“He came into my backyard Alice,” she said. “I want to know what his voice sounds like when he thinks he’s speaking down the leash.”
She hit call and then punched the speaker icon.
The room held its breath.
It didn’t even ring twice.
A man’s voice slid through the tiny speaker. Smooth. Impatient. Coiled with the kind of entitlement you only get when you’ve had your hand on a city’s throat for decades.
“Took longer than usual,” he said. “Is it done? Did you retrieve it?”
No hello. No introduction. Just expectation.
I watched Liberty’s face.
Recognition hit her like a fist. Her eyes narrowed. I’d seen that expression on her exactly once before—on a night when a man had comeinto our bar and thought his local badge meant something here. He’d left toothless.
She didn’t answer his questions.
She just said his name.
“Tesauro Vincino.”
The Vincino Don. The Philadelphia darling. The man who smiled for cameras and shook hands with mayors and donated to charities for photo ops I’d seen playing on TVs behind bars for years.
On the other end of the line, there was one sharp inhalation.
Then the call dropped. Clean. Dead.
The burner went silent in.
In the quiet that followed, I realized I could hear my own pulse.
“You still there, Alice?” Liberty asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I heard it.”
“He sounded just like he does in every news clip,” Liberty said, voice stripped of anything but purpose. “Only shorter of patience.”
“That confirms it then,” Blackjack said. “The Vincinos aren’t just dabbling. They’re commissioning runs through Roman’s piers and sending Serpents to chase their toys when things go wrong.”
“And calling clean-up directly,” Rosé added.
Liberty set the burner down beside the Serpent cut, like laying two parts of the same weapon on a table.
“Then we’re done pretending this is just a bad coincidence,” she said.
She looked at me. At Jersey. At Rosé and Indigo. At the space where Diamondback leaned, pale but upright, bandage bright against her arm.
“The Vincino family strangled a man in my shadow,” Liberty said. “Sent their pets into my territory after my people. They tried to finish a Devil in my hospital, on my streets, because they think they can move their little war toys through our world without asking.”
Her gaze burned.
“The Shore Vipers are at war,” she said. “With the Vincinos. With the Steel Serpents. With anyone stupid enough to stand between us and whoever thought this was a good idea.”
On the line, Blackjack exhaled.
“Then the Devil’s Aces are in it with you,” he said. “We were already halfway there. Might as well call it what it is.”
