The Devils in the Details (Mafia Mayhem: The Italian Connection #3)

Chapter One

The Devils in the Details

AJA FOXX

~ Aristoteles ~

The weight of three centuries pressed down from every limestone block of the Romano villa.

I’d walked these halls before, but never like this—never as the man who owned them, rather than the bastard the family kept in the wings.

The main corridor stretched ahead of me, wide-plank floors creaking under my boots in a rhythm that sounded like acknowledgment.

Or maybe a warning.

Leon was a half-step behind my right shoulder, where he’d been for years. I didn’t need to check to know he was there. His breathing was steady, his gaze scanning the same rooms I was scanning, but from a different angle—security first, decorations somewhere down the list.

The silence between us was comfortable. We’d built it on the docks, in the dark, in places where talking got you killed.

The ceilings in the formal rooms soared high enough that our footsteps echoed. Voices carried. My father Geno Romano had probably liked that—the way a quiet word could fill a room, make a threat sound bigger than it was. It meant every conversation was public whether you wanted it to be or not.

I didn’t like it.

Gold and burgundy tapestries lined the library walls, faded to the color of old blood. Nobody had touched them in years. Dust sat on the shelves in a fine layer that caught the light from the arched windows.

Through the glass, I could see the formal gardens—or what was left of them.

Ragged hedgerows, gravel paths disappearing under weeds, late-season roses hanging on by stubbornness more than anything else.

The lavender beds had gone wild, spilling over the stone borders like they’d given up on being contained.

It smelled of dust and history and something else underneath—lemon oil, wood smoke from the deep stone fireplaces, and the faint tang of neglect.

Staff appeared in doorways and at the ends of corridors as we passed. Housekeepers, groundskeepers, security men whose faces I recognized from Geno’s time.

They stood at attention, backs straight, eyes forward. Wary. Every one of them clocked and filed away. The older ones looked at me and saw a dock worker who’d gotten lucky. The younger ones looked at me and saw whatever Leon had told them to see.

I didn’t care what they saw. I cared what they did.

The study was the last room on the east wing. I stopped in the doorway. The smell hit me before anything else—that expensive, wrong cologne Geno had worn, something with too much cedar and not enough honesty.

It lingered in the fabric of the leather chair, in the curtains, in the air itself like the man had stamped his presence into the walls and the reparation payments hadn’t been enough to scrub it out.

“All of this needs to be replaced before Mother arrives.” She needed no reminders of the man that had betrayed her.

My lighter flicked open in my fist. Closed. Open. The tiny flame caught the light from the window, held it for a second, then died.

Behind me, Leon was silent. He knew better than to fill the space.

I moved on.

The glass-roofed atrium came next. The indoor pool lay still and dark, the underwater lights switched off.

At night, Leon had told me, the whole room glowed blue from below, turning the water into something alive.

I made a mental note to see it. Not for the beauty.

For the security angle—all that glass, all those sight lines.

Pretty meant vulnerable in my world.

The basement corridor was colder. Bare stone walls, fluorescent strips overhead casting everything in that flat, institutional light that made even healthy people look sick.

The armory door stood open at the far end, racks of weapons visible inside. Beyond it, the cells. I didn’t go in. I didn’t need to. The smell of cold earth, damp limestone, and a hint of copper told me everything about what those rooms had been used for.

The fifteen-car garage was the one concession to pure function I could respect. Modern steel roll doors, concrete floor, the kind of space built for utility rather than show.

A row of vehicles sat under covers—Geno’s collection, most of it. I’d have Leon move them. Sell what we didn’t need. The family was bleeding money and sentimentality was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

We finished the circuit and came back to the main hall. The wrought-iron staircase rose overhead, dark walnut banister worn smooth from generations of hands.

Under it, the staff had assembled. Two dozen people lined up in silence, waiting for the man who’d inherited a broken family with a ruined name to tell them what came next.

I looked at their faces. I looked at Leon, standing at my shoulder like he’d been carved there. The lighter was warm in my palm. I didn’t flick it.

Not yet.

The staff didn’t fidget. They didn’t whisper. They stood in their lines under the wrought-iron staircase with the kind of stillness that only comes from genuine fear, and I respected that.

Fear was honest.

