Chapter 6
He began to change in ways his men could measure. Mercy where there had once only been the ledger. Questions about school shoes and good pairs of children’s shoes, things he had never in his life needed to know the price of. And when Rosa, the head housekeeper, sent a man to scrub the faint water stain still ghosting his armchair, Alessandro stopped him at the door.
“That’s not a stain,” he said quietly. “That’s where a child covered me with her jacket. Leave it there.”
But the underworld has sharp ears, and it began to whisper. Moretti has gone soft.
Luca, his consigliere, said what no one else dared. “Kindness in our world is the smell of blood among sharks. I’m glad for you, Don. And I’m afraid for you.”
Alessandro, watching Emma sketch the fountain in the rose garden below, answered without turning around. “For fifteen years I was perfectly safe, Luca. And for fifteen years I was dead. Now I’m alive. And being alive means taking risks.”
He was right to be afraid — because five miles away, in a walled villa on the south side of the city, a silver-haired man named Victorio Romano sat before a fireplace, turning a telephoto photograph over in his fingers. It showed Alessandro Moretti laughing in the sunlight, pushing a little girl on a swing.
It was Victorio who, fifteen years ago, had bought Marco’s loyalty piece by piece. Victorio who had given the order that put Don Giovanni Moretti in the ground. His only regret, he’d said more than once, was that the son had walked out of that warehouse alive.
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Now his empire was rotting. Soldiers muttered about late payments. Families across Boston were drifting toward the young don who was quietly turning docks and restaurants legitimate. Victorio was not a greedy man; greed had burned out of him decades ago. He was afraid — the fear of an old wolf who smells the day coming when the pack turns on him.
He tapped a finger against the photograph. “Fifteen years, and no one has been able to touch Moretti. Do you know why? Because he had nothing to lose.”
