And inconvenient.
The morning passes in a blur of phone calls and paperwork.
My new assistant handles the administrative work with surprising competence. She doesn’t speak unless spoken to. Doesn’t ask questions. Brings files when I ask for them and coffee when I need it. Every interaction is clipped, professional, minimal.
She’s adapting.
Around ten-thirty, I find myself at the window again, watching the city below while I wait for a callback from our contact at customs.
The view from this office isn’t subtle. Vincenzo insisted on it when we opened the firm.
“Appearances matter,” he told me. “People need to see success before they believe in it.”
Vincenzo Conti. The old man who pulled me out of a gutter and gave me a purpose.
When we met, I was a fifteen-year-old street rat with dead parents and no family name worth mentioning. Living on scraps and stolen wallets. Childhood like that doesn’t leave you untouched—it either ends you or hones you into something harder.
My phone buzzes. The customs contact. I take the call, but my mind keeps drifting.
“—shipment’s clean on our end, Mr. D’Amico. Documentation looks solid.”
“Good. Make sure it stays that way.”
I hang up and turn back to the window and the past reflected there.
Vincenzo found me trying to pick his pocket outside a restaurant. I was good—better than good—but he was better. Caught my wrist before I even touched his wallet.
I thought he’d break my arm. Instead, he looked at me with those cold, calculating eyes and saw something worth keeping.
“You’ve got quick hands,” he said. “But you’re sloppy. Desperate. Desperation makes you careless.”
I didn’t say anything. Just stared at him, waiting for the blow.
It never came.
“You want to survive? Really survive? I can teach you. But you have to be smart. You have to be patient. And you have to be mine.”
I said yes. What else was I going to say? I had nothing. He was offering everything.
A knock at my door. The assistant—Mendez—with another stack of files.
“The Martinez documents you requested.”
She sets them on my desk and retreats immediately, like proximity to me might burn her.
I watch her go, then turn back to the papers.
Vincenzo paid for my education. Private schools, then law school, then the bar exam. He taught me how to think, how to plan, how to see three moves ahead while everyone else was still reacting. He gave me D’Amico & Associates—not as a gift, but as a tool. A legal fortress so airtight the feds could investigate for a hundred years and never find a single crack to breach.
He built a criminal empire. I built the walls that protect it.
“You’re the son I should have had,” he told me once. “Nico has the name. But you have the brain—and the balls to use it.”
Nico Conti. Vincenzo’s actual son. Heir to the throne I helped build.
The thought sours my mood, right on schedule.
When Vincenzo dies, Nico gets everything—the organization, the power, the legacy. I get to remain exactly what I’ve always been: the help. The fixer. The man who cleans up the mess so the rightful heirs can sleep at night, undisturbed by the details.
