The Macallan in my glass caught the lamplight and turned it gold, a forty-year bottle wasted on a night like this.I’d been nursing it while running down a list of minor business—messages to return, licenses to renew, a few small fires to put out among captains who needed reminding of their place.Nothing that required my full attention.Sal’s back room had always been where I thought best.The wood paneling was old enough to remember every whispered negotiation, every favor sold, every warning delivered.I preferred it over the polished conference rooms at the compound.Those smelled like image.This room smelled like truth.
Photographs lined the walls, frames just a little crooked from age and neglect.My father in the old neighborhood.My first crew, cocky and bulletproof until the world proved otherwise.And Maria—my second wife—smiling in that picture from Greece, months before she grew tired enough of me to become a threat.I kept the photos not because I cared, but because I knew what they represented.They reminded me that sentiment cost more than bullets.People who held onto love, loyalty, hope—they all made mistakes.Deadly ones.
The knock at the door came at nine forty-seven.I didn’t check the clock; I didn’t need to.I tracked time without trying, the way other men breathed.Three short raps, a pause, then two more.The signal I’d created decades ago when I realized most men couldn’t follow instructions unless you carved them into stone.“Enter,” I said, no need to raise my voice.Men who worked for me learned early that missing my words meant missing your last chance.
Tommy Falcone stepped inside, hunched shoulders telegraphing exactly what he’d come to deliver.I could smell fear from across the room; it clung to him the way cigarette smoke clung to cheap suits.Tommy was useful enough—good eyes, steady memory, no initiative.I preferred men who didn’t think too much.But the tremor in his hands told me this wasn’t just nervousness.This was dread.
I didn’t ask right away.I let him stand there, shifting his weight and dripping sweat onto the floor while I took another slow sip of scotch.Let him feel the silence press down.Men reveal more when they’re desperate to fill quiet than when you question them directly.When he finally found his voice, it cracked on my name.“Boss...something happened.About the Grant job.”
My hand paused on the glass before I set it down.The Grant job had been finished five days ago.Clean, fast, contained.Vincent Calabrese signed off on the report himself.Maxwell Grant, his wife, and their boy—all removed in accordance with the contract.Gabriel had handled the work personally and checked in before going off-grid to ride out the winter storm.Nothing about that should have put sweat on Tommy Falcone’s collar.
“Continue.”I kept my tone even, but a cold thought was already forming.Men didn’t tremble like this over bookkeeping errors.
Tommy swallowed hard before he spoke.“I was in the area doing the property checks, like you said.Making sure the storm didn’t leave anything exposed.I drove by the Grant house.I figured it’d be locked down, but...I saw Gabriel the night of the murders.”His voice frayed on the name.“He wasn’t alone.He was carrying someone.A woman.Looked unconscious, and he was...careful.Holding her like she mattered.”
I didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t react.I’d make this little bastard pay later for not telling me sooner.But for now, I only asked one word.“Who?”
“Grant’s daughter.”He said it with the caution of a man who expected the floor to give way under him.“I got close enough to see her face.It was her.”
Stillness settled over me like a second skin.Not shock—shock was a luxury reserved for men who hadn’t spent their lives preparing for betrayal.What I felt was calculation.Five days.Gabriel in a snowed-in cabin with the Grant girl.If he needed information, he would have taken her to the compound.If he planned to kill her separately, he would have done it within the hour.This wasn’t intelligence gathering or cleanup.This was disobedience.
Gabriel had been flawless since he was a teenager.Ruthless when necessary, detached by design, efficient in ways that made other soldiers seem sloppy.I had forged him into what I needed—someone who didn’t question, didn’t hesitate, didn’t feel.A man should never become attached to anything he couldn’t afford to lose.I raised him to understand that.I carved the weakness out of him myself.Or so I believed.
“Five days,” I repeated softly.Tommy flinched.The softness was always what frightened them most.
My hand went to the encrypted phone.Not the line for captains or advisors.The other line—the one that connected directly to men whose loyalty I owned at a price high enough that betrayal would destroy them.Victor picked up on the second ring.“We have a problem,” I said.“Gabriel is compromised.He has the Grant girl.Find them.Clean it up.”
Victor hesitated for half a second.Just long enough to ask, “Both?”
“Both.”The word cost less than it should have.Twenty years of training, conditioning, investment—all undone because Gabriel had chosen weakness.Because he had chosen a girl.“No loose ends.”
The call ended.Tommy was still waiting like a man on the gallows.I didn’t bother to look at him.A flick of my fingers told him he was dismissed.He left quickly, shutting the door behind him like he feared the room itself might reach for him.
The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful.It was judgment.I poured another two fingers of scotch, not because I needed a drink but because ritual steadied the mind.On the wall, Maria smiled from another lifetime.She had called me cold once—told me I’d forgotten how to be human.She said it like it was an insult.She didn’t understand that humanity was a liability in our world.I proved it to her the night I signed her death certificate and called it an accident.
Sentiment kills.I teach that to every man who wears my name.I’d made sure Gabriel learned that lesson first and hardest.
Now he had forgotten.
Somewhere in that winter hell, he was holding the Grant girl instead of burying her.Somewhere he was telling himself he could escape the life I built for him.Somewhere he was imagining a future where he could love instead of obey.
He would learn soon enough that there was only one way men like us ended up free.
In the ground.
I raised my glass to the photographs on the wall—my father, my first crew, Maria.All of them reminders that softness destroys faster than bullets.“To lessons learned,” I said, barely above a whisper.
I drank, and the forty-year scotch tasted like ash on my tongue.
Mia
I woke to static.Not loud, but insistent—crackling through the dark like something trying to claw its way into my dreams.The space beside me was cold, the blanket thrown back, the indentation of Gabriel’s body fading from the cot.I blinked at the dying glow of the fire while my mind scrambled to remember where I was, why I wasn’t screaming, and why the absence of the man who killed my family felt like something sharp instead of something satisfying.Snow hammered the shutters, the wind howling in the eaves, and the cold tightened around me like a fist.
Memory returned all at once—the cabin, the storm, the kiss that had unraveled everything, the sex that shouldn’t have happened but had, pulling me into something I didn’t have a name for.My stomach tightened with a mix of shame and want and confusion I still didn’t know how to process.I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and stood slowly, every movement careful, as if the floor might shift under me if I moved too fast.Gabriel sat at the table near the window, backed by shadow and the weak glow of a single lamp.His posture was too controlled, too still, shoulders rigid and jaw locked.And the sound—static—came from the object in front of him.A radio.Not the kind you listen to music on.A military-grade radio with encryption dials.
I stopped beside him, my feet silent against the boards.He didn’t look at me, but I saw the way his back tightened when he registered my presence.The static shifted when he turned a dial with shaking fingers, breaking into something that might have been a voice before dissolving again.I kept my voice low.“You’ve had that the whole time?”He nodded once, eyes fixed on the radio.“Insurance.In case I needed to know whether someone was coming.”The tremor in his hands said he already knew the answer.He adjusted the dial again—and the static split into clarity.
“—coordinates confirmed.Two targets.Orders are clean sweep, no exceptions.Repeat: both targets require elimination.Moving to intercept at first light.Weather’s breaking in six hours.We’ll have a window—”
