Turo
The funeral home smells like lilies and bleach. Death dressed in perfume. Cleaned, sanitized, made polite enough that civilians can walk through and pretend grief is the only thing that happens in rooms like this.
My shoes click on the tile as I enter, and every sound feels too sharp. Too exposed. The kind of acoustics designed to make you whisper. Rossi chose it for that. They wanted the room to swallow screams.
I don’t look around like a tourist. I take inventory. Left wall: framed landscapes meant to soften the mind. Behind them, drywall. Easy to hide wiring, easy to hide microphones.
Ceiling: low. Lights recessed. Shadows pooled in corners.
Air vents: large enough for sound to travel, small enough to conceal a camera.
Exits: exactly where Lucia said. Two doors out of the meeting room. Both narrowing into a corridor that turns before it opens. Perfect for a choke point. Perfect for turning men into targets.
And then there’s the “staff.” Three men in black slacks and crisp white shirts, moving with forced casualness. One carries a tray. One adjusts a flower arrangement. One wipes a table that doesn’t need wiping.
They aren’t Rossi’s.
They’re mine. Matteo’s work. Lucia’s warning made it possible.
I don’t let my gaze linger on them. I don’t acknowledge them with a nod. They know the rules. If I recognize them, Rossi recognizes them. So I let my eyes slide over the room as if I’m checking the décor. As if this is, in fact, a peace meeting.
Across the space, the Rossi delegation waits.
Too many men for diplomacy. Their underboss, Vittorio Rossi, stands near the far end of the long table, hands open, posture relaxed.
He wears a suit like a man wears skin: comfortably, as if violence is just another organ. His smile is bright. It’s also empty.
Beside him: a consigliere with soft eyes and a thin mouth, and three “guards” whose jackets fit wrong over their shoulders because they’re hiding bulk. Weapons. I can smell it on them. Not gun oil. Confidence. The kind that makes men sloppy.
Vittorio spreads his arms. “Turo.”
I return his smile with one of my own. The kind that doesn’t reach my eyes.
“Vittorio.”
We exchange the performance of respect. Handshake.
A brief squeeze. Eye contact long enough to imply equality, not long enough to imply intimacy.
My men spread into position behind me, exactly as planned.
The Rossi men mirror them. It’s almost comical: two groups pretending they’re not measuring angles and distances like hunters.
The table is long. Heavy. Polished enough to reflect faces. A thing meant to look civilized.
A thing that can be flipped into a barricade in half a second.
Lucia’s voice is in my head as I move toward it. Choke points. Catering. Flowers. Toast.
I sit in the seat that gives me the widest line of sight. My back to a wall, not a door. My men take positions where they can see the exits without blocking them.
Vittorio sits opposite me. He’s too relaxed for a man genuinely seeking peace.
That’s the first confirmation.
The second is the flowers. Tall arrangements in thick vases. Greenery dense enough to hide hands. Placed near corners, exactly where they’d give cover for movement. Exactly where Lucia said.
My mouth goes dry. Not with fear. With clarity. Lucia was absolutely right. This was never peace. This was a kill box with tablecloths.
Vittorio begins the conversation. Territory. Boundaries. Mutual respect. The same words men have used for centuries to dress up greed.
I answer with the right responses. Calm. Measured. Professional. I let him think I’m in the rhythm. I let him feel control. Because if you want a man to expose himself, you don’t spook him early. You let him commit to the idea that he’s winning.
His consigliere slides a folder across the table. “Proposals,” he says.
I open it. Blank pages. Not literally, but effectively. Words that mean nothing. Concessions designed to corner me. Vittorio watches my face. His eyes flick not to my eyes, but to my hands. He’s waiting for tension. For tells.
I keep my fingers loose. Inside my jacket, my gun sits against my ribs like a second heartbeat.
Ten minutes pass. The room hums with restrained violence. I watch Vittorio’s eyes. I watch his men shift. I watch the “staff” move, too casual, too present.
I wait. Because that’s what dons do. We wait until the other man shows his hand. Then we take the whole arm.
Vittorio’s voice is smooth. “We both want stability.”
My jaw tightens. Stability. Enzo’s word. The word traitors love because it sounds noble.
I keep my face still. “Stability,” I repeat, neutral.
Vittorio leans back. “We’ve heard you’ve had internal complications.”
There it is. A little probe under the ribs.
I lift my brows. “Have you.”
He smiles wider. “Rumors travel.”
“They do,” I agree.
He glances briefly toward the side of the room, toward one of the flower arrangements. So small, most people would miss it. But I don’t. That flicker is a signal. My pulse steadies. This is it.
Vittorio’s underboss gives a slight nod. Not dramatic. Just decision.
And then, like the room has been waiting for permission, movement erupts.
One of Rossi’s “staff” reaches into the flower arrangement.
Hands disappear into leaves. A gun comes out.
Exactly where Lucia predicted. At the same time, two Rossi men shift toward the exits.
Moving to block, to funnel, to turn the corridor into a throat.
They think the table is my trap. They think the exits are theirs. They think I’m ten minutes behind.
I’m not.
I move before the first gun clears the flowers. My hand snaps under my jacket. My chair kicks back. And I flip the table. The heavy slab of wood slams onto its side with a crack that reverberates through the room like thunder. Glasses shatter. Papers scatter.
Cover. Chaos. The first shot fires. It hits wood instead of flesh. My men move as one. Not twenty individuals. A single machine.
The “staff” that Rossi didn’t recognize pulls weapons from trays, from under linens, from places we planted them with Lucia’s blueprint in our heads.
