Cast Out as Old-Fashioned, I Watched the Mafia Fall Apart

Last night I received notice that the Family was cutting me loose. The explanation was flimsy: my thinking was outdated, I refused to modernize, and I was seriously obstructing the Family's expansion. That morning, my fiance stopped me in the corridor, his expression icy. "Kelly was right. Someone as stubborn and inflexible as you only holds the Family back. "And don't blame me for cutting you. You offended someone you shouldn't have." Kelly leaned against the railing, surrounded by her men, and watched me with a smug smile. She was the Don's own niece. Two weeks earlier, she had been parachuted in to take over the Family's core operations, using reform as an excuse to purge every elder. At the Family meeting yesterday, I rejected her reckless expansion plan in front of everyone. Kelly shot me a cold glance from the crowd, contempt sharpening her voice. "Certain old relics who can't move with the times outlived their usefulness long ago. Clinging to power only drags the whole Family down. "If you know what's good for you, get out." My expression remained unreadable. Without a word, I signed the papers withdrawing from the Family. What she didn't know was that I had never needed to stay in this Family. Someone had begged me to stay and hold it together. Then I posted on Instagram. "I have left the Family. I look forward to seeing what comes next." The moment the post went live, the entire underworld erupted. 1 The comments scrolled past faster than I could read them. "If you've left the Family, why not come to us? Whatever cut you were taking, I'll triple it." "Triple? You call that an offer? Iris, come to me and you can have as much territory and as many men as you want." Soren, an arms dealer I had worked with, messaged me as well. "Iris, we closed a deal just last week. How are you gone already?" I wrote back. "Sorry. The Family cut me loose. A new person will handle the account from here." He went silent for a full half minute before he asked in disbelief, "Iris, they cut you? Has the Vincent Family lost its mind, or is it trying to go out of business?" I didn't answer, and another message came through. "If you're gone, then forget the deal." Looking at a screen full of messages, whatever irritation being cut had left in me simply drained away, and I smiled. A decade in the underworld had left me holding a great many channels, contacts, and business lines. Over the years, countless people had tried to recruit me away, each offer better than the last, but none had ever tempted me. It was only because of my history with Vincent. Years ago, during the infighting, Don Vincent was cornered at the docks with his life hanging by a thread. I went in alone, called in men and weapons, and turned the situation around. Afterward Vincent said, in front of every elder, that half this Family was mine. That was why I stayed. In the years since, I had opened the Family's supply lines, taken territory for it, and kept even the toughest cops firmly in hand. The men under me earned more every year. Somewhere along the way, everything changed. A week ago, Kelly took over the dock business, forgot to pay off customs, and got an entire freighter's cargo seized. It nearly cost the Family tens of millions. I pointed out her mistake. That same evening, my fiance Aiden confronted me for embarrassing her and withheld my cut from one business line. Three days ago, Kelly invoked humane management and pulled everyone off every post on schedule. That night, our rivals seized the opening and wrecked three warehouses. I took men out overnight to clean it up, and got called rigid and mean and out to get the new people for my trouble. Then a top-level notice appeared in the Family group chat. [Effective immediately, Kelly is head of the Family's core operations with full authority over every business line.] A wave of agreement and flattery followed, including from several people I had personally trained. Reading those messages made me see everything clearly. This had stopped being a place for me a long time ago. "Iris, packing up to get out?" Kelly strode into the office in high heels, with my fiance Aiden behind her. She glanced at the half sorted files and sneered. "Clean everything up, and put the rest of this room in order while you're at it. After all, this is the last thing you'll ever do for the Family." I ignored her and kept packing. When I did not answer, she came over and shoved me. "What's with the act? So what if you spent ten years as an elder? When I tell you to get out, you get out." I gave a cold laugh and looked up at her. "Is that so? Does your uncle Vincent know you cut me loose? "Or is this a decision you made entirely on your own?" Vincent had been overseas for days handling a dispute between crews, with orders not to be disturbed for anything short of life and death. I was fairly certain he knew nothing about my being cut. No Don willingly casts out an elder who holds half his Family's fate in her hands. Kelly's gaze flickered with guilt, but she stuck out her chin anyway. "My uncle adores me. If I cut you, he'll back me! "I think nobody out there wants you, and that's why you're standing here trying to frighten me!" Aiden spoke up in a cool voice. "That's enough! Kelly runs the Family now. Show some respect, Iris! "Leave with some dignity. Don't make me throw you out!" I looked between them and smiled. "Aiden, this is the road you chose. Don't come back and beg me later. "But are you really so sure Kelly can keep that position?" Kelly frowned and opened her mouth to argue. I beat her to it, speaking slowly. "Do you know the contact codes for every business line the Family runs? Do you know what sets off the head of each district? "That chair isn't a place to throw your weight around, young lady. Put your so-called reforms on the table and they're a joke. "You had better pray nothing goes wrong, or you may end up