17. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dante
Dante sat at the head of the table, shoulders squared against the cold, his hands folded over a disposable phone already dusted with his fingerprints.
The phone was not ringing, but everyone in the room understood this was a countdown.
He’d assembled the most loyal after midnight: Luca to his right, Marco hunched over the battered MacBook, Elena sitting cross-legged on the marble countertop, face half-lit by the glow of her own phone.
Alina had been sent upstairs with the first draft of a travel itinerary and a mug of black tea; her absence made the air between the men denser, more dangerous.
“Romano,” said the voice, nasal and perfunctory, with the undertow of someone who’d already moved on. “My people say your situation’s escalated.”
Dante’s tone was silk over steel. “I told you it would.”
Romano made a wet, unhurried sigh. “Not worth it. You’re asking for eighty men. Three-day window. That’s a funeral, not a job.”
A pause, then: “We’ve got our own issues. Vescari are sniffing around the east docks already.”
“If you back out now, you lose your cut. The rest of what you built here—”
“I’ll take my chances,” Romano said, and disconnected.
Dante didn’t blink, didn’t speak. He just stared at the screen as if it might reconstitute Romano’s voice, drag him back and force him to listen.
The second call arrived two minutes later: DeLuca’s consigliere, careful and officious, reading from a script. DeLuca never spoke to anyone not in his inner circle, and today was no exception.
“We’re out,” the voice said. “Nothing personal. Not our fight.”
Click.
Elena made a small, incredulous noise, but Marco was already updating the spreadsheet in silence, deleting entire rows with a forefinger that hovered over the trackpad as if hesitant to erase so much history in a single gesture.
The third call was the shortest. Serrano himself, voice thick with contempt. “We won’t bleed for your woman.”
Dante’s jaw twitched. “She’s not—”
But Serrano had already hung up.
Dante crushed the phone in his fist, splintering the cheap plastic and sending fragments skittering across the table.
The others flinched, but not Luca. He’d been waiting for this—for the moment when the last of the allies would peel away, and Dante’s mission would be boiled down to its purest, ugliest necessity.
“They’re cowards,” Dante said. His voice didn’t rise, but the volume of it filled the room like poured concrete. “All of them.”
Luca regarded him, weighing loyalty against the obligation to speak. “They’re protecting their own, boss.”
“They’re condemning us,” Dante said. Not as an accusation, but as fact.
Luca hesitated, glancing sideways at Marco and then at Elena, who had begun to peel a label from her water bottle in thin, surgical strips. “So what now?”
Dante leaned over the map splayed across the table—every Vescari property marked in red Sharpie, every approach route traced and double-underlined.
The east side safe house, the river warehouses, the abandoned shipping containers out near the airstrip.
Each target in isolation looked manageable. Together, they formed a hydra.
He put a palm flat on the table, as if to steady himself or the world. “We do it without them.”
Luca stiffened, a muscle flickering along his jaw. “That’s suicide.”
Dante met his eyes, slow and deliberate. “It’s necessary.”
Luca stepped closer, the bare floor creaking under his boots. “Dante… you’re not thinking clearly.”
Dante’s gaze was steady, but there was a fever in it: the slow-burn mania of someone who’d been awake for three nights and was now living in a hallucination of perfect clarity. “Say that again,” he said, voice low.
Luca didn’t back down. “You’re letting this woman cloud your judgment.”
The silence that followed was so complete it metabolized every sound from the world outside—the wind, the refrigerator hum, the persistent drip from the upstairs tub.
Dante’s heartbeat sounded in his ears like distant artillery.
He closed the map, folding the edges together with the care of someone sealing a wound.
“Choose your next words carefully,” Dante said.
Luca’s expression was raw—dangerously honest. “I’ve followed you into every war.
Every fight. Every impossible situation.
But this? This is different.” He swept a hand toward the map, the whiteboard, the empty space above the table.
“You’re risking everything—the Moretti’s, our men, our future—for someone who wasn’t part of this world until a week ago. ”
Dante’s face was stone, but his hands trembled on the map’s surface. “She is part of my world now.”
“That,” Luca said softly, “is the problem.”
Dante exhaled, a slow, glacial expulsion that seemed to drag something out of him. “You think I don’t know what I’m doing?”
“I think,” Luca said, “you’re in love with her.”
The words didn’t land as an insult or a verdict. They were a pronouncement, the truth that had been pacing the edge of the room for days and now finally entered, uninvited, but impossible to ignore.
Dante froze, the line of his throat pulsing. The world shrank to the perimeter of the butcher block table and the map was still warm from his hands. Luca’s challenge was not a threat—it was an invitation to admit, to own, the thing he’d been avoiding.
For a long time, Dante said nothing. When he did, his voice was so quiet that Elena had to stop peeling the label to hear it. “And love gets men killed.”
Luca’s shoulders dropped, the tension leaving him all at once. “It does. It will.”
There was no defense left. No point in posturing, not here, not now. Dante looked away, not because Luca was wrong, but because he was too close to the truth for Dante to bear.
Finally, Dante said, “I’m ending the Vescari. With or without the families. With or without your approval.”
Luca exhaled, the ghost of a laugh in it, but also a profound sadness. “Then I’m with you. But don’t ask me to pretend this isn’t reckless.”
Dante nodded once, the single decisive movement of a man who had just amputated his own last restraint. “Good,” he said. “Because recklessness is exactly what we need.”
He turned back to the map, reopening the folds and smoothing them flat, hands steady now, every motion precise. In the corner of the room, Marco looked up from his laptop, the blue light reflecting in his glasses like the flicker of a coming storm.
“We’re going to hit the Vescari where it hurts most,” Dante said, and even the dawn outside seemed to flinch from the intent in his voice.