The brownstone is quiet, the air thick with the scent of old wood, gun oil, and espresso. I bypass the main living quarters and descend the steel-reinforced staircase to the subterranean level. The biometric scanner flashes green against my thumb. The steel door to the war room hisses open.
Fabio is at the massive mahogany table, sleeves rolled up over thick, heavily tattooed forearms, dismantling a Beretta with the restless energy of a man looking for a fight. Santi is standing in the corner, a silent monolith in the shadows, his calm, calculated eyes fixed on the array of surveillance monitor feeds covering the north wall.
Fabio looks up, his dark eyes taking in my posture. He stops wiping the barrel of the gun. "She's asleep?"
"She's pretending to be," I say, my voice a low, gravel-heavy rasp. I walk to the head of the table and place my palms flat against the wood. "Pull up the South Side logistics map."
Santi doesn't ask questions. His massive fingers fly over the keyboard. The central monitor switches from street cameras to a topographical grid of the South Side industrial district. Two red icons blink on the screen—one near the rail yards, one farther south along the waterfront.
"The Bellanti distribution hub on the Ashland warehouse line," I say, pointing to the first icon. My gaze shifts to the second. "And the South Side docks. Their port access point."
Fabio lets out a sharp, blunt breath, setting the rag down with an aggressive flick of his wrist. "Dom, we've talked about this. The hub is their central vein, and the docks are how they feed it. If we hit both, we're not escalating—we're detonating. We don't have the street soldiers to hold all of it if they retaliate in force."
"I am not asking for a strategic assessment, Fabio." I slowly lift my gaze to meet my brother's. "I am giving an order."
Fabio's jaw flexes, his restless energy barely contained. He was exactly eighteen when our parents were slaughtered. He has carried every one of my orders since that night, burying his own life to build my revenge. He has earned the right to question me, but tonight, I have no patience for it.
"They burned her shop," I say, the words tasting like copper in my mouth. "They took the only thing she had left of her family. And I told her I bought the ashes."
Fabio stops moving. Santi shifts his weight in the shadows, his dark eyes narrowing.
"I tried to fix her grief with a check," I continue, the self-loathing a bitter pill. "I isolated her. I suffocated her. I thought keeping her alive was the same as keeping her whole. But they took her grandmother's legacy. They struck at her, Fabio. A civilian."
"They're not trying to destroy us yet," Santi says from the corner, his voice sparse and deliberate. "Every strike is reconnaissance disguised as retaliation. The flower shop was a message. They want to see how we respond."
"Then let's give them something to study," Fabio growls, slamming the slide of his Beretta back into place with a sharp, restless movement.
I straighten up from the table. I look at my brothers—Fabio coiled and ready to explode, Santi still as stone, already calculating angles, and Matteo at the far end of the table with a glass of water he has not touched.
Matteo is at the far end of the mahogany table. He has been there the whole time—I registered him the way you register furniture, large and motionless and simply present. He has a glass of water in front of him that he has not touched.
I say Carlo's name.
It is not even the center of the sentence. It is a reference—the warehouse, the south side, the twenty-year-old wound they are still fighting a war over. Three syllables dropped into the war room like they cost nothing.
Matteo goes still.
Not the composed stillness of Santi, who uses silence as a weapon. Not the coiled stillness of Fabio, who is suppressing something volatile. This is different. This is the stillness of aman who has suddenly found himself somewhere he was not prepared to be, and who is deciding, very carefully, not to go there.
His hand moves to the glass. He picks it up. He sets it back down without drinking. Very carefully. Like he is moving something fragile.
Then he stands. Pushes back from the table. Says nothing—not even an excuse. He simply leaves, and his footsteps go down the hallway, and the door at the end of it opens and closes, and he is gone.
Nobody at the table reacts. Not one of them. Fabio does not look up. Santi does not move. I do not stop talking.
This has happened before. That is the only explanation for how easily they absorb it. This is something that happens, and they have all learned where to look when it does—which is anywhere but after him.
My chest does something I did not give it permission to do.
I look at the empty chair Matteo left behind, and then I look at the door, and I think: whatever happened in that alley twenty years ago, he is still in it. He has never once come home from it. And not a single person in this room has ever figured out how to go in after him.
These are the men I shielded for twenty years. The men I kept blind to protect. They are not my subordinates. They are my blood. And tonight, the war I built for them finally has teeth.
"Two operations," I say, the command settled into the room like a dropped blade. "Simultaneous. Santi—you take a tactical team to the docks. Reclaim the port access. I want every Bellanti guardneutralized and our men holding the loading bays by dawn. Quiet and surgical. Your kind of work."
Santi nods once, his expression unchanged. He is already running the operation behind his eyes.
I turn to Fabio. "The Ashland warehouse line. Their distribution hub. I want it burned to the foundation. Every crate, every cash pallet, every brick. You hit hard and you hit fast."