crying and begging me to come back." I picked up my case and left. "Beg you to come back? In your dreams!" Kelly shouted after me, beside herself. "Hand over every client file and every channel you have!" I didn't slow down. I pointed at the files on the desk. "It's all there. You're on your own now." I walked out of the building. Behind me the Family headquarters was dead silent, and not one person came after me. I wasn't sad. I was curious. With no one out front cleaning up their messes, could this lot go on taking a fat cut and living comfortably the way they always had? And where would this Family go from here? 2 My phone buzzed without stopping the whole way. I opened the Family's core operations chat, where messages were flying past. At the top was Kelly. "The underworld should have changed the way it operates long ago. Digging in and fighting head-on are outdated, hidebound rules of the old guard. "We younger people have more flexible methods and a cleaner way of doing business. From today, every post changes shifts on time. No one has to stay up all night guarding freight or risk their life on the front line. "Under my leadership, you'll earn more and live better!" In the long string of agreement beneath it, Aiden's name came first. "I support Kelly! The old rules should have been thrown out years ago!" The rest fell in behind him, all taking veiled shots at the old rules for being cruel and treating people like machines. Another message came up. I had been added to a private group. The first to speak was Robbie, who used to flatter me more than anyone. "Kelly is a hundred times better than Iris. At least she doesn't keep us freezing at the docks in the middle of the night!" The group exploded at once. "Right? She's finally gone! What could she do besides make us risk our necks?" "With Kelly in charge we can just take our cut and live easy." Message after message tore me down to build Kelly up. I sent a smirking emoji. A system notice came up a second later. [You have been removed from the group] It would be a lie to say I felt nothing. I never liked working around the clock. Who doesn't want a decent night's sleep and meals on time? But in this line of work, your enemies don't wait for your shift to start, and customs doesn't wait until your break is over to inspect the freight. Every all-night watch had been about plugging a hole or containing a crisis. And afterward, I always fought to secure my men their share. Yet after risking my neck to carry every crisis, I had somehow become the one exploiting them. I opened the feed and a new post caught my eye. "Nobody understands what it's like to be kept beneath someone forever, or how unbearable it is to be lectured by people who trade on seniority." Someone replied underneath. "Vera's finally out from under her. She's really gone!" She answered, "Yes. Nobody knows how long I put up with it." I stared at the screen and gave a quiet, bitter laugh. Vera was the first protege I ever trained. When she first joined the Family, she made a serious mistake that got an entire freighter impounded, and I covered the loss out of my own pocket. When she negotiated her first deal alone, I backed her every step of the way. And now this was what she said. So she had wanted me gone all along. Just as well. The next time we crossed paths, I would not have to honor any old loyalty between us. Back at my place, I put my phone on Do Not Disturb. In all those years of holding the Family steady I had never slept a night through. My dreams were freight schedules and contact codes. Now I could finally give myself a break. Over the next few days I started spending afternoons at a coffee shop by the docks, watching the evening sun turn the whole surface of the sea gold and red. Now and then news of the Family reached me. Kelly had taken everyone to an expensive club for a team night, raised their benefits, and found a new, easy way to make money. Every evening a post praising her appeared in the feed, as though it had been put there for me to see. I paid it no mind. Then, on Friday evening, the feed went completely silent. 3 I woke that morning to the phone beside my pillow buzzing nonstop. When I checked the screen, I found more than fifty missed calls and a flood of messages. The port managers, the business contacts, even the police were looking for me. [Freighter Three is being held by customs. Come back at once!] [Soren wants to end all cooperation!] [Iris, where are you?!] The one at the very top was from Don Vincent. He clearly had no idea that his precious niece had thrown me out of the Family. I had barely answered the call before he was roaring at me. "Iris, where did you go? I gave you the largest cut and the widest authority in this Family so you could drop everything and go have fun? "Nothing has gone this badly in all these years. How long was I gone for you to create a mess this big?" I started to speak. "Vincent, I've already been—" He cut across me. "I don't care what you're doing. Get back to headquarters and put all of it right! Whatever else there is, I'll settle with you when I return!" He hung up, and when I called back there was only a cold busy tone. The phone buzzed on and off all day and I answered none of it. Then in the evening Callen, who had been with me for years, sent a message with a secretly recorded audio file attached. That was how I learned what five days had done to the Family. After I left, the people at every post stopped pulling their weight. The long-serving men already knew how to shirk responsibility, and with no one watching them, they stopped trying altogether. The rest were the new people Kelly had brought in, who couldn't even read a manifest. Kelly was young, headstrong, and inexperienced. Without me out front to cover for her, the whole Family lost its backbone. They couldn't produce the goods Soren wanted, and he said on the spot that he would never do business with the Vincent Family