My uncle told me I was being shipped off to New Jersey to serve a mandatory alliance contract with a veteran syndicate partner named Gabe DeLuca.
Vic didn’t answer Don Moretti’s call. He ignored it, then dialed my number. His voice, when I picked up, was a low, dangerous growl, laced with barely contained fury.
“You think you’re clever, boy?” Vic spat, his voice shaking. “Swapping ledgers? You think you trapped me?”
“You trapped yourself, Uncle,” I said calmly, standing by the window of Julian’s warehouse office, looking out at the murky Newark bay. Julian stood nearby, listening intently.
“I have your precious evidence, Leo,” Vic boasted, his voice regaining a sliver of its old arrogance. “Those Devlin receipts. They prove nothing. Just a disgruntled employee trying to frame me.”
“Do they?” I asked, a faint smile touching my lips. “Moretti’s auditors won’t see it that way. Especially when they cross-reference them with the emergency audit you just triggered.”
Vic scoffed. “Moretti is a fool. I just moved eight million dollars of syndicate funds into a single clearing bank account in Manhattan. To satisfy his preliminary review. He’ll see the liquidity, he’ll back off. He always does.”
A thrill shot through me. This was it. The moment I had been working towards.
“You moved eight million dollars into a single clearing bank account?” I repeated, making sure Julian heard every word.
“That’s right, little genius,” Vic sneered. “And you, Leo, are still a powerless orphan with a hundred and twelve dollars to his name. You have nothing. No money, no property, no family. You’re exiled. Just as I planned.”
“Exiled?” I chuckled, a genuine, mirthless sound. “You think I was exiled, Uncle Vic?”
Julian looked at me, a question in his eyes.
“The bus ticket, the ambush, the fake contract with Julian… all of it,” I continued, my voice gaining strength. “You believe you forced me out, didn’t you? That I was a frightened pawn being shipped off to New Jersey to be eliminated.”
Vic was silent, the sound of his heavy breathing audible through the phone.
“You didn’t exile me, Uncle Vic,” I revealed, the words tasting like victory. “I staged my own departure. I orchestrated this entire scenario.”
A shocked gasp came from Vic’s end of the line.
“I knew about Julian’s parole, about your plan to frame him for my ‘accident’ before I even boarded that bus,” I explained. “I needed to get out of New York, out of your immediate reach. Away from your enforcers.”
“Why?” Vic demanded, his voice now a desperate plea, a crack in his arrogant facade. “Why would you do this?”
“Because I needed you to feel secure enough, powerful enough, and desperate enough to consolidate all your hidden funds,” I said, my gaze sweeping over the bay outside. “Into a single clearing bank. A bank where Great-Aunt Sofia, the true trustee of the Ross family estate, holds primary signatory authority.”
The line went dead. Vic had hung up. The silence in the office was thick, heavy with the weight of my words.
Julian stared at me, his face a mixture of shock and dawning understanding. “Sofia… she has authority over his bank?”
“Not over his bank,” I corrected. “Over that specific clearing bank. The one he just put eight million dollars into to ‘satisfy’ Don Moretti. The one where my father, knowing Vic’s greed, put in a fail-safe many years ago.”
The exile wasn’t a punishment. It was a strategic retreat. A calculated bait to make Vic consolidate his stolen wealth, exposing it to the very family member he thought he had neutralized.
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