Chapter 6
Vivian Cross was brought to answer for it three days later — not by any police department, which would never touch a case buried this deep inside organized crime, but by something far older and far more permanent, the kind of justice that had governed the Cross family and the five other families beside it for three generations.
Damian called a sitting of the Syndicate’s ruling council, the six families who had kept a careful, violent balance over Boston’s ports since before he was born. He laid Gerald’s signed confession on the table beside the toxicology reports and the security footage that left absolutely nothing open to interpretation, and he watched the faces around that table shift, one by one, from polite attention to something closer to disgust.
Vivian didn’t bother denying any of it. She simply looked across the long table at her brother with the same flat, calculating eyes she’d worn since childhood, since the day their father had told her, in front of both of them, that an empire needed a son at its head, not a daughter, and that she should learn to be useful in whatever way she could manage.
“She was never going to be one of us,” Vivian said, meaning Elise, meaning the baby. “A secretary’s bastard raised to inherit everything Father built? I did this family a favor. Someone had to protect what’s ours, since you clearly weren’t going to.”
“You tried to murder a pregnant woman,” Damian said, and for the first time in the entire meeting his voice actually shook, just slightly, just enough for the men around the table to notice, “because you couldn’t stand the idea that I might finally have something you couldn’t take from me.”
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The council’s verdict was unanimous, swift, and final in the particular way such verdicts always were in Damian’s world — a world he had inherited without asking for it, and had spent his whole life trying to keep from swallowing the people he loved. Vivian Cross did not leave Boston that night. She did not leave the building at all.
Damian didn’t stay to watch. He was already walking away, back toward the penthouse offices, back toward Elise — because whatever was left of his soul, he had decided a long time ago to keep it separate from whatever had to be done to protect the people he loved, and tonight, more than any night before it, he needed that separation to hold.
