Page 2 of The Devils in the Details

The staff didn’t fidget. They didn’t whisper. They stood in their lines under the wrought-iron staircase with the kind of stillness that only comes from genuine fear, and I respected that.

Fear was honest.

I let the silence stretch. Let them feel it. The main hall was cold, the kind of cold that seeped up from stone floors and settled in your joints if you stood still too long. Nobody shifted their weight. Nobody coughed.

Good.

When I spoke, my voice stayed low. I didn’t raise it. I never needed to. “Three rules.” The words carried in the high ceiling, found their own echo. “Absolute loyalty to this house. Absolute silence about its business. Zero contact with anyone from Geno Romano’s inner circle.”

I paused. Let it land.

“The front gate is open. Anyone unwilling to comply, walk through it. Now.”

Silence. No shuffling. No exchanged glances. No movement toward the door. Twenty-four people standing exactly where they’d been standing, eyes forward, breathing controlled.

I looked at each face. Held each gaze for the count of two. Some held steady. Some dropped. One of the older groundskeepers—a man with silver at his temples and the weathered hands of someone who’d worked soil his whole life—met my eyes without flinching. I filed him away.

Useful.

Nobody moved for the door.

Acceptance, then. Or the appearance of it.

I’d take either for now.

I nodded once. Leon stepped forward, handed a sheet of paper to the head housekeeper—a woman in her fifties with a tight bun and the wary eyes of someone who’d survived multiple regime changes. She took it without looking at it. Smart.

“New rotations,” Leon said. His voice was flat, informational. Nobody asked questions.

I turned and walked toward the study. Leon fell in beside me. The hinged panel in the study wall swung open at a touch, revealing the security office on the other side.

The contrast was jarring. One side of the wall: dark wood, brass fittings, leather-bound books, the lingering ghost of Geno’s cologne. The other side: matte screens glowing blue under low light, keyboards, the hum of servers. Two worlds pressed together, neither comfortable in the other’s skin.

Leon settled at the console. His fingers moved over the keyboard without looking. Camera feeds populated the center screen—the front gate, the perimeter wall, the garage, the lake path. Personnel files stacked on the right monitor, contact logs on the left.

I took the desk chair. Rolled my sleeves to mid-forearm. The silver watch caught the blue light. The ring on my finger—black onyx set in silver—weighed nothing and everything.

The ledgers were leather-bound, heavy, ink-spattered in places where someone had been careless or rushed. I opened the first one. Then the second. The third.

Shell companies. Dozens of them, layered through Cyprus, the Caymans, Luxembourg. Empty. Drained in the months before Geno’s death, money moved somewhere I couldn’t follow through the paper trail. Offshore accounts with seven-digit balances whittled down to five, then four, then zero. Transactions dated the week before the bombing, the week before the sanctions, the week before everything fell apart.

Fifty million dollars in reparation payments. D’Angelo, Borelli, Sabatino. Fifteen million already paid, bleeding the family’s liquid reserves dry. Thirty-five million outstanding, chained to payment schedules that gave us eighteen months before the next installment came due.

The debts didn’t wait politely. They crowded the margins of every page, interest compounding in red ink that looked almost cheerful against the yellowed paper. Shipping contracts defaulted. Protection rackets scaled back after Geno’s men got sloppy. A wine import business that should have been printing money, running at a loss because the distributor had been skimming for years and nobody had noticed.

Or nobody had cared.

My lighter clicked open. Closed. Open. The tiny flame held steady for a count of three before I snapped it shut.

The study grew colder as the night deepened. The ancient radiator under the window clanked once and fell silent. Outside, the mountain wind picked up, driving against the glass with a sound like someone testing the locks.

Leon worked through the personnel files. Every guard, every driver, every man who’d carried a weapon for Geno Romano. He cross-referenced against contact logs, against shift rotations, against the dates money had started disappearing from accounts.

His expression didn’t change. Nothing surprised him. Nothing surprised me, either. Betrayal was the oldest currency in this business, and Geno had spent it like water.

“Three,” Leon said finally. Not a question. A statement.

I nodded.