The Mafia Boss's Baby Would Only Stop Crying in My Arms—Until He Looked at My Badge and Discovered My Brother's Fatal Secret

The impact knocked the breath from Marcus’s lungs. His handgun clattered across the wet stones and splashed into the freezing lake.

Daniel dragged Marcus up by the collar of his tactical vest with one hand, lifting him until Marcus’s feet barely touched the gravel. Daniel slammed him back against the stone seawall with bone-crushing force, burying the muzzle of his custom sidearm beneath Marcus’s chin.

"Daniel! Please! We’re blood!" Marcus choked out, blood and lake water dripping from his split lip, his eyes wide with animal terror. "We grew up together! You can't kill your own cousin!"

"You stopped being my blood the second you sold Camille’s route to Vincent Moretti," Daniel snarled, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, primal rage that made Marcus whimper.

Luca and three guards converged on the seawall, their weapons raised, forming an iron ring around them.

"I had to do it!" Marcus shrieked, tears of cowardice mixing with the lake water on his face. "You were going to make the family legitimate! You were transferring eighty percent of our assets into clean shipping, commercial real estate, and medical trusts! You were destroying everything our fathers built in the streets!"

"My father built this family to protect our people, not to slaughter women and premature babies in the street!" Daniel roared, pressing the gun harder against Marcus’s jaw.

"Camille was weak!" Marcus spat, a desperate, venomous sneer flashing across his bruised face. "She was turning you soft, Daniel! And that little bastard in the crib would have grown up with nothing—"

Crack!

Daniel didn't pull the trigger. He brought the steel slide of his weapon across Marcus’s jaw with brutal force, shattering Marcus’s cheekbone and sending him crashing to his knees in the wet gravel.

Marcus groaned, spitting out blood and teeth, clutching his face in agony.

Daniel stood over him, towering like a dark judge in the moonlight. He holstered his sidearm, looking down at his cousin with an expression of cold, absolute disgust.

"Death is too quick for you, Marcus," Daniel said, his voice dropping into an icy, merciless calm.

Daniel turned to Luca. "Take him to the harbor precinct. Hand him over directly to Special Agent Miller at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with the decrypted audio recordings, the financial ledgers, and the wiretap logs."

Luca blinked in genuine shock. "The feds, Boss? We don't involve the government."

"We do tonight," Daniel replied, staring at Marcus with venomous finality. "Let the entire criminal underworld know that Marcus Russo is a traitor, a child-killer, and a federal informant. In twenty-four hours, the Moretti family will place a million-dollar bounty on his head. Let him spend the next forty years rotting in a maximum-security federal penitentiary, looking over his shoulder every second of every day, waiting for the knife that’s coming for him."

Marcus’s eyes filled with pure, unadulterated horror. In the mafia world, being labeled an informant in federal prison was a fate ten thousand times worse than a quick bullet on a private beach.

"No! Daniel, no! Just shoot me! Put a bullet in my head!" Marcus screamed, crawling across the gravel, begging. "Kill me, Daniel! Please!"