Chapter Five
~ Aristoteles ~
The study smelled of cigarette smoke that had settled into the curtains thirty years ago and decided to stay. I could taste it on the back of my tongue every time I breathed, faint and stale and persistent—the ghost of Geno’s habits haunting a room he’d left behind.
I didn’t open the windows. The smoke didn’t bother me. What bothered me was the way my brain kept returning to Zephyr Kontos when I had six armed men waiting at the long table and a family to restructure.
Unacceptable.
Forty-eight hours. That’s how long he’d been in the house. Two days. Not enough time for a man to become a problem. Not unless the man was five-foot-five, blond, and carried himself like he’d been invited.
Which he had been. By me. A decision I was reclassifying from “operational necessity” to “catastrophic judgment error” approximately every twelve minutes.
The curve of his neck where it met his shoulder.
The way his oversized T-shirt rode up when he reached for something on a high shelf in the kitchen yesterday morning.
The sound he made when he was concentrating—a low mutter, half in Italian, half in whatever language his brain defaulted to when the math got complicated.
I wanted to put my hands on him. Not professionally.
Not the way a boss puts hands on an employee.
The way a man puts hands on something he’s decided belongs to him, and I had decided Zephyr Kontos belonged to me approximately four minutes into the interview, which was the kind of thinking that would get a man killed in my line of work.
Good thing I was the one who did the killing.
The lighter clicked open in my palm, held steady, snapped shut. Open. Shut. The rhythm of it matched my pulse, which was steadier than it had any right to be, given the circumstances.
The meeting room adjoined the study through a set of carved double doors that had probably been impressive once. Dark walnut paneling, floor-to-ceiling, the grain gone soft with age.
A single overhead light—one of the old brass fixtures Geno had never bothered to replace—threw a warm yellow glow over the long table and the six men seated around it.
My dock crew. The ones who’d worked the docks with me, unloading contraband in the dark while the harbor patrol looked the other way. Big men with rough hands and the quiet competence of people who’d learned that the loudest guy in the room was usually the first one to get shot.
They sat in the high-backed chairs with their shoulders straight and their hands visible on the table. No slouching. No leaning. The kind of posture men adopt when they understand exactly who’s in the room with them and what that person is capable of.
Leon stood at my right shoulder. His arms were loose at his sides, he was breathing even, and there was a definite bulge of his firearm riding his hip under his jacket.
I didn’t sit. Standing worked better. Standing let me look down the table at all six of them at once, and looking down was a language these men understood.
“Three positions,” I said. My voice stayed low. I didn’t need to raise it. The room was quiet enough that the sound of my lighter opening and closing carried to the far end of the table, and every man in the room had worked with me long enough to know it meant something was being calculated.
“I want two men on the Livorno port. You handle the shipping contracts, the inspections, the customs officers who need reminding that certain containers stay closed. Marco and Santino. You’ve done it before. Do it again.”
Two heads nodded. No questions. Good.
“Florence palazzo perimeter. Two men. Rotating shifts, twelve hours on, twelve off. You answer to Leon. Not to me, not to anyone else. Leon tells you where to stand, you stand there until he tells you to move.”
More nods.
“I want two of you on the villa estate outside Livorno. One of you watches the perimeter for movement. You radio it in if you see anything out of place. “You don’t engage unless Leon says otherwise.”
I glanced at everyone to make sure they were hearing me and what I wanted.
“One of you is inside. You’re armed and you’re the last thing anyone sees if they get past the perimeter,” I said.
“Territories are clear. Chain of command is clear. You report to Leon, Leon reports to me. Anything you see, anything you hear, anything that doesn’t smell right—Leon hears it first. I hear it second. No exceptions.”
I paused. Let it settle.
“What I expect is simple. You do the job I’ve given you. You do it without complaint, without commentary, and without drawing attention to yourselves. You are Romano men now. You carry the name. You don’t get to pick which parts of it you like.”
Another pause. Longer this time. The cigarette smoke hung in the air between us, old and patient.
