"He Watched Her Take Five Bullets for His Mother and Then the Most Feared Man in Chicago Fell Apart

The rain had returned, washing over the stone courtyard of the estate as twenty armed men stood in a wide circle. In the center knelt Dante, Marco’s cousin and underboss for the West Side operations. His hands were bound behind his back, his face bruised and bleeding from Caruso’s preliminary interrogation.

Marco walked out into the pouring rain without an umbrella. The water soaked his shirt, plastering it against his broad chest as he stopped five feet from his cousin.

"Why?" Marco asked simply.

Dante spat blood onto the wet stones. "Because she's old, Marco! Your mother should have stepped down ten years ago! The Russians offered peace, a fifty-fifty split on the port routes, and you turned them down because Isabella didn't like their methods!"

"So you sold her out," Marco said, his voice eerily calm above the sound of the thunder. "You gave them her route. You gave them the security codes."

"It was supposed to be a clean hit!" Dante yelled, looking up with desperate, crazed eyes. "One sniper round! How was I supposed to know your little nurse would jump in front of the bullet?!"

Marco’s calm shattered. He moved faster than a man his size had any right to move. His fist connected with Dante’s jaw with a sickening crack, sending the underboss sprawling across the wet pavement. Marco hauled him back up by his collar, his eyes burning with black fire.

"She has a name," Marco snarled, drawing his sidearm and pressing the hot barrel directly against his cousin's forehead. "Her name is Lena. And she has more loyalty in her bleeding finger than you have ever had in your entire miserable life."

"Marco, please—family!" Dante begged, weeping now as the cold steel pressed into his skin. "We're blood!"