Chapter 3 - The Bloodline's Rot
Marco didn’t answer immediately. He looked down at the sealed evidence bag clutched in my hand, then toward the doorway where two of my most trusted enforcers, Viktor and Leo, had just appeared, standing guard in the corridor with grim, stone-cold expressions.
“Not here, Boss,” Marco murmured, lowering his voice until it was barely a breath above a whisper. “The walls in this hospital have ears, and the wrong people have long paychecks. Let’s step into the private consultation room down the hall.”
I cast one last, lingering look at Elena. Her chest rose and fell in a shallow, mechanical rhythm, assisted by the oxygen mask. A nurse was carefully wrapping a warm blanket around her wasted frame.
“If she stops breathing again,” I told Dr. Bennett, who was wiping her hands with a paper towel, “you call me before you call the morgue. Understood?”
“She’s stabilized, Mr. Mercer, but she’s out of the woods,” Bennett replied evenly, meeting my gaze without flinching—a rare trait for anyone outside my inner circle. “She needs rest, nourishment, and absolute peace. Whoever put her in this condition caused systemic shock to her body and the fetus. If she faces another stress event like that tonight, neither of them will survive.”
I nodded once, sharp and cold, and turned on my heel.
The consultation room was small, smelling faintly of antiseptic and old coffee. Marco locked the door behind us, pulling the heavy blinds shut over the narrow window facing the hallway.
“Talk,” I commanded, leaning my palms against the cheap laminate table. The plastic creaked under my weight. “Which one of them is it? Is it Julian?”
Julian Mercer. My younger brother. A slick, ambitious viper who had spent the last five years resenting the fact that our father had handed the empire’s reins to me instead of him. Julian loved high-stakes gambling, expensive European sports cars, and accumulating massive debts that he expected the family bank account to cover. He had always looked at Elena with a predatory, mocking amusement, treating her like a temporary pet I had picked up from the streets.
“It’s not Julian,” Marco said quietly, pulling a folded manila folder from inside his heavy woolen coat and laying it flat on the table.
My brow furrowed. If not Julian, the options narrowed down to a terrifyingly small, vicious pool of blood relatives. “Then who? Uncle Vincent? Is the old bastard trying to test my leadership by targeting my personal life?”
Vincent Mercer was the last of the old guard—a ruthless relic of the 1980s mob wars who believed that weakness in a boss was a disease that needed to be surgically excised. He had opposed my marriage to Elena from day one, claiming a civilian orphan with no family connections was a fatal vulnerability.
“Not Vincent, either,” Marco replied, sliding the folder across the table toward me. “Open it, Boss. The paper trail doesn't lie, and neither do the financial logs.”
I snatched the folder up, tearing the metal clasp open and dumping the contents onto the table.
Photographs, bank statements, wire transfer receipts, and pharmacy logs spilled out under the harsh yellow light of the overhead fixture. I grabbed the topmost document—a certified cashier’s check drawn from an offshore account in the Cayman Islands, routed through three shell companies before landing in a local apothecary’s ledger.
My eyes scanned the signature line at the bottom of the authorization form.
The blood drained entirely from my face. My breath caught in my throat, a sudden, suffocating pressure crushing my chest far worse than any physical blow.
It wasn't Julian. It wasn't Vincent.
It was Elena’s signature on some pages—and someone else’s signature authorizing the systematic, calculated restriction of her medical access, the freezing of her personal accounts, and the redirection of her mail.
“Sophie,” I whispered, the name tasting like poison.
Sophie Mercer.
My younger sister. The quiet, artistic, seemingly harmless sister who spent her days painting in her Soho loft, hosting charity galas, and playing the role of the sweet, detached sibling who wanted nothing to do with the bloody business of the Mercer syndicate.
“How?” I choked out, the word feeling foreign and jagged in my mouth. “Sophie hates blood. She won't even watch me clean a cut after a turf war. Why would she do this to Elena?”
“She didn't do it out of bloodlust, Boss,” Marco said softly, pulling out a chair and sitting down. He looked older tonight, lines of exhaustion etched deep around his eyes. “She did it out of ambition. And fear.”
“Explain.”
“Three months ago, right after you signed the divorce papers and publicly cut ties with Elena to keep her safe, Sophie found out something she shouldn't have,” Marco explained, tapping a finger against one of the printed bank statements. “You quietly set up a secondary, untraceable trust fund for Elena—ten million dollars parked in a Swiss vault, accessible only through a biometric key locked in my office safe. You intended for her to live like a queen anywhere in the world, far away from New York.”
My jaw tightened. “I did. What of it?”
“Sophie found the ledger on your private laptop while you were in Chicago handling the docks dispute,” Marco continued. “She realized that if Elena disappeared with ten million dollars of Mercer capital while you were still legally or emotionally tied to her, it created a massive financial leak. But more than that... Sophie has been secretly partnering with the Moretti family behind your back.”
The name Moretti dropped into the room like a live grenade.
Salvatore Moretti. Our fiercest rival in the Tri-State drug and shipping lanes. For two years, we had been engaged in a cold war, trading blows, ambushing shipments, and circling each other like starving wolves.
“The Morettis?” I snarled, slamming my fist down onto the table with enough force to crack the laminate. “Sophie is in bed with Salvatore Moretti? My own flesh and blood?”
“She wanted out from under your thumb,” Marco said steadily, absorbing my fury without blinking. “Moretti promised her a fifty-percent cut of the North River shipping docks once he eliminated you and took over the family. To seal the alliance, Sophie needed to prove her loyalty. And what better way to test your weakness than to target the woman you supposedly discarded?”
“She didn't just test me,” I whispered, staring down at the medical logs showing weeks of deliberate starvation, isolated confinement in an abandoned safehouse in Queens, and denied medical treatments. “She tortured her. She kept her locked away, starved her of proper nutrition, cut off her phone, and watched her slowly break down—all to see if I would come running, or to break Elena completely so she would miscarry your child before you even knew it existed.”
“According to the surveillance footage we pulled from the Queens safehouse an hour ago,” Marco said, pulling out a second set of glossy surveillance stills and laying them out, “Sophie visited her personally three times last week. She told Elena that you were the one who ordered her locked away, that you hated her, and that the divorce was just the first step in erasing her from your life.”
The room went deathly, terrifyingly silent.
I looked at the photographs. In one image, Sophie stood over a frail, chained Elena, holding a cup of water just out of her reach, smiling with a cold, sociopathic detachment that made my own blood run cold.
In that exact moment, every drop of brotherly affection, family loyalty, and mercy I had ever harbored for my sister evaporated.
The Mercer family motto had always been Family Above All. But when a limb turns gangrenous, you don't save the limb—you amputate it down to the bone.
“Where is she?” I asked. My voice was no longer human. It was the low, vibrating growl of a predator that had found its prey.
“She’s currently hosting a charity gala at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan,” Marco replied, checking his watch. “Celebrating her new philanthropic foundation—funded, no doubt, by Moretti’s initial installment.”
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I stood up slowly, buttoning my heavy wool coat, my fingers sliding automatically into the holster beneath my arm, wrapping around the cold, checkered grip of my customized SIG Sauer P226.
“Cancel my meetings for the rest of the week,” I told Marco, my eyes fixed on the locked door. “Get Viktor and Leo in the cars. We’re going to a party.”
