Page 3 of The Devils in the Details

He made a note. Moved to the next file.

The stack of ledgers grew. I worked through them methodically, page by page, the numbers getting worse the deeper I went. By midnight, my coffee had gone cold and my shoulders had locked into the kind of stiffness that came from too many hours in one position. I didn’t stop. Stopping meant admitting how bad it was, and I wasn’t ready to do that yet.

The lighter clicked. Open, shut, open. The rhythm of it filled the spaces between Leon’s keystrokes, between the turning of pages, between each new revelation of how thoroughly the family I’d inherited had been hollowed out from the inside.

At some point, a servant appeared in the doorway with a fresh pot of coffee and a plate of sandwiches. She set them on the corner of the desk, touched my shoulder once—brief, warm, gone—and left without a word.

I drank the coffee, ate half a sandwich without tasting it, and went back to the numbers.

By two in the morning, the cold had worked its way into my hands. The study felt like the inside of a tomb. Leon’s screen cast the only light, blue and steady, illuminating the stack of ledgers and the growing list of problems neither of us had said out loud yet.

We didn’t need to. The numbers said enough.

The mountain had gone fully dark by the time we finished the list. No moon. Just the black bulk of the terrain against a starless sky, and the estate windows glowing amber in the distance like the place was burning from the inside out.

Three guards. Loyalty logs clean as a surgeon’s blade, every call and text and shift rotation tracing back to Alexios Romano’s circle with the kind of precision that made the betrayal almost admirable.

Almost.

I handled the first one myself. Found him at the east perimeter post, hunched in a fleece jacket with a radio crackling at his hip. Young. Maybe twenty-five. Dark hair, nervous eyes that didn’t know how to lie yet. He stood when he saw me coming, back straightening on instinct.

“Boss.” The word came out steadier than he expected.

I gave him points for that.

I didn’t waste time on speeches. “Your last shift was two hours ago. You’re relieved.”

He blinked. “I’m on until six—”

“Not anymore.” I handed him an envelope. Cash, enough for a bus ticket and three months’ rent somewhere that wasn’t here. More than he deserved. “Front gate. Don’t come back.”

The second one was in the garage, wiping down a Mercedes he had no business touching. Older. Forty, maybe. Salt-and-pepper stubble, the kind of calm that came from having made his peace with whatever happened next.

He took the envelope without opening it, nodded once, and then walked to the gate without looking back.

Smart man.

The third put up a fight. Or tried to. Big guy, former military by the way he carried himself, hands that had seen real work. He was in the guardhouse when I found him, feet up on the desk, a paperback novel open in his lap that he didn’t bother to hide. Something by Steinbeck.

I almost liked him for that.

“You’re Alexios’s man,” I said.

Not a question.

He looked at me. Really looked, the way few people did—taking in the scar, the tattoos, the cold set of my mouth. Then he smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. “Geno would have shot me for reading on duty.”

“Geno’s dead.” I didn’t move. Didn’t need to. “Walk or I throw you through that window. Your choice.”

He walked. Slowly. Deliberately. Making sure I knew he was leaving because he wanted to, not because I’d asked. I let him have the fiction. It cost me nothing.

Two others got reassigned. Sent to the lake path, the stables—places where they could be watched without being useful. Leon made the notations. Updated the rotation sheets. The old guard’s homophobia and their nostalgia for Geno’s brutality had just become someone else’s problem.

At three in the morning, Leon sat at the security console and sent the word. Six men. My dock crew. The ones I’d built from nothing, from the fringes of the family nobody else wanted, men who’d worked alongside me in the cold and the dark when Geno’s name still meant something and mine meant less than nothing. They’d come.

They always came.

The old guard was finished. Not with ceremony. Not with fanfare. With a few keystrokes and the quiet certainty that by morning, the men who’d been loyal to Geno would be outnumbered by the men who were loyal to me.