“What happens when I don’t get what I expect is also simple. You find another family. Or you find another line of work. Or you don’t find anything at all. Your choice.”
Silence. The good kind. The kind that meant everyone in the room had heard the sentence and understood exactly what lived in the spaces between the words.
The meeting ran forty minutes. It should have run an hour.
I cut the speeches, cut the inspiration, cut everything that didn’t need to be said because men like these didn’t need to be told why they were here.
They needed to be told what to do, and they needed to believe that the man telling them would notice if they didn’t do it.
I noticed everything. That was the point.
They filed out without lingering. One by one, through the double doors, boots soft on the hardwood, the sound of them fading down the corridor toward the kitchen where coffee was waiting. No handshakes. No backslapping. No unnecessary noise.
Just six men walking away with assignments and the quiet certainty that the man who’d given them those assignments would know, within hours, whether they were doing them right.
Leon stayed. Of course he stayed. Leon was the kind of man who considered “dismissed” a suggestion rather than an order when it came to standing at my shoulder, which was why he was still there and why I’d stopped trying to change it years ago.
“You’re thinking about him,” Leon said. Not a question. A statement of fact, delivered with the flat precision of a man reading a weather report.
I didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. Leon had been reading my silences since we were unloading shipping containers in the rain at three in the morning, and he’d gotten better at it than most people got at actual conversation.
“The vendor list came back clean,” he said, switching tracks without waiting for confirmation.
“Five names. Two kitchen staff, one driver, the head groundskeeper, the woman who handles the linen service. None of them have contact with Alexios that we can trace. Phone records are clean. Bank records are clean.”
“Someone talked,” I said.
“Someone always talks.”
“Find out who.”
He nodded. Made a note in that tight handwriting of his, the pen moving across the page with the efficiency of a man who considered words a luxury.
I crossed to the window. The mountain spread below the estate, green and vast and quiet in the late afternoon light.
Zephyr was out there somewhere. I could feel it—the thickness of the air when he was in a room, the way the silence changed around him, became something attentive and slightly charged, like the atmosphere before lightning.
I wanted to know what sound he’d make. Not the muttering. Something else. The sound a man makes when he has nowhere to go and the person who’s put him there is close enough that he can feel the heat.
The lighter clicked. Open. Shut. Open.
This was a problem. A significant one. The kind of problem that didn’t get solved with knives or threats or the cold silence that had served me for thirty-two years.
The kind of problem that got worse the longer I let it sit.
I turned from the window. The study was empty except for Leon and the ghost of Geno’s cigarette smoke and the weight of a decision I hadn’t made yet, but could feel approaching, inevitable as weather.
Back to work. The family didn’t run itself. The ledgers didn’t balance themselves. The vendor fraud needed handling, and somewhere in Florence, a man with caramel on his fingers was doing something with my thirty million dollars that I hadn’t authorized and couldn’t bring myself to stop.
The lighter snapped shut. I slipped it into my pocket and reached for the next problem on the list. There were fifty-three of them. None of them were named Zephyr Kontos.
Not on paper, anyway.
The phone lit up on the table, a soft buzz against walnut, the screen brightening to blue-white in the dim study, cutting through the haze like something that didn’t belong there.
I looked at it. I always look at phones when they light up. In my world, phones that light up at the wrong time usually mean someone’s dead or about to be, and I prefer to know which.
This was worse.
A photograph. High resolution, clean angle—street camera or phone, didn’t matter.
The image was sharp enough to count the pores on Theo Romano’s face as he walked down a Florence sidewalk, his head turned slightly toward the camera, his expression the blank pleasantness he wore when he thought no one was watching him.
Underneath, text. Zephyr’s text. I recognized the cadence before I registered the words, which was its own kind of problem.
Do you know this man? He’s been following me for the last six blocks.
I was on my feet before the last word processed.
Chair scraping hardwood, the sound loud in the quiet room.
My hand was already moving—a single gesture, flat-palmed, cutting sideways through the air—and Leon was already turning toward the door because that’s what happened when I gestured.
No questions. No clarification. The gesture meant move, and Leon moved.