Chapter 2
RAFFAELE
The legal briefs blur in front of me.
I’ve been staring at the same paragraph for ten minutes.
Something about offshore accounts and shell corporations—the usual financial origami that keeps federal investigators chasing their own tails.
Normally, this is the part of the job I enjoy.
Finding the cracks in the system. Exploiting them before anyone realizes they exist.
Today, I can’t focus.
I push back from my desk and check my watch. 9:28 AM. The city sprawls beyond my window, glass and concrete and millions of people going about their meaningless little lives. From up here, they look like ants. Busy. Purposeless. Easily crushed.
A siren wails somewhere far below. Ambulance, probably. Someone’s emergency. Someone’s worst day.
I turn back to the file.
Carlo Conti. Nico’s nephew. Twenty-three years old, IQ barely scraping double digits, and somehow managed to get himself caught on camera assaulting a bartender who cut him off. The video’s already circulating online. By noon, it’ll be on every local news station.
I flip through the preliminary report. Witnesses. Security footage. The bartender’s medical records—broken orbital bone, shattered cheekbone, possible permanent vision damage.
Carlo didn’t just hit him. He beat him half to death while his friends filmed it, laughing.
Fucking idiot.
The Conti organization has survived for three generations because it knows how to stay invisible. We don’t make headlines. We don’t leave evidence. We certainly don’t assault civilians on camera for refusing to serve us another vodka tonic.
But Carlo is family. And family gets protected.
No matter how much they deserve to rot.
I reach for my phone, scroll through contacts until I find the name I’m looking for. Judge Harrison. He owes me a favor—actually, he owes me about seven, accumulated over a decade of making his gambling debts disappear.
The phone rings twice before he picks up.
“Raffaele.” His voice is cautious. It always is when I call. “What can I do for you?”
“Carlo Conti. The assault video.”
A pause. I can hear him breathing, calculating the cost of refusal.
“That’s... that’s a lot of exposure. The video’s everywhere. Suppressing it would require—”
“I’m not asking for a cost-benefit analysis, Harrison. I’m telling you what needs to happen.”
Another pause.
“You know, Harrison. There are certain photographs,” I continue, “from a bachelor party in Atlantic City. 2019, if I recall correctly. Lovely blonde. Looked barely legal, but I’m sure she was.” I pause. “Mostly sure.”
The line goes quiet.
“The video will be handled,” he says finally.
“I knew you’d see reason.”
I hang up before he can respond. The witnesses will develop sudden amnesia by end of day—I’ll have Lorenzo’s people handle that. The bartender’s lawyer is already negotiating a settlement generous enough to buy his silence and a new face.
Problem solved. Another fire extinguished.
This is what I do. Clean up messes made by men too stupid to avoid making them in the first place. The fixer. The cleaner. The legitimate face of illegitimate money.
D’Amico & Associates exists for one reason: so the feds can never trace anything back to Vincenzo Conti.
I close Carlo’s file and toss it aside. The motion sends a stack of papers sliding across my desk—depositions from the Martinez case, financial records, shipping manifests. Work that actually matters, if I could make myself focus on it.
A knock at my door. Light. Hesitant.
“Come in.”
The door opens, and she appears.
The new girl. Mendez.
She’s carrying a cup of coffee on a saucer, and her hands are trembling so badly the porcelain rattles with every step. The sound fills my office—a tiny, percussive reminder of her fear.
She looks like she didn’t sleep last night. Dark circles under her eyes and a pallor to her skin that suggests she spent the hours questioning every decision that led her to this moment.
Smart girl. She should be afraid.
She sets the coffee on my desk, careful to avoid the scattered papers. The cup clinks against the saucer one final time before she releases it.
“Your coffee, Mr. D’Amico.”
I lean back in my chair and study her now that I have the time.
Yesterday was chaos—all adrenaline and snap decisions. I’d caught her reflection in the window, heard her sharp intake of breath, and my first instinct was the same as always: eliminate the liability.
She’d heard enough to ruin everything. One phone call, and she’d be dead before sunset—filed away as a tragic accident.
Standard procedure. Regrettable, but necessary.
I’d already reached for my phone.
Then she looked at me.
The memory comes back without warning: her in the elevator, pressed against the back wall like distance alone might save her. The fear was there—obvious, physical—but it wasn’t all of it.
Most people break at that point. Panic, plead, grasp for anything that might delay the inevitable.
She didn’t.
She watched. Looking for an angle.
My coffee sits untouched on the desk, already cold.
“We’re going to be working closely together,” I say. “Formality seems unnecessary.”
“I’d prefer to keep it professional, Mr. D’Amico.”
Would you, now.
Interesting.
I stand.
She tenses. I see it in the sudden stiffness of her shoulders, the way her weight shifts slightly backward. Ready to run.
But she doesn’t. She holds her ground, even as I move around the desk toward her.
It reminds me of someone.
A kid, fifteen years old, standing in front of a man who could have killed him with a word. Not running. Not begging. Just waiting, calculating, deciding whether to fight, to survive.
That was twenty-five years ago.
“You’re not here because of your preferences.”
I stop a few feet away—well within her space, close enough that she can’t ignore me.
“You’re here because I control your silence. Your work. Your time.” A slight pause. “Everything.”
She holds her ground.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
I tilt my head slightly. “Yes, what?”
She hesitates. I can see it in the tension of her shoulders, the way her hands curl at her sides. Resistance, stubborn and pointless.
It won’t last.
“...Yes, Raffaele.”
Hearing my name like that—quiet, reluctant—lands harder than it should. A brief, unwelcome heat settles low, gone as quickly as it comes.
Noted.
“Get me the Martinez files.”
She turns without another word.
I watch until the door closes behind her. Only then do I exhale.
Interesting.
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.
It’s a good arrangement. For him.
I agreed to it. Knew the terms from the beginning.
Doesn’t mean I have to enjoy watching it play out.
I push the thought aside and turn back to the Martinez files. Shipping routes. Customs inspections. The quiet, precise choreography of moving product without attracting attention.
This is what matters.
This is what keeps everything running.
Around eleven, there’s a knock at my door. Not the hesitant tap of my assistant—this one is confident, familiar.