I looked at Mia and there was an understanding there that made me want to erase every night that had taught it to her.“They’re not breaking in,” she said.“They’re reminding you they could.”
“Yes.”
“Arrogant.”
I put the ledger square into the safe along with the crane we’d sleeved earlier.
Mia’s hand found my wrist.“What happens next?”
“We go to Via del Leone, but not tonight.Marco will send men to turn every stone.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime,” I said, and brushed a thumb over the place where her pulse answered me, “we don’t let them scare us.”
She stepped closer.“Show me how.”
I kissed her.Not to distract.To anchor.“I need to make some calls,” I said.“One to a banker and one to a cop who owes me a favor he can’t repay.After that, we sleep.Not because the world is safe.Because we are, here, right now, and that’s what a man builds an empire for.”
She nodded and slid onto the couch, drawing her legs under her, my shirt riding higher on her thigh than was fair.
I made the calls.The banker said he’d never seen the seal I described.The cop said city cams on Via del Leone had suffered intermittent “weather incidents” the last three nights.
I took the framed photograph one last time and studied the faces.My father’s mouth was open in some small joke or lie.Gallo’s eyes were on the camera but his attention was elsewhere.
He promised me a kingdom.You built it on his grave.
33
ENRICO
When I reached Via del Leone, dawn had not yet cracked the horizon.Marco waited beside the car, the ember of his cigarette pulsing like a warning.“You sure about this?”
“What kind of fucking question is that?I wouldn’t be here if I thought otherwise.”
He didn’t argue.Right now wasn’t the time to piss me off.My whole body was wound tight, waiting for the opportunity to kill the son of a bitch who hurt my wife.
The warehouse ahead loomed — the place my father once used for quiet meetings, the kind where silence bought more.I hadn’t been here since I was a boy, back when I still believed men like him could be legends instead of cautionary tales.
The padlock on the side door was new, but the hinges weren’t.One twist of the crowbar and the metal gave.We slipped inside.Shafts of pale light speared through cracks in the ceiling, catching on dust motes that drifted.
Marco swept his flashlight across the space.“You ever come here with him?”
I nodded.“He made me watch him sign a deal with Gallo.Told me this was where dynasties were made.”I traced my hand along a worktable scarred with cigarette burns.“I didn’t understand then that dynasties also died here.”
The beam of the flashlight fell on a pile of charred paper in the center of the floor.I crouched, brushing off soot.A joint seal pressed in wax, half melted, as if the alliance had been burned even as it was born.
“They were partners once,” Marco murmured.
“Partners until pride turned them into gods.”I folded the half-burnt page and slipped it into my coat.“And gods always fall.”
A noise scraped through the silence — the sound of something metal dragging.Instinct kicked in; my gun was in my hand.
“Easy.”
A stray cat darted between broken crates, vanishing through a gap in the wall.The tension lingered anyway, coiling under my skin.
I walked deeper into the warehouse.Rusted tools, a ledger cabinet long kicked in, a wine bottle half-filled with dust.On one wall, faint markings bloomed beneath the grime: a family crest, my father’s, half-obliterated by red spray paint.Over it, a newer mark — the Gallo insignia.
