!” Victor commanded, grabbing Nina by the nape of her neck and pulling her flat against the floorboards as bullets shredded the door panels.

Anton drew his sidearm, kicked open his door, and returned fire, providing covering fire through the rain. “Boss! There are at least twelve shooters! Newark uniforms! They’ve boxed the perimeter!”

Nina looked up from the floor. Victor was completely calm.

He closed his eyes—not that it made any difference to his sight—and tilted his head, listening intently to the acoustic reverberations of the gunshots echoing between the steel shipping containers.

“Anton,” Victor spoke with absolute clarity. “Three shooters at ten o'clock behind the yellow Maersk container. Two shooters on the catwalk above the crane at two o'clock. They are using suppressed submachine guns—recoil pattern indicates lightweight nine-millimeter.”

Nina stared at him in disbelief. Without sight, his auditory spatial mapping was operating like high-resolution sonar.

“Nina,” Victor murmured, his hand resting firmly on her shoulder. “Describe the visual ground directly in front of my door. Is the concrete clear?”

“Yes!” Nina shouted over the roar of gunfire. “Ten feet of open asphalt, then a blue forklift to your left!”

“Anton, suppress the crane!” Victor ordered.

Victor kicked open his door, stepped out into the pouring rain, and drew a sleek, customized Kimber .45 from his shoulder holster.

He did not rush. He moved with chilling, predatory grace.

Guided entirely by the muzzle flashes and the sharp acoustic cracks of the opposing weapons, Victor raised his arm.

Crack! Crack!

A shooter leaning around the yellow container fifty feet away dropped instantly to the ground.

Victor pivoted ninety degrees to his right, firing twice more through the cascading rain. A second assailant tumbled from the forklift platform, his weapon clattering onto the asphalt.

Nina watched from the floor of the vehicle, paralyzed by a mixture of terror and awe. The blind man was not hiding from the wolves; he was dismantling them in the dark.

A sudden, sharp ricochet struck the steel frame above Victor’s head, showering his face with metallic fragments. Victor staggered back against the car, his left hand flying to his brow as an acute wave of intracranial pain surged through his skull.