The afternoon my maid asked me for two months of salary in advance and begged to leave early, I assumed someone had compromised her. So I followed her through freezing Chicago rain expecting to find a rival, an informant, or a man blackmailing one of my employees—but instead I found Linda on her knees beside a dying seven-year-old boy, crying into his hospital blanket because she was eighty thousand dollars away from saving his life.

The counterattack was swift, brutal, and total.

I did not wait for Silvio Moretti to regroup. By sunrise, I unleashed every resource at my command.

Using the comms recovered from Dante’s gear, we traced the traitor within my organization—a low-level accountant who had leaked the estate's floor plans for a cocaine debt. Marco eliminated him before breakfast.

By noon, my strike teams hit Silvio's three primary distribution hubs across Cook County, burning his warehouses to the ground and seizing sixty million dollars in illicit freight. By 4:00 PM, Silvio's capos realized that their boss had provoked a demon who was willing to incinerate the entire Midwest to protect his house.

They turned on him.

At 7:00 PM, Silvio Moretti’s second-in-command delivered Silvio's severed signet ring to my front gate, begging for a ceasefire and surrendering all territorial claims south of the Chicago River.

The war was over in less than twenty-four hours.

I returned to the east wing, exhausted, the adrenaline finally draining from my veins. The glass in the house had been replaced, the marble scrubbed clean, the scent of death eradicated by the relentless winter wind.

Dr. Vance met me at the entrance of the clinic room with a broad, genuine smile.

"Mr. Gallo," the doctor said, holding up a fresh binder of lab results. "The CAR-T cells are multiplying exactly as hoped. Mateo’s blast count is below five percent. He is in full clinical remission."

The words struck me harder than any bullet ever could.

"Remission?" I repeated, the word foreign on my tongue.

"He's going to live," Dr. Vance affirmed. "With routine maintenance, this boy has a normal life ahead of him."