Chapter 30 - The Yonkers Sweep
At 3:02 AM, exactly three hours after Leo’s conversation with Viktor, the stillness of a quiet suburban street in Yonkers was shattered by absolute, overwhelming violence.
The "North Atlantic Syndicate"—a loose collection of twenty desperate thugs trying to carve out a piece of Moretti’s former empire—had converted a dilapidated two-story warehouse into their regional command post. They believed they were safe, operating behind encrypted proxy servers and hidden from the radar of the legendary Mercer syndicate.
They were catastrophically mistaken.
Without warning, the reinforced metal doors of the warehouse blew inward in a deafening concussion of shaped breaching charges. Before the smoke had even cleared, twelve Mercer enforcers surged through the breach like a dark, unstoppable tidal wave.
Leo led the assault, his suppressed carbine spitting precise, lethal bursts of fire that dropped the two armed guards at the front desk before they could even unholster their sidearms.
"Clear!" Leo shouted over the encrypted comms, stepping over a fallen chair as he swept toward the administrative office at the back of the building.
The men inside—scrambling for assault rifles tossed haphazardly across a folding table—found themselves staring down the barrel of an absolute execution squad. There was no negotiation, no warning, and no quarter given. The Mercer enforcers moved with terrifying mechanical precision, neutralizing every single combatant in less than forty seconds.
When the smoke cleared, the warehouse was dead silent, save for the hiss of a ruptured radiator pipe.
Leo walked over to the central computer terminal, pulling a small USB data drive from his tactical pouch and plugging it directly into the motherboard to scrub the server logs and download their financial routing codes.
He tapped his Bluetooth earpiece, connecting directly to Viktor’s private frequency.
"Yonkers safehouse is neutralized, Vik," Leo reported calmly, stepping over a discarded rifle casing. "Twenty hostiles eliminated, hardware secured, and the server has been wiped clean. There won't even be a ripple in the underworld."
"Good," Viktor’s voice came back instantly, cold and steady. "Leave the bodies as a message for anyone else thinking about testing our borders. Let the street scavengers find them at dawn. Make sure the message is crystal clear: The throne is occupied, and the king is untouchable."
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"Copy that. Heading back to base now."
Leo clicked off, turning his back on the carnage as his enforcer unit fanned out to secure the perimeter. The underworld had tested the waters, and the syndicate had instantly frozen them solid. The message had been sent. New York belonged to Luke Mercer, absolute and unchallengeable.
