Chapter Two #2
I pulled up the security feeds from After Dark first. Santino’s system was good, but I had been given quiet access months ago for “emergency” reasons. Frame by frame I watched her. The way she moved on stage. The small flinch when men got too close. I screenshotted stills and printed them.
Then the real work began.
I worked alone. I always did. No soldiers.
No shared intel. No one to question how deep I went.
By dawn I had her full name. Morena Caruso.
Twenty-one in three years. Daughter of Salvatore Caruso, the traitor Leo had poisoned in a restaurant eight years earlier.
Mother dead of an overdose. One younger half-sister, Camilla, currently living with a man named Dario Rizzo who had a long list of assaults and two sealed juvenile records.
I found the apartment she had grown up in.
The scholarship she had earned and been forced to decline.
The medical records from the night her mother died.
Bank activity that showed every dollar she made at the club went straight to Dario.
Photographs of her leaving After Dark at four in the morning with her head down and her arms wrapped around herself.
I learned the shape of her life until it felt like I had lived the worst parts of it with her.
She was perfect.
No powerful relatives left. No one who would come looking if she disappeared into a marriage she did not choose. Young enough. Broken enough. Beautiful in the exact way that made men stupid and possessive. The pain I had seen on stage was not an act. It was carved into her.
I sat back in the chair as the sky started to lighten over the city. Printed pages and photographs covered the table. Her face looked up at me from a dozen angles. On stage. Leaving the club. One grainy shot from years earlier, a school photo where she had a little softness left in her eyes.
My cock had been hard for hours.
I unzipped and took myself in hand, eyes locked on the clearest of her mid-dance, lips parted, that trapped look in her eyes.
I stroked slow at first, then harder, imagining what it would feel like to be the one who put that expression on her face.
To take every piece of remaining fight out of her and replace it with need.
To fill her until there was no question who she belonged to.
I came with her name in my mouth and the private knowledge that she had no idea I owned her future.
When it was over I cleaned up, lit a cigarette, and stared at the web of her life I had built in one night.
The Vernizzi seat was the goal.
Morena Caruso was going to be the way I took it.
One week later the walls of the penthouse had changed.
Morena’s face was everywhere.
I had stopped pretending the Vernizzi files were the priority.
Every night I sat in the dark and watched the After Dark security feeds from the beginning of her shift until the second she left.
I knew the exact minute she stepped on stage.
I knew which songs made her shoulders tighten.
I knew the precise moment her eyes went empty, the moment she disappeared inside herself so the men watching could not touch what was left.
Some nights I only meant to check the feed for a few minutes.
Those nights turned into hours. My hand would end up around my cock while she danced, slow and reluctant, and I would come to the image of the faint bruises Dario left on her when he thought no one was looking.
Afterward I would sit there breathing hard and force my mind back to the plan.
The plan was simple in the way the most violent things usually are.
I needed the Vernizzi seat empty.
I arranged the meeting through three separate cutouts and a burner that would be at the bottom of the river before sunrise.
The message was clean. A Bratva intermediary with product and a proposal that could move serious weight through the docks the Vernizzi controlled.
I used an old alias I had built years earlier, complete with a paper trail good enough to survive a surface check.
Russian name. Russian history. Just enough arrogance to feel authentic.
They took the bait.
The location was an empty warehouse on the water that had once belonged to a shell company I dissolved six months earlier. No cameras. No nearby traffic. One way in. I arrived three hours early, killed the power to the block, and waited in the dark with a suppressed pistol and a second magazine.
They showed up together, the way arrogant men who believed in safety in numbers often did.
The eldest came first, heavy in a good coat, complaining about the cold. The middle brother followed, looking for an angle. The youngest came last, sharper than the other two, eyes moving across the shadows. None of them brought more than two men total.
I let them step fully inside.
Then I stepped out of the dark and shot the two bodyguards first. Center mass. Quiet. They dropped before either of them finished turning.
The warehouse went very still.
The three Vernizzi brothers stared at me. Recognition did not come. They were looking for a Russian.
“You’re not Bratva,” the youngest said.
“No.”
I shot the eldest through the throat. He went down making wet, useless sounds, hands clamped over the hole like he could hold the blood in. The middle one tried to run. I put two rounds in his back and one in the base of his skull when he hit the concrete. He stopped moving.
The youngest had a gun half drawn. I put a bullet through his hand. The weapon clattered away. He stumbled back against a rusted support beam, face white, eyes wide with the first real understanding of the night.
I walked closer, unhurried.
“You don’t have heirs,” I said. My voice sounded calm even to me. “Your father is old. Your line ends with the three of you. That makes this simple.”
He tried to speak. I shot him in the knee. He screamed and collapsed. The sound echoed off the high metal ceiling and faded.
I crouched in front of him while he clutched the ruined joint and stared up at me with pure animal fear.
“I’m going to take your seat,” I told him. “I’m going to fill it with a wife and children the rest of the families will have to respect. And none of you will be alive to object.”
He opened his mouth. Maybe to beg. Maybe to curse. I did not wait to find out. I stood, placed the barrel against his forehead, and pulled the trigger.
The warehouse fell quiet again except for the soft drip of blood and the distant sound of water against the docks.
I collected the spent casings. I checked each body for pulses that no longer existed. Then I walked out the same way I had come in, locked the door behind me, and drove toward the river to dispose of the gun and the clothes.
By the time the sun rose the Vernizzi sons were a problem that no longer existed.
I went home, showered until the water ran cold, and sat down in front of the wall of Morena’s photographs with a glass of whiskey and a steady heartbeat.
The seat was almost fucking open.
All I needed now was the girl who would make it permanent.