A man in a white shirt at the left exit drops his tray, silverware clattering, and draws a pistol in the same motion.
He fires. Rossi’s blocker at the exit goes down.
The choke point that was supposed to trap me becomes a sealed door for them.
Gunfire explodes. That sound in a funeral home is obscene. Sharp cracks, ricochets, the ugly wet thud of bullets finding bodies.
Twenty seconds. Maybe less.
It feels like a lifetime compressed.
I fire twice. One Rossi guard spins, collapses. Another tries to reach for a weapon near the flowers. Matteo’s man, dressed as a caterer, puts a round through his shoulder, dropping him. The air fills with smoke and lilies and blood.
Vittorio ducks behind his chair, eyes wild now, control gone. His consigliere crawls, scrambling for the second exit. Only to meet another of my planted men already there, gun leveled, calm as prayer.
The exits are ours.
The kill box is theirs.
Rossi’s men realize it all at once. You can see it on their faces: surprise turning into panic turning into rage. They weren’t prepared to be the prey.
Two of my men are hit. One in the arm, one in the thigh. They stay upright. They keep firing. Not critical.
Rossi loses three fast. A fourth drops his weapon and raises his hands, shaking. The room goes quieter in abrupt waves as bodies stop moving and men stop shooting.
The last crack echoes. Then silence falls like a lid.
Vittorio rises slowly, hands up, breathing hard. His face is pale beneath the arrogance.
“Okay,” he says quickly. “Okay. We’re done.”
His voice is too loud in the aftermath, like he’s trying to talk himself back into dominance.
I step around the overturned table. Gun raised. My men pivot with me. Tight formation. Controlled.
I stop a few feet from Vittorio. Look him in the eye. This is the moment he understands what he gambled.
“This was a peace meeting,” he says, desperate to rewrite reality out loud.
I tilt my head slightly. “No,” I say. “It was an execution.”
He swallows. His hands tremble now, the mask slipping.
“And you failed,” I add.
Vittorio’s eyes dart behind me, searching for an exit, for a miracle. There isn’t one.
“Please,” he says, and the word sounds wrong coming from him. It sounds like weakness.
And weakness is the only thing I have never tolerated near my son.
“You tried to kill me in a funeral home,” I say evenly. “You tried to cut off my exits and bury my name in this room.”
His throat bobs. “We thought…”
“You thought we were bleeding,” I finish for him. “You thought Enzo’s death made us weak.”
I step closer. Vittorio flinches. My gun remains steady.
“Message travels,” I say quietly. “Make sure it travels correctly.”
His mouth opens.
I don’t give him another word. I fire once.
He drops.
The room holds its breath.
Then my men begin moving, swift and efficient. Weapons collected. Phones pulled. Photos taken for leverage and proof. Bodies checked. Wounded treated. Evidence wiped clean enough that civilians will only find a narrative someone else wrote for them.
This is what my world does after violence. It tidies. Because disorder invites questions. And questions invite consequences.
I turn away from Vittorio’s body and look at the remaining Rossi men. Those who surrendered, and those still kneeling with hands up, eyes wide.
“You go back,” I tell them, voice calm enough to be terrifying. “You tell whoever’s still breathing over there that the Mancini family is not in chaos. We’re in cleanup.”
One of them nods fast, swallowing hard.
“Try again,” I add, “and you’ll die louder.”
They nod again, frantic.
Good.
I don’t linger. There’s nothing here for me.
Not anymore.
The only thing that matters is getting home.
* * *
In the car, the city looks the same. Gray. Indifferent. Busy. People walking past cafés with no idea how close they are to blood.
My hand finally twitches to my ear. It rises. Touches.
Then I pull my phone. Call Lucia. It rings once. She answers on the first breath.
“Turo?” Her voice is tight, controlled, trying to be calm for Nico even if she stepped into a hallway to take the call.
“You were right,” I say immediately.
A pause. Then I hear the exhale she’s been holding like oxygen was a luxury.
“They tried?” she whispers.
“Yes,” I say. “They sprang it exactly how you saw it. Staff vectors. Flowers. Exits.”
Another breath. “You’re okay?” she asks, and the question carries everything she can’t say in front of our son.
“I’m okay,” I answer. And then, because she deserves truth, not softened, not minimized, I add quietly, “I’m okay because of you.”
Her silence is thick. I can hear the faintest sound in the background. Nico’s voice, small and distracted, asking something about cars.
Lucia’s breath shakes once. “Turo…”
“Lucia,” I say, firm. “It could have been a massacre. Twenty of my men. Me. All in that room. They designed it to wipe us out.”
I swallow. My throat tightens around the image of what could have happened.
“But we flipped it,” I continue. “Because you saw it first.”
Her voice is soft. “I just… I knew the setup was wrong.”
“You didn’t just know,” I say. “You saved my life.” A beat. “And you saved theirs,” I add. “My men. Our people.”
Her breath catches. I can imagine her face. Eyes wide, mouth tight, trying not to cry because crying feels like inviting fate to take more.
“You’re coming home?” she whispers.
“Yes,” I say, and this time the promise feels like a weapon I can enforce. “I’m on my way.”
Another pause. Then, quieter, “Nico asked.”
My chest tightens. “What did he ask?”
“When you’d be home,” she says. “He said it like… like he was trying to be brave.”
My jaw clenches, hard enough to hurt. “I’ll be there,” I say. “Soon.”
I stare at my phone for a second. Then I look out the window. Lucia is my secret weapon. Not because she’s violent. Because she sees the world the way predators do, but she learned it through survival, not ambition.
And no one saw it coming.