Chapter 5 - Ghosts from the Past
The phone call was routed through three different voice-distortion proxies before it connected to a secure satellite line in a secluded cabin outside of Phoenix, Arizona.
"Speak," barked a gravelly, exhausted voice at the other end.
It was Viktor Petrov, the former boss of the Russian Bratva on the West Coast. Three years ago, Marcus Kane had convinced me that Viktor was planning a coup, leading me to slaughter half his crew and force him into exile. It was the single biggest tactical mistake of my career—one that Marcus had orchestrated entirely to weaken my inner circle and replace my loyalists with his own men.
"The coffee in San Diego is terrible this time of year, Viktor," I said, letting the voice modulator drop just enough for him to catch the familiar cadence. "Too much poison."
Silence fell over the line so absolute I could hear the crack of a fireplace in Arizona.
"...Damian?" Viktor whispered, his voice trembling. "They said you died at the Cordova. Marcus went on every news channel crying crocodile tears."
"Marcus is a very good actor," I replied smoothly. "And a terrible friend. He poisoned me, Viktor. Just like he poisoned the well between you and me three years ago. He fed us both lies so he could take over the board."
A low, guttural growl vibrated through the speaker. It was the sound of a caged bear smelling blood.
"That treacherous son of a bitch," Viktor snarled. "I lost thirty men because of his whispers. Tell me what you want, Damian. My guns are yours."
"I don't want your guns yet, Viktor. I want your silence, and I want you to quietly move a team of your best operators into Baja California. Wait for my word. When I light the fire, I want you to cut off Julian Reyes's escape route to the south."
"Consider it done," Viktor muttered. "And Damian? It's good to have you back."
I hung up and looked at Nora and Maya, who were watching me with wide eyes.
"One down," I said. "Now for the financial trap."
Over the next week, the girls and I operated out of the damp basement like a phantom command center. Using the ghost accounts, we quietly bought up massive blocks of distressed debt tied to Julian Reyes’s real estate holdings. We didn't use my name; we used a shell corporation registered in the Marshall Islands that Nora had spun up in twenty minutes.
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We were strangling Julian's empire from the inside out, buying up his mortgages, shorting his stock, and quietly bribing his mid-level accountants to leak compliance violations to federal regulators.
By the end of the second week, the first cracks began to show. Julian Reyes's stock plunged twelve percent in a single morning after an anonymous tip led environmental inspectors to uncover toxic waste dumping at one of his primary shipping yards—a yard that Marcus Kane personally managed.
