Sixty million dollars had just changed hands when a baby crawled beneath my desk and exposed the secret my own brother had taken to his grave. Everyone believed Julian Caruso had died eighteen months earlier, but when that little girl looked up at me with his unmistakable gray eyes, I realized someone had been hiding his child inside my own house.

I set the silver medal beside the encrypted USB drive on the vault table, plugging the drive into my ruggedized tactical laptop.

Markings on the drive flashed blue. An interface popped up, demanding a thirty-two-character cryptographic hash.

Using the micro-etched numbers on the back of the Saint Christopher medal combined with the compass coordinates Julian had drawn on the paper, I keyed in the sequence.

ENTER MASTER ACCESS CODE: J-C-1994-ST-CHRISTOPHER-0830

The screen flickered. A green checkmark illuminated the display.

ACCESS GRANTED. DECRYPTING VANE_SECRETARIAT_ARCHIVE.DAT...

Files began opening in rapid succession.

Columns of financial figures, wire transfer receipts, offshore registry documents, and digitized audio files flooded my screen.

I opened the primary file folder titled: PROJECT NEPTUNE_CLEANSE.

Inside was a series of recorded telephone conversations dated two weeks before Julian’s boat exploded.

I hit play on the first audio recording.

My office vault filled with the digitized sound of my uncle Marcus’s gravelly voice, speaking to a man with a thick European accent:

“...Gabriel is too clean. He won't allow the Antwerp shipments through the Brooklyn terminals. But Julian is getting nosey. He scanned the manifest logs yesterday.”

The European voice replied: “Then eliminate Julian first. Make it look like a maritime accident. Once Julian is gone, Gabriel will be paralyzed with grief. We introduce Vane Maritime as his rescue package. He’ll sign the buyout, unknowingly absorbing all our cartel liability into his legal corporate entities. When the Feds step in, Gabriel takes the fall, and you walk away with sixty million dollars in cash.”

Hannah covered her mouth with both hands, letting out a soft, horrified gasp.

“They set you up,” she whispered, her eyes wide with shock. “They killed Julian to make you vulnerable, so you would sign that sixty-million-dollar deal and take the blame for their illegal shipping lines!”

“They didn't just set me up,” I said, my blood turning to pure ice as I scrolled down to the bottom of the ledger file. “They used my brother’s death to fund the entire transaction.”

At the bottom of the screen was a forged life insurance policy payout worth twenty million dollars, taken out on Julian Caruso three months before his death—signed by Marcus Caruso and witnessed by Vincent Vance.

They had murdered my brother, collected his life insurance, used that blood money to float the Vane Maritime shell company, and then tried to sell it back to me for sixty million dollars while framing me for international smuggling.

Grace let out a soft sound, reaching toward the glowing laptop screen. She touched the image of her father’s signature on the document, her tiny fingers leaving a little print on the glass.

I looked at her, feeling a dark, unyielding rage settle deep inside my soul.

For thirty years, I had played the civilized businessman. I had cleaned up my father’s criminal legacy, turned the Caruso Group into a legitimate corporate powerhouse, and tried to keep my hands clean.

I had tried to be the good brother.

And because I was good, my brother was dead, and his daughter had been living in hiding like a beggar in my own house.

I looked at the tactical bag sitting on the table.

I unzipped it, pulled out the heavy custom Kimber .45 pistol, checked the magazine, and racked a round into the chamber with a sharp, lethal metallic snap.