Chapter 10 - The Traitor at the Table
The drive back to the estate was wrapped in a suffocating, funeral silence. I sat in the cargo area of the van, clutching the Pelican case to my chest as if it were a shield, while my mind spun out of control.
Arturo Morales. Gabriel’s own brother. I had seen Arturo once at the estate—a slick, smiling man with expensive jewelry who ran the syndicate’s private banking and casino operations. Why would the brother of the most powerful crime lord in San Marcos murder my parents, two humble accountants who just wanted a quiet life?
When we reached the mansion at three o'clock in the morning, Morales didn't send me up to bed. He led Marcus and me straight into the secure subterranean command center beneath the library—a soundproof room filled with servers and tactical displays.
"Plug the drive in," Morales ordered Marcus, his face carved from stone as he tossed the USB stick onto the central console. "We play the confession file. Now."
Marcus inserted the drive into the secure terminal. A few seconds later, the static of an old audio recording hissed through the room’s speakers, followed by a voice that made my heart stop entirely.
It was my grandmother. Her voice was strong, sharp, and decades younger than the frail whisper I remembered from our final months together.
“Gabriel,” the recording began, the sound of ocean waves echoing faintly in the background of her voice. “If you are listening to this, it means I am dead, and my grandson Julian has brought you to the locker. I pray you protected him, Gabriel. I pray you remembered what we built together.”
Morales closed his eyes, his head bowing slightly as the voice of his Queen of Numbers filled the underground room.
“Ten years ago, I discovered an eleven-million-dollar discrepancy in the offshore casino transit accounts,” Elena’s voice continued, her tone turning hard and clinical. “I traced the embezzlement directly to your brother, Arturo. He was skimming from the syndicate general fund and secretly investing the money into Hector Rojas’s southern cartel. Arturo was preparing a coup to assassinate you and take over the San Marcos waterfront.”
Marcus cursed quietly under his breath, his fist slamming onto the metal console.
“When I confronted Arturo with the numbers, he panicked,” Elena recorded. “He knew if I brought the ledger to you, you would execute him for treason. He sent his hitmen to my daughter’s house to secure my silence. They cut the brake lines on my son-in-law’s car. They murdered Julian’s parents, Gabriel. And they would have murdered the boy if I hadn't taken him from his crib that very afternoon and fled into the slums.”
Tears streamed silently down my face, hot and stinging against my cold cheeks. I wasn't just a poor street kid whose parents had bad luck. I was a survivor of a syndicate execution—an execution ordered by a man who was currently sleeping in a luxury wing of this very house.
“I could not come to you, Gabriel,” Elena’s recording concluded, her voice breaking for the first time. “Arturo controlled the mansion guards. I knew if I walked through your gates with a baby in my arms, we would be shot before we reached your study. So I became a ghost. I raised my grandson in the dirt to keep him breathing. Do not let my sacrifice be for nothing, Gabriel. Avenge my family. Purge your house.”
The recording clicked off, leaving only the hum of the cooling fans in the server room.
I looked up at Gabriel Morales. The crime lord stood entirely motionless, his fists clenched at his sides so tightly his knuckles were white as bone. The brother he had protected, the brother he had elevated to run half his empire, was a traitor who had murdered the family of the only woman Gabriel Morales had ever truly respected.
Morales turned his head toward Marcus. His amber eyes didn't look like eyes anymore; they looked like twin coals of hellfire.
"Where is Arturo right now?" Morales asked, his voice disturbingly calm.
"He’s in the main dining room, boss," Marcus replied, checking a perimeter monitor. "He arrived an hour ago while we were at the docks. He’s hosting a late breakfast meeting with three of our harbor captains."
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Morales reached down, drew his heavy tactical pistol from his shoulder holster, and racked the slide, chambering a round with a sharp, metallic snap that echoed through the concrete bunker.
"Julian," Morales said, looking down at me with an expression of absolute, terrifying resolve. "You stay behind Marcus. You are going to watch me fulfill a promise I should have made ten years ago."
