Chapter One
Tristan
Present day…
The doors to the interrogation chamber crash open, slamming against the walls.
Viktor and Aiden drag in a lanky looking man with a goatee and a blood splattered shirt. His face is all messed up and he’s begging for mercy.
Motherfucker.He’s wasting his breath. Mercy is a thing no one in this room will show him.
Tonight is a night of reckoning. A night for answers and for our enemies to answer for their crimes.
Eighteen months ago, every man in this room lost a father when the Syndicate of the Brotherhood was bombed in a secret plot to eliminate them.
Massimo is all that remains. One solitary man who got to keep the wealth of a secret society of crime families who were once deemed a force to be reckoned with. Massimo was initiated when our father made him boss of the D’Agostino famiglia.
My brother was the only one to survive the bombing, and the only reason he survived was because of other secret plots at work instigated by Ricardo Balesteri. My family’s enemy.
In a bid to get the wealth of the Syndicate Ricardo betrayed them and formed an alliance with Vlad Kuznetsov, Mortimer’s right hand man in the Circle of Shadows. They were the only people strong enough to take them on. We thought they were solely to blame for the bombing until we got an anonymous letter letting us know there were more people responsible. Our quest for vengeance as a group began then.
For me, however, it went deeper than that because I suspected more involvement in relation to Mortimer Viggo. I was well versed in how he worked from years back when I tried to get revenge for my Alyssa.
It was Vlad who killed Alyssa. Him who did everything abominable to my girl before he cut her head off and sent it to me in a box, but Mortimer sent him to kill her. I killed Vlad, but I’m still seeking my revenge on Mortimer.
Vlad orchestrated the plot with Riccardo to take out the Syndicate, but we knew the presence of any Shadow member could only arise if Mortimer sanctioned it. We have no idea who else was involved but I knew getting answers would start with him.
This fucker here is the first stroke of luck we’ve had in all that time. A fucking spy.
“This motherfucker is the one with the answers. Playing sides, filthy scum,” Viktor shouts, his voice heavy with a Russian accent.
Viktor became boss of the Romanov family with his father’s passing, Aiden is his brother. They are part of the Bratva. Their father like ours was a member of the Syndicate.
“This piece of shit made the bomb that killed our fathers,” Aiden adds, hustling the man along.
I rivet my gaze to the man in their arms. It was he who made the bomb. That knowledge just put the ink on his death certificate.
Massimo and Dominic move out of the way as Viktor drags the man over to the wall and Aiden secures his wrists with chains. They both then step aside allowing Massimo to takeover, showing their respect for his leadership and authority here.
“Name?” Massimo demands.
“Wilson Parker,” Viktor replies.
“Details?”
“Age twenty-nine, resident of Summer Heights. He’s an ex-army bomb disposal officer and a computer hacker. For our purposes he’s the guy who Mortimer Viggo commissioned to not only make the bomb that killed our fathers, but he also hacked the systems in the Syndicate building to make it possible. He’s been working with Mortimer Viggo for a very long time.”
There it is.
There it all fucking is. A taste of what I suspected.
Mortimer Viggo had more involvement than what we thought. When we got that letter, he was the first person who sprung to my mind.
Now we know Vlad and Ricardo were just puppets. The master controlling the strings was always Mortimer.
Just like six years ago.
Massimo looks to me and Dominic cracks his knuckles. They both know I have a personal stake in this because of Alyssa.