Chapter 4 - The Harbor Secret
Salvatore stepped over the fallen gunman without looking down, his boots crunching over the carpet of broken glass. Marco followed closely behind, quickly securing the hallway and checking the street outside.
"Are you injured, Lena?" Salvatore's voice was surprisingly calm, but his jaw was clenched tight, the muscles corded like iron.
"I'm fine," I gasped, clutching my aching ribs as I pulled myself up against the desk. "He was Carmine's man. He came for the bullet."
"I know," Salvatore said, stepping closer. He reached out with an unexpected gentleness, using the back of his leather-gloved thumb to wipe a fleck of plaster dust from my forehead. "Carmine slipped away from the estate twenty minutes after you left. He thought I took my post-operative sedative. He didn't realize that for the first time in eight years, my head was completely clear."
"Why would your own brother try to assassinate you at Pier 42?" I asked, catching my breath. "He was running your supply lines. He lived in your house."
"Because eight years ago, our father's will was unsealed," Salvatore explained, his voice low and bitter. "My father left sixty percent of the shipping empire to me, and forty percent to Carmine—on the strict condition that Carmine could never hold the chairman seat unless I died without an heir. Three days after the will was read, I was summoned to Pier 42 to inspect a counterfeit shipment of machinery. That was the night the sniper opened fire."
Salvatore took a deep breath, looking out the rain-streaked window. "I survived only because a stray gust of wind pushed the bullet an inch to the right. It caught my cheek, shattered against my jaw, and everyone assumed the bullet had fully exited through the soft tissue wound. My brother wept at my hospital bed. He played the devoted second-in-command for eight years, taking more and more control of our waterfront operations while I withered away in a darkened room, unable to eat, speak, or think past the blinding agony in my head."
"The bullet wasn't military surplus," I said, pulling the vial from my coat and handing it to him. "It belongs to a Swiss Sphinx 3000 competition pistol. It's custom-machined with a reversed polygonal rifling barrel."
Salvatore stared down at the tiny piece of brass inside the glass. A dark, terrifying realization spread across his features.
"Our father kept a matched pair of Sphinx pistols in his private safe," Salvatore whispered. "He gave one to me on my twenty-first birthday. He gave the other to Carmine."
"Carmine pulled the trigger himself," I said softly.
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"No," Salvatore replied, his eyes turning cold as arctic ice. "He hired someone to use his gun, so he could maintain an alibi at a dinner party across town. And now, he knows the truth is sitting in this room."
Marco re-entered the clinic, holding up an encrypted burner phone he had stripped from the dead gunman's pocket. "Boss, Carmine just sent a ping. He has thirty men assembling at the old refrigeration warehouse on Pier 14. He's liquidating our cash reserves and boarding a cargo freighter to South America at dawn."
