The first bullet missed my face by less than an inch, and the man I had spent three years waiting to see dead was bleeding beneath booth four. I could have stayed behind the bar and let Arthur Costello die—but instead, I stood up, took down the men sent to kill him, and made the most feared mafia boss in New York finally ask who I really was.

Marcus didn't die that night in the study—because killing him too quickly would have left his underground network intact across the five boroughs.

Instead, utilizing the encrypted comms logs Khloe had decrypted, Arthur and Khloe orchestrated a trap so flawless it paralyzed Marcus’s entire faction within forty-eight hours. They fed false intelligence through Marcus’s secure channels, claiming that a massive shipment of untraceable bearer bonds was arriving at an abandoned shipping warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Midnight at the Navy Yard.

The skeletal remains of old brick storehouses loomed against the dark river water, illuminated only by the harsh glare of halogen work lights set up inside the central bay.

Khloe crouched atop a rusted gantry crane thirty feet above the concrete floor, her sniper rifle braced against her shoulder, peering through the high-magnification scope.

Below her, twelve of Marcus’s elite mercenaries swept through the cavernous room, rifles raised, expecting to ambush Arthur Costello.

Instead, the heavy steel roll-up doors at both ends of the warehouse slammed shut with a thunderous bang, locked electronically from the outside by Frank and Leo.

“It’s a trap!” one of Marcus’s mercenaries shouted over the comms.

From the shadows near the loading dock, Arthur Costello stepped forward into the harsh halo of the work lights. He wore a heavy black overcoat, flanked by twenty of his most fiercely loyal senior capos, their weapons drawn and locked on the traitors.

“Drop your weapons,” Arthur’s voice echoed off the concrete walls with absolute, bone-chilling authority.

Marcus Vance stepped out from behind a stack of wooden crates, his face bruised from his encounter in the study, his eyes wild with desperate fury. He held a pistol pointed directly at the center of Arthur’s chest.

“You think a few old men with gats are going to stop me, Arthur?!” Marcus screamed, his finger twitching on the trigger. “I control the docks! I control the distribution lines! You’re a ghost of a dying era!”

“An era you were foolish enough to think you could steal,” Arthur replied calmly.

Marcus raised his weapon higher, preparing to fire.

High above on the gantry crane, Khloe exhaled slowly, aligning the crosshairs of her rifle with the center of Marcus’s right shoulder.

Crack!

The suppressed shot echoed like a whip through the warehouse.

Marcus screamed as the bullet tore through his shoulder, spinning him violently around and sending his pistol clattering across the concrete floor.

Within seconds, Arthur’s men swarmed the mercenaries, disarming them before a single additional shot could be fired.