Chapter 3 - The Price of a River
Back on the forty-second floor of the Calloway Tower, the phone call concluded with a sickening click.
“She’s alive. For now,” Victor Dane’s voice seemed to hang in the air like poison gas.
Roman remained motionless behind his wide mahogany desk. The six senior captains standing before him had witnessed him execute traitorous lieutenants without blinking, negotiate hostage releases with federal prosecutors, and withstand car bombings without missing a morning briefing. But in this exact second, Roman’s gaze was unreadable in a way that made the hair on their arms stand up. It was the calm before an extinction event.
“The marriage isn’t real,” repeated Douglas Ward, Roman’s oldest consigliere, his voice trembling slightly under the boss’s freezing stare. Douglas had served Roman’s father. He understood the ledger of power better than anyone. “Roman, listen to reason. It’s an arrangement on paper! She was a public relations asset to stabilize your board before the state commission vote. You cannot trade the South Chicago river corridor for a woman you hired six months ago! If you surrender those terminals, Victor Dane controls every barge, every fuel pipe, every cargo manifest between here and Saint Louis. We lose fifty million a year and our defensive perimeter dissolves overnight!”
Roman slowly rounded the desk. He did not raise his voice. He did not slam his fist. He simply stopped two inches from Douglas’s face, towering over the older man.
“Who leaked her schedule?” Roman whispered. The tone was soft, chilled to sub-zero temperatures.
Douglas blanched. “Roman, we don’t know yet—”
“She was supposed to have a three-car escort,” Roman continued, every word landing like a hammer on an anvil. “Her firm’s subterranean garage was swept at noon. Victor Dane’s strike team bypassed three distinct security redundancies and ambushed her vehicle precisely four minutes after she reached the lower level. That requires real-time GPS telemetry from an inside transponder.”
Roman reached out, grasped Douglas by the silk lapel of his tailored jacket, and effortlessly lifted the two-hundred-pound man off his feet until his polished oxfords swung an inch above the Persian rug. The remaining five captains drew back in sheer horror, none daring to reach for their holsters.
“You think this marriage is just paper because you value ledgers over blood, Douglas,” Roman said, his dark eyes burning with psychotic lucidity. “You think she is replaceable because you look at women as collateral. But Elena Calloway bears my name. And anyone who touches what belongs under my roof does not get negotiated with. They get systematically dismantled.”
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Roman released the older man, who hit the floor coughing and clutching his bruised throat. Roman turned toward his chief of enforcement, a towering Ukrainian named Lev.
“Lock down every exit out of Cook County,” Roman barked, stripping off his suit jacket and rolling up his white cuffs, revealing the dense black tribal ink running up his muscular forearms. “Shut down the river locks. Tell our port captains that if a single tugboat moves without my personal authorization, they sink it with the crew onboard. And bring me Victor Dane’s younger brother from the Cicero warehouse. He has twenty minutes to tell me which safehouse they took her to, or I will peel him like fruit.”
