Chapter 32
Turo
Two daysafter you kill a man like Enzo, the city breathes differently. It’s subtle at first. Not in the streets. Not in the papers. Not in the legitimate places where people pretend this world doesn’t exist.
It’s in the pauses. The half-second longer a call rings before it’s answered. The way certain men stop dropping by “just to check in.” The way messages start arriving, wrapped in politeness so tight it squeaks.
Enzo was my oldest friend. He was also a weight on the scales. The moment he fell, the balance shifted.
And every bastard with a map and an appetite felt it.
My phone doesn’t stop. Capos report movement in the docks. A Rossi runner, spotted where he shouldn’t be. A lawyer, asking too many questions about “new custodial arrangements.” A banker, whose voice is too smooth, too eager, offering to “ensure liquidity” like he’s doing me a favor.
Predators circle when they smell blood. They don’t always care whose it is.
The war room looks the same. No windows. No softness. Screens lit with feeds and grids and numbers that never sleep. Men moving around me like muscle memory.
But I’m not the same.
There’s an absence in the air where Enzo’s presence used to be. For thirty years, I could feel him even when he wasn’t in the room. A quiet competence at my shoulder. A steady hand on the wheel. The man who would lean in and whisper the angle I missed, the complication I’d overlooked, the knife coming from behind.
Now there’s only the echo. And the knowledge that he was steering me toward a cliff the whole time.
Matteo is at the table with a folder. Luca’s jaw is tight. Gianni’s eyes are narrowed at the main screen as if he can bully it into showing him what he wants.
“We’re getting chatter,” Matteo says. “Rossi chatter.”
“Of course we are,” Luca mutters. “They’ve been waiting for us to look weak for years.”
Gianni’s gaze cuts to me. “Do we look weak?”
No one does. Not to my men. Not in this room. But this isn’t about what we look like to the people who love us. This is about what we look like to the people who want to put a knife in our ribs and take our chair.
“We executed a traitor,” Matteo says carefully. “Word travels.”
“It travels in the way they want it to,” I reply.
I keep my hands flat on the table. Stillness. Authority. Inside, something tight hums beneath my skin. Not rage. Not panic.
A countdown. We don’t get to mourn in this life. Not properly. We bury grief under logistics and call it discipline.
Gianni clears his throat. “We received a formal request.”
He slides a paper across the table. Formal. Clean. Polite enough to pass for diplomacy if you didn’t know how to read the smell of it.
A sit-down. A “peace meeting.” Neutral territory. Territorial boundaries.
Mutual respect. The language of civilized men who would shoot you in the mouth the moment you leaned forward to shake their hand.
I read it once. Then again. For the pleasure of recognizing the pattern.
Rossi is moving openly now. They smell the internal chaos. They smell the missing man at my shoulder. They smell the fact that my heir has appeared like a miracle, and miracles always have a price.
Luca scoffs. “Peace negotiations.” He spits the words like they’re dirty. “They think we’re distracted.”
“They know we’re distracted,” Matteo corrects. “We are.”
The room shifts. A silence like a held breath. Because saying it aloud is dangerous. It makes it real.
