Chapter 5 - THE BUSINESSMAN THEY THOUGHT THEY KNEWVictor had always disliked me.
Not openly.
He was too disciplined for that.
At family dinners, he called me “the businessman” in the same tone other men might say “accountant.”
He knew DeLuca Maritime owned warehouses, trucking companies, freight-forwarding firms, and pieces of two port terminals.
He did not know what existed underneath.
Clara knew I came from a criminal family.
She knew I had inherited relationships I did not choose.
But she believed—as I wanted her to believe—that I had spent twenty years converting those relationships into legitimate business.
That was mostly true.
Mostly.
There were still men who called me before doing things they wanted hidden.
There were still union leaders who remembered my father.
There were still politicians who answered because they preferred friendship to uncertainty.
But I had promised Clara one thing when we married:
Our home would never become part of that world.
Now her father had brought violence into it anyway.
My first instinct was to destroy the Bellandis socially and financially before prosecutors finished reading their files.
Instead, Clara stopped me.
She was sitting upright for the first time when she said:
“Promise me.”
“What?”
“No bodies.”
I almost laughed because only Clara could say that from an ICU bed.
“Clara—”
“Promise.”
I looked at her.
She knew me better than her family ever had.
“Okay.”
“No accidents either.”
Despite everything, I smiled.
“No accidents.”
“And don’t make charges disappear just because you can.”
That hurt.
She believed correctly that I could make parts of the legal system bend.
She wanted it straight.
“Then what do you want?”
She looked toward the empty chair beside her bed.
“Everything.”
I understood.
Not vengeance.
Truth.
All of it.
So I gave Nathan and Ruiz every resource they asked for.
Legally.
Accountants.
Cyber specialists.
Old transaction records.
Port contracts.
And names of people who suddenly became very cooperative once they heard whose wife had been attacked.
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Within four days, we discovered that Bellandi Harbor Materials had not merely been planning a sale.
The company was drowning.
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