Chapter 6 - A Lawyer's Panic
While Gabriel Moretti was making vows in his harbor penthouse, Marcus Thorne was pacing the marble floor of his luxurious Back Bay condominium like a trapped rabid animal. His three-thousand-dollar Tom Ford suit was rumpled, his hair disheveled, and his hands were shaking so violently he could barely pour himself a glass of scotch from the crystal decanter on his wet bar.
“What do you mean you can’t file a kidnapping report?!” Marcus screamed into his mobile phone, his face purple with rage and panic.
On the other end of the line was Captain Thomas Miller, a senior detective in the Boston Police Department who had routinely enjoyed front-row Red Sox tickets and expensive steakhouse lunches courtesy of Marcus’s law firm.
“Marcus, listen to me very carefully,” Captain Miller’s voice crackled through the speaker, low and tense with warning. “You told me the guy outside Abe & Louie’s was Gabriel Moretti. And you told me your fiancée walked into his Escalade voluntarily without a weapon being drawn.”
“He intimidated her!” Marcus yelled, hurling his empty crystal glass against the brick fireplace, shattering it into a hundred glittering shards. “He had two armed thugs shove me against a brick wall! That is assault! That is unlawful restraint! I want a SWAT team dispatched to his waterfront building right now!”
“Are you out of your mind?!” Miller barked back, dropping all professional pleasantries. “Gabriel Moretti isn't a street dealer you can shake down with a warrant, Marcus! Half the judges in Suffolk County attend his charity galas, and the other half are terrified of his union connections. If I send a cruiser to his penthouse without a signed federal warrant and a dead body on the floor, my badge will be sitting in the commissioner’s desk drawer by noon tomorrow!”
“So you’re just going to let a mobster steal my wife?!”
“She isn't your wife, Marcus,” Miller said coldly. “And from what my patrol boys on Boylston Street told me after interviewing the valet, she looked like she was running from you, not being dragged away by Moretti. My advice to you as a friend? Lock your doors, call your senior partners in the morning, and pray to God you didn't say anything to that girl that Moretti took personal offense to. Because if Gabriel Moretti is looking at you, a police report is the absolute least of your problems.”
The line went dead with a sharp click.
Marcus stared at his phone in disbelief. He had spent his entire career operating under the absolute conviction that the law was a weapon designed exclusively for men of his social and financial standing. He had bullied nurses, evicted small business owners, and terrorized Clara with complete impunity because he controlled the legal machinery of the city.
Now, for the first time in his life, he was staring into an abyss where his law degree meant nothing.
He scrambled toward his home office, throwing open his mahogany desk drawers until he found his private legal files. He pulled out the folder labeled Hughes Bakery Holdings LLC—the shell company he had used to buy out the mortgage on Helen Hughes’s commercial property in South Boston.
“You want to play rough, Clara?” Marcus whispered to the empty room, a manic, desperate smile twisting his lips. “You think sleeping with a mafia boss is going to save you? I’m going to serve your mother with a twenty-four-hour emergency eviction notice at dawn. By tomorrow afternoon, the health department will condemn her ovens, and the sheriff will dump her flour sacks into the gutter.”
He grabbed his laptop, booting it up to draft the emergency eviction filing for the Suffolk County Housing Court. But as the screen illuminated, his corporate email inbox pinged with an automated high-priority alert from the firm’s central accounting server.
Marcus frowned, clicking open the notification.
It was an urgent memo from the senior managing partner of Vance, Adler & Sterling:
URGENT: All partners report to the main conference room at 7:00 a.m. sharp. Our primary maritime logistics client, The New England Seaport Consortium, has just terminated their twelve-million-dollar annual retainer with our firm, citing breach of ethical confidence by Senior Partner Marcus Thorne. Full executive inquiry pending.
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Marcus’s heart stopped. The New England Seaport Consortium was his largest client—the cornerstone of his entire billable practice. Without that account, his partnership shares were worthless.
He slumped back into his leather office chair, the cold, terrifying reality of Gabriel Moretti’s reach finally sinking into his bones. The war hadn't even started, and Moretti was already dismantling his life brick by brick.
