Chapter Three
~ Aristoteles ~
I sat in Geno’s chair. The coffee on the desk was fresh, which was the only improvement I’d made to the room so far, and the only one that mattered at seven in the evening when your back had been in the same position for three hours.
The study was quiet. The kind of quiet that comes after a decision has been made, but before the consequences arrive.
Leon came through the door without knocking.
He never knocked. The sound of his boots on the hardwood was familiar—two steps, pause, the soft creak of the floorboard near the desk that I should have fixed already.
His face was set in its usual neutral configuration, which told me nothing and everything at once.
I set my pen down. Didn’t look up from the ledger. “Thirty million dollars.”
He stopped. I heard his breathing change—the slight intake, held for half a beat longer than it should have been.
“The kid found it. Moved it. Money’s sitting in our accounts like it never left.” I flipped the ledger closed. “Verified it myself. Clean transfer, no flags, nothing any regulator is going to notice unless they’re already looking for it.”
Leon’s jaw worked once. His eyes did something complicated—surprise first, sharp and genuine. His hands stayed at his sides. Perfectly still.
Good man.
“Thirty million,” he said. Flat. The word sat in the air between us like something that weighed more than it should.
“Give or take. Mostly take.” I leaned back.
The chair creaked. Geno’s chair. His ghost in the leather, his ghost in the air, his ghost in every ledger I’d spent the last twelve hours reading.
“Kid looked pleased with himself. Like he’d found my wallet on the street and decided to return it with interest.”
Leon was quiet. I let the silence stretch. He was good at silences. Better than I was, which was saying something.
I watched him. He watched the desk.
“What do you think?” I asked. The question was direct. I didn’t do indirect. Waste of breath, waste of time, and time was the one thing this family couldn’t afford to lose anymore.
Leon considered it. He always considered. Even questions he already had answers for, he considered, which was why he was standing in this room and not buried somewhere on the mountain.
“Useful,” he said. The word came out careful, like he was testing its weight. “Unpredictable. Talks too much.”
“He’s a liability until proven otherwise.”
Leon nodded. “Too comfortable for a man sitting in a room full of people who could make him disappear before lunch.”
I’d noticed that too. The comfort. The way Zephyr had smiled at me like I was an interesting puzzle and not the man who’d buried three guards before breakfast.
“Agreed on all counts,” I said.
Leon waited. He knew there was more.
There was always more.
“Dock crew arrives tomorrow.” I reached for my coffee. Cold. I drank it anyway. “They need assignments before they walk through the gate. I want them integrated fast. No separate rotations, no special treatment. They’re Romano men now. They just don’t know it yet.”
Leon made a note. His handwriting was small and tight, the kind that didn’t waste space.
“Three staff names.” I pushed a folded slip of paper across the desk. “Watch them. Not obviously. The head groundskeeper, one of the kitchen women and the driver who takes Theo into the city twice a week.”
He took the paper. Didn’t look at it. Slid it into his pocket.
“Two positions need filling. Head of security for the estate and someone to handle the wine import business.” I paused. “Neither one goes to anyone who’s spent the last decade eating out of Alexios’s hand.”
Leon’s expression didn’t change, but I saw the calculation happening behind his eyes. Rewriting the organization chart in real time, slotting names into boxes, crossing out the ones that didn’t belong. That’s why I kept him. That quiet, ruthless efficiency.
“There’s more,” I said.
He looked up.
“Security firm. A legitimate private company on paper. Licensed carriers, documented training records, clean payroll. Tax write-off. Government loves organized crime that pays taxes more than organized crime that doesn’t.”
The silence that followed was different.
His head tilted slightly. The pen in his hand went still. Then he nodded. Once. “It’s a good idea.”
Of course it’s a good idea. The kid thought of it in the five minutes he sat in that chair, which is either impressive or embarrassing depending on how long I’ve been running this family without thinking of it myself.
“Look into licensing requirements. Find out which of our people can qualify. Find out which ones have records that make that conversation complicated.” I set my coffee down. “I want names by Friday.”
Leon wrote it down. No commentary. No drama. No questions about whether this was a pivot or a whim or the beginning of something larger. He just wrote it down in that tight, controlled hand and slid the notebook back into his jacket pocket.
