Keep reading as the story moves into Chapter Two and takes an unexpected turn.

-5

The search for Ewan didn't take weeks. With the full, unchecked resources of the Hale syndicate mobilized across the country, combined with the encrypted digital archives Paulie managed to extract from Celeste's bank servers, the trail opened up within forty-eight hours.

He wasn't in Seattle.

According to a quiet, off-the-grid maritime shipping manifest in the Pacific Northwest, a man matching Ewan’s exact description, using a clean paper identity provided by a sympathetic dock union delegate in 2020, had relocated to a small, isolated coastal town in British Columbia called Tofino.

He ran a small boat repair shop on the edge of the harbor—a quiet, salt-sprayed life completely removed from the blood, concrete, and neon of Chicago.

I didn't send an enforcer. I didn't send a team of men.

I took a private charter flight out of O'Hare alone, landing on the rugged Canadian coast just as a heavy Pacific fog was rolling in over the pine forests.

The harbor was quiet, smelling of damp cedar, diesel fuel, and salt water. Small fishing boats bobbed rhythmically against weathered wooden docks, their hulls creaking in the gray swell.

I walked down the pier, my heavy wool coat buttoned against the biting wind, my boots crunching softly on the frost-covered planks.

At the very end of the dock stood a weathered corrugated-metal building with a hand-painted wooden sign dangling by a single rusted chain: ROSSI MARINE REPAIR.

Rossi.

He had taken their name. The family our father destroyed had become the name my brother used to redeem himself in exile.

I stopped in front of the open sliding door of the workshop.

Inside, the space was illuminated by a single amber work light hanging over a workbench cluttered with marine engine parts, grease rags, and half-assembled carburetors.

A man stood with his back to me, wearing a faded flannel shirt, his dark hair streaked with premature gray, using a wrench to tighten a brass propeller shaft.

"We're closed for the season," he said without turning around, his voice slightly rough from the salty air. "If you need an emergency haul-out, try Miller's yard down the coast."

I didn't move. I stood in the doorway, letting the cold wind howl off the ocean behind me.

"Miller's yard is too far," I said.

The wrench slipped from his hand, clattering loudly against the concrete floor.

Ewan froze.

For three long seconds, neither of us breathed. The crashing of the waves against the wooden pylons sounded like a distant drumbeat.

Slowly, painfully, my younger brother turned around.

He looked older—harder around the eyes, lines carved deep into his forehead by years of guilt, isolation, and hard labor—but the moment our eyes locked, the thirty-four-year-old mafia boss and the exiled fugitive vanished, leaving only two motherless boys standing in the wreckage of a family they never asked for.

Ewan stared at me, his chest heaving, his hands trembling slightly where he gripped the edge of the workbench.

"You shouldn't have come here, Daniel," Ewan whispered, his voice cracking on the edge of a sob. "If Father's men—if the syndicate finds out I'm alive—"

"Father is dead," I interrupted, walking slowly across the oil-stained concrete floor until I was standing just a foot away from him. "The syndicate belongs to me now. And I burned his legacy to the ground three days ago."

Ewan’s eyes widened, filling with sudden, hot tears that he made no attempt to hide. He looked at me, searching my face for the cold, unyielding stranger our father had trained me to be.

Instead, he saw his brother.

Before he could speak, I closed the remaining distance and pulled him into a fierce, suffocating embrace—the kind of hug we had never been allowed to share as boys, the kind of human warmth our father had sworn to stamp out of our bloodline.

Ewan broke, burying his face against my shoulder, his entire frame shaking as six years of exile, fear, and survivor's guilt finally spilled out into the cold Canadian air.