Page 1 of Powerful Deception

PROLOGUE

This life has taken a lot from me.

The mother of my children and my wife, my own parents. Yet, it has left me standing.

Out of all the people that should still be walking this earth, I am not one of them.

In my lifetime, I’ve done a handful of bad things. More than most.

Things that would make people run for the hills. Things that would make people fearful of even coming within a hundred feet of me.

Things that make me a terrible, terrible person.

The type of person that parents warn their kids about when they go out late at night.

The person that cops tell the citizens of their city not to get in business with.

I’m a dangerous man and everybody who has lived within this beautiful yet dangerous city all their lives, knows it.

You see, the streets of the city Chicago may be owned by some of the richest families in this country, but I run them.

There isn’t a bullet shot that I don’t know about. There isn’t a cop that roams the streets, that doesn't know my name. There isn’t a drug trade that I don’t have my hands in. Everything that happens within the two hundred and thirty-four square miles of the city of Chicago, I know.

I have a hand in every little detail that happens within the city’s borders and some people would be astonished to know just how far my reach goes.

People don’t tend to cross me, yet the stupid ones try. Some I let, just out of pure enjoyment and to see how far they will go, and others I bring down before they get too close. Soon, though, there will be one person that will succeed in whatever plan they muster up to take me down, and when that happens, I will let them take my last breath.

I’ve done heinous things in my life, even I know that I deserve to be brought down for my crimes.

Until then, I will continue living up to my namesake that has been given to me by this city. By its people.

The way the people of the city of Chicago see it, the city of wind has two rulers. The king and the devil.

I, Dante Rosetti, am the devil.

And I live for anything and everything that comes with it.

Everyone be damned.

1

Are you still considered an orphan if both your parents are dead before the age of twenty-four?

Or do you lose that title the second you are no longer a child?

Because as I sit here in this pew, listening to Father John talk about how my father was a great man and loved by many, I feel like an orphan.

Especially since there is not one single person sitting next to me. There’s not even a single person in my row.

No family members, no friends, no coworkers.

I’m alone. My last living relative, my last living parent, is in a wooden box a few feet from me, ice cold.

He shouldn’t be ice cold.

My father should be sitting on his favorite spot on the couch with a can of beer in his hand watching whatever game is on. He should be putting on his uniform and going to work. He should be tinkering on that old piece of junk he has in the garage that he calls a car. He should be doing a whole lot more than being lifeless and ice cold inside a box that shouldn’t even be his. A box that’s rented.

Yet he is.