1
MATTEO
If he weren’t dead, I’d kill him for this. My feet drive against the pavement, trying to outrun his ghost as I tear through Central Park.
“Heavy is the head that wears the crown, my son.” His voice rings in my skull like a struck gong.
My hood stays up. My chest burns for air. I pump my arms harder, increasing my pace — running from a past I would give anything to erase. I can still taste the meeting room: wood-paneled walls, the stale smoke of cigars, and the burn of well-aged whiskey. And the tension in that room was suffocating, almost toxic.
I knew the crown would be heavy, but he never said it would feel like I’d need an oxygen tank and an IV. Davide Davacalli left a mess for me to clean.
I’ve never had to do this. I was the dutiful son, standing at my father’s side while he gutted the legacy our forefathers built. Once we were at the top of the food chain; his greed sent us into freefall. Now I’m here, picking up the pieces.
I push my legs faster, racing the echoes in my head. “You will be my heir. My pride and joy.”
“You ruined it all, Papá.” I spit the words like acid.
I’m in deep water now and the sharks are circling. My father’s body is still warm, but his allies have already forgotten their promises. Their loyalties have vanished — but not for long. One by one I’ll visit them, and they will answer for their betrayal.
“You may be a Davacalli, but you lack grit. You lack power.” Alejandro Ventura made his opinion about my succession crystal clear.
“You are not him,” Elliot Havner had said.
He leads what he calls the English mafia — a well-run gang with no brotherhood, no code. Just like some in the Italian families.
Giacomo Feriama, a thorn to us all and a man my father openly despised, now sits firmly on my list of enemies. He led that farcical crusade to discredit me in front of the families.
I push my legs harder until my lungs scream for reprieve. I come to a grinding halt at the curb, doubled over, ripping my hood down like tearing off a restraint.
I breathe deep, forcing my heart to slow while lactic acid knives through my calves. The skyline splits open — a ribbon of gold sliding across glass and steel, indifferent to the chaos below.
Even in a city that breeds rot, small beauties hide in the stillness. To my left, La Maison sits quiet and low — the brownstone I bought after college, one of the investments that kept our ledger from flipping into the red. If not for my quick thinking, we’d be drowning in debts with no life preserver.
I tilt my face to the sun and let a long, careless breath go. For a moment everything I’ve been carrying — the promises, the lies, the burden of a name — pours out in that single sigh.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Three shots, sharp and final. One bullet found the place I’d always thought unbreakable. Three tiny pieces of metal dissolved the myth of his invincibility.
What should have been a short drive turned into his last trip on earth.
My eyes snap open. My feet move before my head catches up. I cross La Maison’s foyer in a few long strides and ride the elevator like a man taking himself up to clarity. The staff nod — practiced, polite. I return a grunt. No small talk today. Small talk is for the living who don’t need to plan funerals.
The elevator hums. The brass numbers tick past floors. The doors sigh open and the morning air on the roof hits me — cold, clean, full of the city’s breath. My exhale fogs in front of me, a white flag against a street of predators.
“You’re too young.”
“You don’t have the balls for this.”
Those whispers have been circling like vultures for weeks; now they scrape at the edges of my skull and sound like roars. I swallow the anger. Fuck them.
Up here, for a sliver of time, there is silence — brittle, as if the city is holding its breath for the next move. The concrete jungle feeds and kills with equal appetite: the higher you climb, the safer you feel, until the floor gives way. It gives, then takes without mercy. It chews you down to bone and leaves nothing for resuscitation.
I stand on the terrace and feel every small thing — the sun, the chill, the sting of guilt — and for the first time since the meeting room, I allow myself to grieve. Quietly. Precisely. Like a man making a list.
The city doesn’t care who’s dead or who’s next; it just keeps pulsing, hungry as ever.
That’s what I love most about it.
