I look at him then, the man who grew up in my shadow and decided that kindness was more useful than cruelty.
“Are you challenging me in public, Riley?” I ask. The question is simple and cold. I will not be challenged when I command.
His face goes pale. He looks around at the family, at the faces turning toward us. He remembers what our father taught him about standing down. He remembers what the city taught him about safety when a Romano is angry and not to be crossed.
“No,” he says, immediately, too fast. The word is a plea disguised as obedience.
Relief flitters through the cluster of eyes like a small, dirty bird. A few people laugh, a brittle sound, and something heavy moves in me at the hit of that laughter—a small, bitter gratitude that he knows his place. It is ugly to feel grateful when it is backed by fear.
“Good,” I say. My voice is a thing made of ice now, and it slices clean. “Tell them. Tell them exactly.” I give the script the clarity of an old order: no ambiguity, no room for later misinterpretation.
Riley swallows. He nods, hands clasped together as if in prayer. “I’ll send word,” he says. He wants to add—none of us have to do this; we can settle another way—but he doesn’t. He is quiet because in his silence there is a calculation: Defy Lucian and he defies the family. And defying the family means choosing to be outside its protection.
The crowd disperses in small clusters, words passing like coin. I see faces that I used to think I could trust and now do not. I see a man from the Moretti contingent—their emissary—watching from the edge of the grounds, his hat pulled low. His eyes are two quick green slits in a face I don’t know well. He watches the movement of our men. He watches me. Good. It is early for answers, but the gaze is a start.
Riley stays a moment longer. He steps in front of the coffin, as if a ritual might make the violence smaller. He lays a hand on the wood. “You’re still my brother,” he says. There is a softness he is trying to sell me like currency.
“So are you my responsibility?” I ask. My voice is softer, but it is not an invitation. It is a question that hangs between us with the weight of the city on it. If I am to be the man who takes this family forward, I cannot be reduced by what they want me to be. If I let pity in, if I let anything that smells like tenderness take root, I will become my father in a different shape.
Riley looks at me like a man measuring the depth of water before he steps in. “No,” he says finally. “I’m your brother.” He says it like an exhale, like a surrender. It is the only safe answer.
Snow presses at the edge of my collar. I can feel the burn of my father’s absence like a live coal. Somewhere in the house, the staff are already making calls. My men move like shadows toward the gates, the ones I have chosen for their steadiness. I have set the terms. The Morettis will have a choice: fold like the old men in their rooms or play their hands and show me their true colors.
The red bow sits in my head like a promise I can feed off. In another life, a bow is something tied for celebration. Today, it is a humiliation I will hang at their throat. I think of the Moretti patriarch—his face when he took my father’s life—and a slow, deliberate heat spreads through my ribs. Vengeance is a ledger. It is a calculation. It is also a thing that tastes like iron when you hold it long enough.
Riley’s hand finds mine again, a smaller, quicker touch. It is not comfort. It is an agreement. I do not squeeze back. I do notneed to. He has already given me what I required—the public submission. For now, that is enough.
I leave the cemetery with the funeral behind me and the snow closing the world in. The estate is waiting, the house a low thing with lights blinking like eyes. Men in dark coats fall into step around me. We walk past the yew into the night, and I think of the bow, red and ridiculous and precise. I will make them deliver it, and when they do, I will see what they mean to me: whether what I have been given to be—revenge, control—is worth more than the soft pull of something like mercy.
Tonight, the Morettis will be told. Tonight, the chessboard is set. The pieces do not move without my command. The city breathes around us and does not yet know its fate.
??? ??? ???
I walk through the house like a man checking the parts of a machine he’s built to run. The Romano estate is not the heavy, carved thing of my father’s youth—his taste for marble and brocade died when I became old enough to make the choices—but a clean, brutalist trophy: concrete, glass, black steel. It looks like power stripped of sentiment. Sliding doors whisper open to rooms that hold light instead of clutter. A bar the length of a wall reflects the chandelier. Leather couches sit in small islands, like islands of authority suspended in a sea of glass. I like that about it. It says we are modern; it says we are not interested in the comforts of pity.
My staff moves like a contrary tide beneath me: soft-footed, efficient, the people who keep my life upright while I do the things that cannot be done by hands that play at gentility. They hang coats in silence, fluff pillows, and steam suits until the seams look new again. The house smells faintly of citruscleaner and something more metallic—gun oil tucked away—and I realize with a small, startled jolt that I have blended the two until I can’t tell where the home ends and the operation begins.
“More wine in the drawing room,” I tell Mara, my head housekeeper, because saying it anchors me. She looks at me as if she’s measuring whether I am ready to lead this family in all things before the age of thirty. For a moment, I see concern. Likely for me personally—Mara is that type of person. She adjusts a cushion with a practiced thumb and says nothing she must be thinking. “Yes, Lucian.”
I move through the rooms and find the things I cannot distance myself from—my father’s chair, the carved table in the library with the water-stained ring where his glass always sat, the portrait of him I hated and now find myself tolerating. I try to keep the hatred in the right place, precise and useful. Hatred clarifies; it makes decisions clean.
Riley has already given the order for the staff to prepare an apartment on the second floor for whoever arrives. Formal sleeping quarters, a room that looks like a gentleman’s refuge: minimal, clean-lined, a bed with a headboard high as a wall, a wardrobe stocked with black and navy suits. A red silk bow sits on the pillow—an affectation, yes, but I want to see it where he will sleep. Symbols matter. My men will know to treat it like a live thing, a test to measure the Morettis’ willingness to show up and submit to humiliation rather than war.
“Do you think they’ll come?” Mara asks as we pass through the kitchen. It’s not a woman’s question and a woman’s tone—she’s practical. The staff are practical the way people near power must be, otherwise they don’t last.
“They’ll come,” I say. I believe it. I need to.
I tell myself I believe it because they have too much to lose and because my father’s death is not an event you shrug off witha ledger. The Morettis will prefer to hand over what looks like obedience rather than watch their empire be burned in a week.
But there is another thought I do not say aloud. I imagine them refusing. I imagine it all descending into red, into the kind of violence that leaves no clean edges. The imagination is a dangerous servant, because it can make the thing real before it happens and then make regret taste like a prophecy.
I stand in the center of the main room and watch my men move—Marco by the doors, a patient, efficient thing; Kade by the back stair, his face like a stone wall. They do not smile. They are young enough to have seen less and old enough to know what silence can mean. I picked them because they’re steady. I picked them because they won’t flinch if things change.
There is a part of me that I thought I’d buried under calculation and the tidy resolve to be better than my father. That flinches at what I have asked for. Eighteen? No, nineteen.
I think of my own age. I will be twenty-nine this month. People will say I am rash. They will call me young to burn a city’s quiet with a red ribbon sent at dawn. I have nights where I ask myself what the city will write about me. Devil of the North End—nice headline, clean. But I do not want the word monster attached to my name. Monsters do cruel things for cruelty’s sake; I do cruel things because, in my math, cruelty is justice when the ledger of favors is stained with blood and textured with betrayal.
Maybe that is the justification I give to myself—the one that calms other men’s hands enough to hold their coffee without rocking. Justice, not cruelty. I say it until I can almost hear it as truth. Justice has a face in this city: it is clean, it is cold, it looks like someone who keeps his shoes polished. Cruelty has a face too. Cruelty smells like old men’s threats and the kind of laughter that comes when you know you can hurt someone forthe fun of it. I do not want to be a man who hurts for enjoyment. I will not be that.