This is why I kept him. This exact thing. The absence of noise.
I stood. My back protested—three hours in Geno’s chair had done nothing for the knots between my shoulder blades. The study felt smaller than it had when I walked in. The walls felt closer. The ghost of Geno’s cologne was still there, clinging to the curtains, the desk, the air itself.
“We move fast,” I said. “The families are watching. D’Angelo, Borelli, Sabatino. They took their reparations and they’re waiting to see if the bastard son can rebuild what the legitimate one broke.” I met Leon’s eyes. “I don’t care what they think, but I care what they see.”
He nodded. Understanding without being told. Another reason.
“The dock crew arrives at nine. Be at the gate.”
“I’ll be there.”
I watched him go. The door closed behind him with a soft click that sounded final, like something settling into place.
The study was quiet again. Just me and Geno’s ghost and the thirty million dollars that had walked back home because a man with caramel on his fingers and too many words in his mouth had decided it should.
I picked up my lighter. Flicked it open. Held the flame for a count of three, watching the small orange light dance against the dark wood of the desk. Then I snapped it shut and went back to work.
A while later, my back told me it was done cooperating for the evening. I stood, rolled my shoulders until something cracked, and headed for the kitchen because the coffee in my mug had reached the temperature of regret and I needed something that didn’t taste like my own bad decisions.
The hallway was quiet.
The faint ghost of Geno’s cologne lingered near the study doorway, a stale afterthought of a man whose ghost was proving more persistent than he’d been in life.
I passed the room where I’d put the kid.
Zephyr.
The name sat in my head like something I’d picked up and couldn’t put down.
The door was open. Light spilled into the hallway—warm, yellow, the kind that came from the desk lamp he’d angled toward the wall instead of the papers he was working on. I slowed. Stopped. Didn’t mean to.
My feet made the decision before my brain caught up.
He was bent over the laptop, one foot tucked under him on the chair like he’d forgotten chairs had rules.
A caramel wrapper was crumpled in his left hand.
Three more sat on the desk beside a mug of tea that had gone cold—I could tell from the lack of steam, from the way he hadn’t touched it in the twenty seconds I’d been watching.
He was muttering. Low, fast, under his breath. Italian, maybe. Or Greek. Something with rhythm, something that flowed and stopped and started again when the data on his screen did something he didn’t expect.
His blond hair was doing something artful and entirely unintentional—pushed back from his forehead on one side, falling across his eyebrow on the other, like he’d run a hand through it and then forgotten that hands existed.
His fingers moved over the keys. Fast. Certain. The kind of speed that came from a brain working three steps ahead of the body housing it.
When something on the screen caught his attention, his head tilted—slightly, unconsciously. His mouth moved. Just slightly. The barest shift of his lips, shaping words that never made it past the threshold of sound.
I stood in the doorway and catalogued all of it with the same cold attention I gave to everything that mattered.
That was the problem.
The curve of his neck where it met his shoulder. The way his oversized T-shirt had ridden up to expose a strip of skin above the waistband of his capri pants.
The concentration in his face—brows drawn, lower lip caught between his teeth, the faint line between them that appeared when he was working through something stubborn.
I thought about the desk.
Not this desk. My desk. The mahogany one in the study, wide enough that a man could be spread across it if someone with large enough hands decided that was where he belonged.
I thought about the sound Zephyr would make. Not the muttering. Something else. The sound a man like that would make if I got my hands on him properly—if I pinned him to the desk and watched that fast, clever mouth go slack with something other than words for once.
The image came with the same cold clarity I applied to everything—detailed, specific, merciless.
His back arched. His hips lifted. That strip of skin above his waistband under my palm, warm and yielding.
The gasp that would break out of him when I bit the junction of his neck and shoulder hard enough to leave a mark that would remind him who owned it every time his shirt collar brushed against it.
I catalogued it all. The width of the desk. The angle of his hips. The way his fingers would curl against the wood, white-knuckled, his rings catching the light.
The exact shade his skin would turn when flushed—pink climbing his throat, blotching his chest, the kind of color that made a man look like he was coming apart from the inside.
Christ.
I stepped back from the doorway like it had burned me.