again. I heard Kelly went rigid where she stood when the news reached her. Her mild, polished facade vanished as she flew into a rage at headquarters. Her voice on the recording was shrill and grating. "I raised your benefits, let you clock out on time, and this is how you repay me? "Why did the deal fall through? Are you all useless?! "Nobody leaves today until you come up with a way to fix it!" Callen followed it with a string of messages. "You should have seen it. The elders berated Kelly for hours. Her eyes were red from it. "Aiden spoke up for her and got torn apart for it too." I looked at the screen and gave a cold laugh. A crisis that serious would have taken everything I had, even if I handled it myself. Without me they had nothing. It was destined to be a sleepless night for the Family. At eight I put up a new post. [A rainy night calls for a whiskey.] The photo showed a crystal glass on the windowsill, rain outside, and firelight flickering through the room. I had never pretended to be a good person. I remembered exactly how viciously they had torn me down on my way out. Now it was time to pay them back. Replies came quickly, all of them from men who used to work under me. "Iris, I'm only now finding out how much you mattered..." "Same." Within seconds the comments were deleted. When I woke the next day, my feed was full of reposts of Kelly's post. The original had gone up at 1:17 a.m. [The rougher the sea, the bigger the catch. What fails to knock me down only makes me stand taller.] I looked at it and couldn't help laughing out loud. Just then someone called me. It was Vera. I hesitated a few seconds before I answered. After I answered, the other end stayed silent for a long time. I was about to hang up when Vera finally asked through her tears, "Iris, could you come to headquarters?" My voice was flat. "No." My immediate refusal clearly stunned her. I had been the one who protected her most, after all. "Please... If you don't come, I'm finished. Kelly has pushed all of this onto me." That actually caught my interest. I got up, took my coat off the back of the chair, and went out. I wanted to see for myself just how far the Vincent Family had come apart without me. And I wanted to know exactly what Vera meant by "finished." 4 I had barely walked into headquarters before I felt something was off. Don Vincent was standing in the elevator with three of the Family's elders. I inclined my head to them. "Iris." Colby, the most senior elder, spoke first. "I hear Kelly has been doing well lately." Before I could answer, Vincent swept me with a warning look. "I'm sorry, Mr. Colby. I no longer run anything in this Family, so I don't know the details." My voice stayed level. "As for how she is doing, you would do better to go and see for yourself." Colby nodded. "Kelly is quite capable," Vincent answered at once, sounding certain. "The Family was unsettled for a while after you left, but fortunately Kelly steadied the situation and even landed a major contract. "In fact, she's signing a port transfer contract with Grayson from the West Side today." Grayson was the most powerful figure on the West Side and famously exacting and difficult. To land him in the first place, I pulled more all-nighters than I could count, answered every one of his concerns, and gave up three percentage points of our cut before he agreed. And Kelly had landed him? "And," Vincent went on, "the young people she brought in are capable. They think flexibly, use new methods, and every member of that team is talented. I'm going to put her team in direct competition with Iris's old team. Competition creates motivation." I scoffed inwardly. Put plainly, he was propping up his niece, stirring up an internal fight, and diluting my power while he was at it. Good thing I had made a clean break. Whatever bond ten years had built between us had long since soured. "What do you think, Iris?" Vincent turned to me. My lips twisted as I started to answer. "Mr. Vincent, you may not know this yet, but I've already—" "We're here." Vincent cut me off and waved a hand. "We can discuss this later. Come to the conference room first. Grayson is signing with Kelly today. You can learn something from the younger generation's approach." My words stopped in my throat with nowhere to go. Vera visibly relaxed when she saw me enter the conference room. Kelly sat beside the head of the table. At the sight of me, her lip curled and she sneered, "What are you doing here, Iris? Couldn't make a living out there, so you came to beg your way back in?" The faces of the elders in the room darkened at once. "And who are you?" Colby frowned, his tone openly hostile. Vincent hurried to smooth things over. "She's my niece, Kelly. She's young and doesn't know better. Please don't take it to heart." Colby swept a cold look over Kelly. "Iris is half of what keeps this Family alive. You younger people would do well to watch how you speak." Color came and went in Kelly's face. She swallowed whatever she had been about to say and retreated quietly to the back of the room. Aiden, standing beside her, turned his face away in embarrassment and didn't dare look at me. Before long the door opened and Grayson came in. He saw me immediately, came straight over and shook my hand. "I was talking to Soren, and he told me the Vincent Family had cut you. I said at the time that if you weren't here, there wasn't much point discussing this deal at all. "Then your people told me you were still with them, so I came. It seems Soren and I had it wrong." My gaze shifted to Vera at the side of the room. She watched me with pleading eyes. So that was it. She had lied that I was still with the Family, and that lie was the only reason Grayson had come. I stopped worrying about anyone's reaction, stepped forward, and let my voice carry clearly through the room. "Mr. Grayson, you had it right. "I was formally cut from this Family by its new head, Ms. Kelly."