Chapter 1
Power has a sound.
It’s the quiet that falls when I walk into a room and every man remembers who owns his lungs.
The back office of the club hums on the other side of the wall—bass, laughter, ice in glasses—but in here it’s only the tick…tick…tick of the old clock above my head and the careful breathing of the men I raised like wolves.
My captains stand along the paneled walls, polished shoes on polished floors. Alessandro—my underboss—takes the spot to my right, expression carved from stone. Lorenzo, my consigliere, is to my left with a leather folio and the patience of a priest at a confessional.
Across from my desk, the traitor kneels.
“Stand up,” I say.
He lurches to his feet. He’s young—too young—slick dark hair pushed back with cheap gel. A month ago, he was a runner, and we were ready to move him up. He’d earned that much. Tonight, his hands shake.
“Explain.” I don’t raise my voice. I never have to.
He swallows. “The shipment was short, Don. I—I was going to make it right next week. I had a situation. My ma—”
“The shipment was short,” I repeat, because the words mean nothing until I decide they do. “Not because you had a situation. Because you believed my eyes were on other things.”
Something flickers in his gaze. Guilt. Panic. Worse—hope. Hope gets men killed faster than greed.
Alessandro sets a small velvet bag on the desk. Chips spill out—red and gold—the house’s token. Our counting room flagged the serials. He skimmed from us in the most obvious place—my place.
“Who put you up to it?” Lorenzo asks, almost kindly. He’s always kind right before he isn’t.
“No one.” The boy’s throat bobs. “It was me. Just me.”
The room listens to his lie and grows smaller around it.
There are rules. Not because I enjoy them, though some would say I do. Rules are the only difference between us and the men who took my wife five years ago and put her in the ground with the last, soft part of me.
“Look at me,” I say.
He looks. Good. The ones who can’t meet my eyes have already left their bodies.
“You know what this crown costs.” I tap a finger against the desk—a simple ring, platinum, nothing ostentatious. The papers call it a crown because they don’t understand restraint. “You know what it buys. Safety. Bread on your table. Heat in the winter. A family that would bleed for you. And you chose to steal from it.”
A hot silence spreads—shame, fear, loyalty, the cocktail we run on.
He nods, small and jerking. “I’m sorry.”
“Bring his mother the envelope,” I tell Alessandro, and the boy’s head snaps up in shock.
“You’re… you’re letting me—?”
“No.” The word is a blade laid down carefully between us. “I am reminding her that her son was loved, once. Then you will take him to the river and teach him how to count for the last time.”
He breaks then. They often do. Pleas spill out, promises, a mess of words I stop hearing the moment I decide a thing. Decisions are the only mercy I give consistently.
“Dante,” Lorenzo murmurs, a quiet question. He knows I don’t enjoy the theater. He knows I do it anyway.
“I don’t forgive theft,” I say, mostly to the room. Then to Alessandro: “Find out who told him I wasn’t watching.”
We move. The clock ticks. The door opens. Footsteps drag, then fade. My men breathe again without realizing they had been holding their breath.
Lorenzo slides a folder onto the desk, then another. Numbers. Routes. A photo clipped to the second—some politician shaking hands with some donor. Our city in grayscale, corrupt and holy in equal measure.
