Chapter 20 - The Blood Debt at Bay Four
The man sitting on the desk was Marcus Kane.
Marcus had been my father’s primary business partner in the late 1990s, the shadow investor who had mysteriously vanished right before the family's first major corporate collapse.
The social circles had whispered that Richard had cheated Marcus out of millions, leaving him to take the blame for an offshore tax shelter.
Now, twenty-five years later, Marcus Kane was standing inside my warehouse, holding a gun to my brother's skull.
"You're shaking, little Hawthorne," Marcus sneered, tapping the barrel of the gun against Vincent's bruised cheek.
"Your daddy thought he could hide behind his fancy lawyers and let me rot in a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania for two decades.
He thought the debt died when he lost his money."
"I don't... I don't know anything about your money!" Vincent choked out, tears streaming down his terrified face.
"I just work here!
I swear to you, I'm just an hourly worker!"
"You're a Hawthorne," Marcus growled, leaning in until his breath fogged Vincent's glasses.
"Your blood is the collateral.
Your father sold me out, and now your brother's shiny new logistics company is going to pay the bill.
These military chips will clear four million dollars in Eastern Europe tomorrow night.
And your signature on the dispatch log is what makes it happen."
Vincent’s eyes flickered toward the dark staging area, and through the glass, his gaze locked onto mine.
For a split second, I saw pure, unadulterated terror in his eyes, followed immediately by an agonizing realization.
He knew that if he cried out, if he called for me, the man with the gun would turn and fire.
Instead of screaming for help, Vincent did something I had never seen him do in all his thirty-two years of self-serving existence.
He swallowed his panic, looked Marcus dead in the eyes, and spat directly in the older man's face.
"I won't sign the clearance slip," Vincent rasped, his voice trembling violently but refusing to break.
"My brother built this place.
You aren't stealing a single crate from him."
Marcus's expression darkened into murderous rage.
He cocked the hammer of the pistol with a sharp, mechanical click that echoed through the small shack.
"Then your brother can bury you in the morning," Marcus snarled, tightening his finger on the trigger.
I kicked the shack door open, the wood splintering off its hinges with the force of an explosion.
"Drop the weapon, Marcus!" I roared, my security guards drawing their firearms in unison, lasers painting bright red dots across Marcus Kane’s chest.
Marcus spun around, pulling Vincent into a tight human shield, the barrel of the gun jammed viciously under Vincent's chin.
"Clark Hawthorne!" Marcus laughed, a mad, desperate edge in his voice.
"The golden architect himself!
Back off, or your little brother's brains decorate these shipping manifests!"
Vincent was gasping for air, the steel pressing deep into his throat, his eyes wide and wild as he looked at me.
"Clark..." Vincent whispered, the word barely slipping past his compressed windpipe.
"Don't give him... the codes..."
Outside the warehouse, the sudden, ominous wail of approaching sirens began to rise in the freezing fog, piercing the industrial silence.
Marcus tightened his grip, his eyes darting frantically toward the darkened loading bays, his finger twitching on the hair-trigger.
"Back them down, Clark!" Marcus screamed over the rising sirens.
May you like
"Or we all burn right here!"
I stood completely motionless in the center of the doorway, caught between the sins of our father's past, the brother I had spent my life despising, and the empire I had sworn to protect at all costs.
