That's what Karolina would say. What the grief counselors and therapists and well-meaning relatives always say after someone dies. You should feel sad. You should feel lost. You should feel like the world has shifted on its axis.
I feel none of it.
I grieved my father while he was alive.
The grief happened in real-time. Now there's just... emptiness. And emptiness I can work with.
Business will help. It always does. Numbers and negotiations and the occasional necessary violence. These things make sense. They follow rules. They respond to action.
Vittoria will help too.
I knew this was going to happen. My father's death. The emptiness afterward. The way my mind would immediately pivot to business, to strategy, to the next problem requiring solution.
The warehouse on Kedzie sits at the edge of our territory, a squat brick building that looks abandoned from the outside. Rusted metal doors, broken windows covered with plywood, graffiti tags from gangs that no longer exist.
Inside is different.
I park the Mercedes in the back lot and kill the engine. Two of my men stand guard at the service entrance, their breath fogging in the cold air. They straighten when they see me step out.
"Boss." I nod and push through the door.
The interior is sparse. Concrete floors, exposed pipes, a single chair bolted to the ground beneath a hanging work light. Igor stands to the side, arms crossed, watching the figure slumped in that chair.
The man lifts his head at the sound of my footsteps, and I stop.
He's young. Too young. Smooth skin, wide eyes, the kind of face that still holds baby fat in the cheeks. He can't be more than eighteen.
Maybe less.
"What's your name?" My voice comes out flat.
He swallows hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. "Drake."
Black American. Skinny frame swimming in an oversized hoodie. His wrists are zip-tied to the chair arms, but he's not struggling. Just sitting there, trembling like a leaf in a storm.
I circle him slowly, taking inventory. One hit to his face. Just one. A bruise blooming purple across his left cheekbone, his lip split but not badly. Igor's men barely touched him.
He broke in twenty minutes with barely a mark on him.
I don't like men who break fast. It usually means they're either lying or they have nothing worth protecting. But this one... this one isn't calculating. He's terrified. The kind of terror that comes from being completely out of your depth.
"How old are you, Drake?"
He hesitates. His eyes dart to Igor, then back to me.
"How old?" I repeat, harder this time.
"Seventeen." The word comes out cracked.
I close my eyes.
Seventeen.
A child. A fucking child sitting in my interrogation chair, zip-tied and bleeding because he got caught up in something he doesn't understand.
I've seen this before. Too many times. Young men from bad neighborhoods, desperate situations, no fathers or fathers in prison, mothers working three jobs just to keep the lights on. They see the money, the respect, the power that comes with this life, and they think it's their only way out.
They don't see the chair. They don't see the warehouse. They don't see the shallow graves.
