Chapter 13
“You’re wrong,” Sophia said, calm enough to make him pause. “Not because you misjudge people. You’re wrong because in your whole life, you’ve never once met someone who looked at you and saw a human being.” She held his gaze. “He has.”
Then a small voice cut through the cold room. “Your hands are cold.” Emma had emerged from her mother’s blanket, looking straight up at him with grave, six-year-old concern. “They’re cold like Mister Alessandro’s used to be. You’ve been cold for a really long time too, haven’t you?”
For half a second, something moved across the old wolf’s face — the boy of nine, standing in the rain. Then he set the glass down hard and turned his back.
“Lock them in.”
Headlights swept the warehouse doors at the appointed hour. Alessandro stepped out alone, hands raised, holding nothing but the case above his head. From a shattered second-floor window, Victorio counted — no convoy, no snipers, nothing. His main force was miles away, drawn off by the false intelligence bleeding through Rosa for two days: a phantom army massing at a south-side depot.
What Victorio couldn’t know was that there was no army in the south. There never had been. Luca’s men had been sealed inside the warehouse’s shipping containers for twelve hours, motionless in the freezing dark, waiting for a single signal.
Alessandro walked to the crate in the center of the warehouse and signed the final page. “Your territory. All of it. Release them.”
Victorio leafed through the real signatures, real seals, real surrender, and let out a dry, admiring laugh. Then the courtesy drained from his face. “But you don’t seriously think I’ll leave you alive to come for revenge, do you, Moretti?”
He raised his hand to signal the shooters — and in that split second, his eyes flicked to the thin line of men along the walls. Too thin. A flicker of doubt, half a heartbeat too late.
Alessandro’s fist closed around the wooden bracelet.
May you like
The container doors blew open. Luca’s men poured out like a black tide. Gunfire tore the shadows apart, tracer rounds bit into stacked pallets, and fire crawled up them like a living thing. Alessandro was already running for the cold storage rooms, a bullet ripping through his left shoulder, blood soaking hot down his sleeve. He kicked the steel door open.
Sophia and Emma, alive, in the corner. A guard’s weapon rising. Alessandro threw his body between the gun and the two of them, arms spread, making himself the wall.
