Chapter 11
Alessandro knelt in the middle of the road and picked it up with both hands, the way a man lifts something holy. Fifteen years collapsed into a single moment — the same cold, the same gray light, the same sensation of the world draining out through a hole in his chest. A young man had once knelt like this in the rain with his father’s blood on his hands, able to do nothing but scream.
He was not that helpless twenty-three-year-old anymore.
His phone rang. Number withheld. Victorio’s voice, leisurely, almost pleasant. Forty-eight hours. The entire North End, signed over, delivered personally — alone, at warehouse number seven, the old harbor. In exchange, the woman and the girl come home breathing.
The choice of location was no accident, and both men knew it. The same warehouse where Marco had stood among Romano gunmen fifteen years earlier. The same concrete floor where Don Giovanni Moretti had bled out in his son’s arms at three in the morning.
“Don’t touch them,” Alessandro said, his voice flat and level as still water. “I’ll come.”
The family council erupted. It’s a death trap. The moment you sign, all three of you are corpses. An old capo who had served his father slammed his fist on the table: No one trades an empire for a housekeeper and another man’s child.
May you like
Alessandro looked at him for a long moment. “And my father died with no one left to trust. Betrayed by a man he called his son, in a warehouse, in the rain.” He rose to his feet. “I will not die that way. And I will not live that way. Not for one more day.”
The betrayal, when it came, cut deeper than he expected. It was Rosa — twenty years in the household, her son’s gambling debt held over her like a blade by Victorio for months. They brought her before him, an old woman weeping into her hands, and the room held its breath, because the old law had only one sentence for this.
