Neither does Volkov.
Chapter Twenty-Two
KILLIAN
The document istwenty-three years old, and it is the ugliest thing I have ever read.
Rory found it deep in the digital archive—a partition of the Falcone records that Alessandro's people migrated to encrypted cloud storage before the warehouse at Pier 11 was compromised. It is a ghost file. A backup of a backup, buried three layers deep in a filing system that predates the current operational infrastructure by two decades.
The header reads:JOINT VENTURE AGREEMENT.
Below it, two signatures.
Salvatore Falcone.
Padraic Kavanagh.
My father.
"Read it," Alessandro says. His voice is neutral—the operational register he uses when he’s trying to keep me from putting my fist through a wall. But his hand, resting on the back of Rory’s chair, is white-knuckled.
Rory reads. His voice is thin, reedy.
"It’s structured like a business contract," he says. "Clauses. Sub-clauses. Definitions of terms. But the business isn't real estate or import logistics. It’s territory."
He scrolls down. The screen glow illuminates the dust motes dancing in the studio air.
"The agreement outlines a coordinated campaign between the Falcone and Kavanagh families to systematically dismantle three smaller organizations—the Devaneys, the O'Connors, and the Ferrara Group. Method: manufactured conflict."
"Manufactured conflict," I repeat. The words taste like ash and bile.
"The two families would stage a public feud," Rory reads, his finger tracing the lines on the screen. "Escalating provocations. Retaliatory hits. The appearance of a blood conflict so violent and so consuming that the smaller organizations, caught between two larger powers, would be forced to choose sides or be ground to nothing. The war would serve as cover for coordinated strikes against shared targets."
"The consolidation clause," Alessandro says, pointing to the screen. "Section four."
Rory reads it. "'Upon elimination of the specified competitors, the surviving parties will divide territorial holdings according to the map appended as Exhibit A, with revenue-sharing mechanisms as detailed in Schedule B.'"
Revenue sharing.
My father and his father, splitting the profits of a war they manufactured from a document they signed in the same room.They sat across a table, drank whiskey, and decided to kill hundreds of men for a profit margin.
"The dates," Rory whispers. He looks up at me. His green eyes—our mother’s eyes—are wide with horror. "Kill, look at the dates."
I look. The agreement was signed twenty-three years ago.
"The 'war' started eighteen months later," Rory says. "And the Devaney consolidation—the campaign that?—"
He stops. He can't say it.
I say it for him. Inside my head, the words scream.
The Devaney consolidation. The desperate push back from a smaller family being squeezed by two giants. The night a Devaney enforcer walked into our house.
Into Rory’s bedroom.
The night I became a killer. The night I crushed a man’s throat with my bare hands because I thought I was protecting my brother from an enemy.
My father sent that man.
