“Your daughter isn’t blind. Your wife has been putting something in her food.” Those words came from a homeless boy I had never seen before, but they shattered six months of medical diagnoses in seconds and forced me to consider something more terrifying than my seven-year-old daughter losing her sight: someone inside the home of Atlanta’s most feared mafia boss might be deliberately taking it from her.

By sunrise, the full machinery of the Moretti crime family was deployed across three states.

I didn't call the police. The police were slow, bound by warrants, procedures, and political red tape.

I called the docks. I called the trucking dispatchers in Birmingham, the dock bosses in Charleston, and the underground loan sharks operating out of the casinos in Biloxi. Within four hours, every criminal network in the American Southeast was looking for a silver Mercedes-Benz carrying Dr. Harrison Vance.

At 10:00 AM, my cousin Sal—who ran our logistics operation out of the Savannah port—called my encrypted line.

"We found him, Don Vincent," Sal’s voice crackled through the speaker. "He tried to charter a private twin-engine Cessna out of a small strip near Brunswick. He offered the pilot fifty grand cash to fly him to the Bahamas."

"Is he still at the airfield?" I asked, my hands gripping the edge of my desk.

"No," Sal replied. "We picked him up before he reached the tarmac. We have him at the old timber mill outside Jesup. What do you want us to do with him?"

"Keep him alive," I said coldly. "Don't touch him until I get there."

I walked down to the basement saferoom before leaving for Jesup.

The steel door unlocked with a heavy clank. Frank pushed it open, revealing a small, windowless concrete room equipped with a single cot and a bucket.

Sophia was sitting on the edge of the cot. Her cream dress was filthy, her hair matted, her face smeared with mascara and dirt. She looked up at me with eyes full of pure venom.

"Are you letting me out?" she spat. "My father’s lawyers will have a federal injunction filed by noon!"

I walked over to her, pulling a thick envelope from my inner pocket and tossing it onto her lap.

"Those are flight tickets to a private compound in the mountains of central Colombia," I said flatly. "A car is arriving in one hour to take you to a private airstrip in Macon."

She stared at the envelope, then looked up at me in disbelief. "Colombia? You're exiling me?"

"I'm giving you a choice, Sophia," I said, my voice as cold as a mountain grave. "Option one: you get on that plane. You live in a comfortable, guarded villa in the middle of nowhere for the rest of your life. You will never see Atlanta again. You will never touch a phone. You will never see Lila again."

"And option two?" she sneered.

I leaned down, pressing my face close to hers.

"Option two is I leave you in this room, go to Jesup, kill Harrison Vance, and then come back down these stairs with a spade."

Sophia stared at me, her throat moving as she swallowed hard. For the first time, she saw the absolute, terrifying reality of the man she had married. There was no negotiation left. No political family to save her. No high-society status to hide behind.