Bloodline of the Broken / Chapter 11 / 20

Chapter 11 - The Black Market SummitTo protect our daughter, we had to go under the grid. Roman moved us to a fortified bunker deep beneath a defunct shipping yard in Brooklyn, a place even the family elders didn't know about. But we couldn't hide forever. Lorenzo had already begun executing Kane loyalists in Europe, hanging their bodies from the docks of Sicily as a warning.

“We need an army,” I told Roman as we stared at a tactical map of New York.

“The council is terrified, Bianca,” Roman said, rubbing his tired eyes. “Lorenzo has deep roots. Half of our men are considering switching sides to save their own families.”

“Then we don’t use Kane men,” I said, leaning over the table. “We use the people they ignore.”

That night, leaving Clara Victoria under Marcus’s heavy guard, I went back to Queens. I didn't go to a mansion or a luxury hotel. I went to the back room of the discount pharmacy where my mother used to work, a place that served as the unofficial headquarters for the local immigrant unions, the truck drivers, and the dockworkers who actually kept the city moving.

They knew me as Bianca, the girl who made it out, not the wife of a mafia don.

“Lorenzo Kane is going to lock down the ports,” I told the gathered crowd of rugged, hard-working men and women. “If he takes over, your unions will be crushed. Your families will pay protection money to a ghost who doesn’t care if you starve. I need eyes on every shipping container, every black sedan, and every warehouse from here to Jersey.”

An old warehouse foreman named Tommy, who had known my mother for twenty years, stood up. “Why should we fight a mafia war for you, Bianca?”

I took off my silk scarf, revealing my short, fiercely growing hair and the faint scars on my neck from the night in the rain. “Because I am one of you. And my daughter, who owns the Kane name, will make sure this city belongs to the people who build it, not the monsters who bleed it dry.”