Chapter 10 — The Syndicate

Luca dropped to his knees beside my hospital bed, and grabbed my hand, and held it in both of his with a desperation that frightened me almost as much as his mother’s presence.

“Jessi, please, listen to me,” he wept, openly now, the words tumbling out.

“My family.

My mother’s firm.

They are not what I let you believe.

They run a high-level private equity operation in Chicago, and beneath the legitimate business, it is something else, something criminal.”

I will not detail the mechanics of what my husband’s family did, the specific machinery of their crimes, because a catalog of how such things are done is not a thing worth setting down, and Luca himself gave me only the shape of it in that hospital room.