Page 19 of The Devils in the Details

“I want two of you on the villa estate outside Livorno. One of you watches the perimeter for movement. You radio it in if you see anything out of place. “You don’t engage unless Leon says otherwise.”

I glanced at everyone to make sure they were hearing me and what I wanted. “One of you is inside. You’re armed and you’re the last thing anyone sees if they get past the perimeter,” I said. “Territories are clear. Chain of command is clear. You report to Leon, Leon reports to me. Anything you see, anything you hear, anything that doesn’t smell right—Leon hears it first. I hear it second. No exceptions.”

I paused. Let it settle.

“What I expect is simple. You do the job I’ve given you. You do it without complaint, without commentary, and without drawing attention to yourselves. You are Romano men now. You carry the name. You don’t get to pick which parts of it you like.”

Another pause. Longer this time. The cigarette smoke hung in the air between us, old and patient.

“What happens when I don’t get what I expect is also simple. You find another family. Or you find another line of work. Or you don’t find anything at all. Your choice.”

Silence. The good kind. The kind that meant everyone in the room had heard the sentence and understood exactly what lived in the spaces between the words.

The meeting ran forty minutes. It should have run an hour. I cut the speeches, cut the inspiration, cut everything that didn’t need to be said because men like these didn’t need to be told why they were here. They needed to be told what to do, and they needed to believe that the man telling them would notice if they didn’t do it.

I noticed everything. That was the point.

They filed out without lingering. One by one, through the double doors, boots soft on the hardwood, the sound of them fading down the corridor toward the kitchen where coffee was waiting. No handshakes. No backslapping. No unnecessary noise.

Just six men walking away with assignments and the quiet certainty that the man who’d given them those assignments would know, within hours, whether they were doing them right.

Leon stayed. Of course he stayed. Leon was the kind of man who considered “dismissed” a suggestion rather than an order when it came to standing at my shoulder, which was why he was still there and why I’d stopped trying to change it years ago.

“You’re thinking about him,” Leon said. Not a question. A statement of fact, delivered with the flat precision of a man reading a weather report.

I didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. Leon had been reading my silences since we were unloading shipping containers in the rain at three in the morning, and he’d gotten better at it than most people got at actual conversation.

“The vendor list came back clean,” he said, switching tracks without waiting for confirmation. “Five names. Two kitchen staff, one driver, the head groundskeeper, the woman who handles the linen service. None of them have contact with Alexios that we can trace. Phone records are clean. Bank records are clean.”

“Someone talked,” I said.

“Someone always talks.”

“Find out who.”

He nodded. Made a note in that tight handwriting of his, the pen moving across the page with the efficiency of a man who considered words a luxury.

I crossed to the window. The mountain spread below the estate, green and vast and quiet in the late afternoon light.

Zephyr was out there somewhere. I could feel it—the thickness of the air when he was in a room, the way the silence changed around him, became something attentive and slightly charged, like the atmosphere before lightning.

I wanted to know what sound he’d make. Not the muttering. Something else. The sound a man makes when he has nowhere to go and the person who’s put him there is close enough that he can feel the heat.

The lighter clicked. Open. Shut. Open.

This was a problem. A significant one. The kind of problem that didn’t get solved with knives or threats or the cold silence that had served me for thirty-two years.

The kind of problem that got worse the longer I let it sit.

I turned from the window. The study was empty except for Leon and the ghost of Geno’s cigarette smoke and the weight of a decision I hadn’t made yet, but could feel approaching, inevitable as weather.

Back to work. The family didn’t run itself. The ledgers didn’t balance themselves. The vendor fraud needed handling, and somewhere in Florence, a man with caramel on his fingers was doing something with my thirty million dollars that I hadn’t authorized and couldn’t bring myself to stop.

The lighter snapped shut. I slipped it into my pocket and reached for the next problem on the list. There were fifty-three of them. None of them were named Zephyr Kontos.

Not on paper, anyway.

The phone lit up on the table, a soft buzz against walnut, the screen brightening to blue-white in the dim study, cutting through the haze like something that didn’t belong there.