I let the silence stretch. Let them feel it. The main hall was cold, the kind of cold that seeped up from stone floors and settled in your joints if you stood still too long. Nobody shifted their weight. Nobody coughed.

Good.

When I spoke, my voice stayed low. I didn’t raise it. I never needed to. “Three rules.” The words carried in the high ceiling, found their own echo. “Absolute loyalty to this house. Absolute silence about its business. Zero contact with anyone from Geno Romano’s inner circle.”

I paused. Let it land.

“The front gate is open. Anyone unwilling to comply, walk through it. Now.”

Silence. No shuffling. No exchanged glances. No movement toward the door. Twenty-four people standing exactly where they’d been standing, eyes forward, breathing controlled.

I looked at each face. Held each gaze for the count of two. Some held steady. Some dropped. One of the older groundskeepers—a man with silver at his temples and the weathered hands of someone who’d worked soil his whole life—met my eyes without flinching. I filed him away.

Useful.

Nobody moved for the door.

Acceptance, then. Or the appearance of it.

I’d take either for now.

I nodded once. Leon stepped forward, handed a sheet of paper to the head housekeeper—a woman in her fifties with a tight bun and the wary eyes of someone who’d survived multiple regime changes. She took it without looking at it. Smart.

“New rotations,” Leon said. His voice was flat, informational. Nobody asked questions.

I turned and walked toward the study. Leon fell in beside me. The hinged panel in the study wall swung open at a touch, revealing the security office on the other side.

The contrast was jarring. One side of the wall: dark wood, brass fittings, leather-bound books, the lingering ghost of Geno’s cologne. The other side: matte screens glowing blue under low light, keyboards, the hum of servers. Two worlds pressed together, neither comfortable in the other’s skin.

Leon settled at the console. His fingers moved over the keyboard without looking. Camera feeds populated the center screen—the front gate, the perimeter wall, the garage, the lake path. Personnel files stacked on the right monitor, contact logs on the left.

I took the desk chair. Rolled my sleeves to mid-forearm. The silver watch caught the blue light. The ring on my finger—black onyx set in silver—weighed nothing and everything.

The ledgers were leather-bound, heavy, ink-spattered in places where someone had been careless or rushed. I opened the first one. Then the second. The third.

Shell companies. Dozens of them, layered through Cyprus, the Caymans, Luxembourg.

Empty. Drained in the months before Geno’s death, money moved somewhere I couldn’t follow through the paper trail.

Offshore accounts with seven-digit balances whittled down to five, then four, then zero.

Transactions dated the week before the bombing, the week before the sanctions, the week before everything fell apart.

Fifty million dollars in reparation payments. D’Angelo, Borelli, Sabatino. Fifteen million already paid, bleeding the family’s liquid reserves dry. Thirty-five million outstanding, chained to payment schedules that gave us eighteen months before the next installment came due.

The debts didn’t wait politely. They crowded the margins of every page, interest compounding in red ink that looked almost cheerful against the yellowed paper.

Shipping contracts defaulted. Protection rackets scaled back after Geno’s men got sloppy.

A wine import business that should have been printing money, running at a loss because the distributor had been skimming for years and nobody had noticed.

Or nobody had cared.

My lighter clicked open. Closed. Open. The tiny flame held steady for a count of three before I snapped it shut.

The study grew colder as the night deepened. The ancient radiator under the window clanked once and fell silent. Outside, the mountain wind picked up, driving against the glass with a sound like someone testing the locks.

Leon worked through the personnel files. Every guard, every driver, every man who’d carried a weapon for Geno Romano. He cross-referenced against contact logs, against shift rotations, against the dates money had started disappearing from accounts.

His expression didn’t change. Nothing surprised him. Nothing surprised me, either. Betrayal was the oldest currency in this business, and Geno had spent it like water.

“Three,” Leon said finally. Not a question. A statement.

I nodded.

He made a note. Moved to the next file.

The stack of ledgers grew. I worked through them methodically, page by page, the numbers getting worse the deeper I went.

By midnight, my coffee had gone cold and my shoulders had locked into the kind of stiffness that came from too many hours in one position.

I didn’t stop. Stopping meant admitting how bad it was, and I wasn’t ready to do that yet.