Chapter 3: The Ghost from the South Side Freight
What we uncovered made my stomach violently churn. Camila Marino wasn't a random college student picked up at a bar; she was the sole surviving daughter of Dr. Julian Marino, the brilliant geneticist who had designed the Moretti syndicate’s synthetic drug-marking formulas before mysteriously "vanishing" during a federal raid three years ago. Julian hadn't died in the raid—he had been locked away in a private underground bunker owned by Alessandro, forced to synthesize experimental compounds designed to evade chemical border patrols. Camila had spent the last three years living under constant surveillance, blackmailed into silence by threats that her father would be executed if she ever contacted the authorities. But two nights ago, she had smuggled a stolen flash drive containing her father’s research out of the compound, intending to hand it over to federal prosecutors. Alessandro had discovered the plan, intercepted her, and—instead of killing her instantly—had decided to parade her at my birthday dinner as a twisted display of psychological warfare against me, before dragging her back down to the operating room to surgically extract the tracking device her father had hidden beneath her skin. The blood on my ring wasn't just collateral damage; it was the physical proof of a syndicate war about to explode from the inside out.
