Chapter 3
Vincenzo Corsetti's POV
The office on the fourteenth floor of the Corsetti building had a view of the harbor that most people in this city would have paid serious money for.
I didn't care, I was working.
I was working through a stack of port authority documents that Marco had flagged earlier in the week, cross-referencing the shipping manifests against our actual inventory numbers.
I had circled three separate line items in red when the knock came at the door.
"Come in," I said.
It was Marco, my head of intelligence and the closest thing I had to a second brain in this organization. Right now his expression carried that particular flatness he reserved for news that required action rather than discussion.
"We found Petrov," he said.
I set down my pen.
Aleksei Petrov. For the better part of three months, he had been using our port operations as cover, running heroin through our shipping channels without authorization.
The Corsetti family had moved plenty of things that kept lawyers busy, and drugs had once been among them.
I had made the rules clear on my first day back in St. Jude. No drugs. No human trafficking. Every single person in this family knew that.
"Where," I said.
"Loading dock on the north side of the old meatpacking plant, down in the district. He had a bag with him. Looks like he was planning to move product tonight."
"How many with him?"
"Two. Local hires. Not family."
I closed the folder and reached for my coat.
It was cold out, and Petrov's blood would still be warm when it hit the ground. Small mercies.
The Meatpacking District smelled like rust and old ice, even from the street. The plant had been decommissioned for years, but that kind of smell had a way of staying in the walls long after everything else was gone.
Petrov was zip-tied to a support beam when I walked in, his two hired hands already kneeling against the far wall under Rio's watch.
"You knew the rules when you came on," I said.
He did not answer that.
"No drugs. No trafficking." I said it the same way I had said it the first day I took the port, without heat. "You ran heroin through my channels for three months. Through the same corridors we use to move everything else."
"It was contained," he said. "Separate manifests, separate handlers. It never touched your—"
"It touched my port," I said. "That's where it touched."
He made a sound that was not quite a word, something caught between a protest and a plea.
"Don Corsetti."
The formal address came out cracked at the edges, stripped of whatever dignity it usually carried.
"Before you came back, this was standard. Every crew ran product through the port. Your father's men, the elders, everyone. I did not invent this. I only did what this family did for twenty years before you changed the rules."
"You're right," I said. "They did."
He looked up, and I could see the flicker of something in his eyes, the dangerous, miscalculating hope of a man who thinks he has found an opening.
"And where are they now," I said. It was not a question.
The flicker died.
"I came back and I cleaned it out," I said. "Every crew that ran drugs through my channels, every elder who thought the old way was the permanent way. You were there for that. You watched it happen. You wanted to gamble on the old rules still having teeth. Fine. You can go meet them. I hear hell runs on the same currency."
Rio's hand moved to his holster.
"Outside," I said, without looking at him.
Rio's hand stilled. He looked at me.
"Move him outside," I said. "I don't want blood in here."
Marco nodded once and reached for Petrov's arm.
A moment later, Rio's shot came, single and clean, the sound swallowed almost immediately by the falling snow and the particular silence of a city buried under three inches of it.
I was pulling on my gloves and heading back toward the street exit when I heard voices outside.
We moved toward the exit, and through the falling snow the scene outside resolved itself piece by piece: a scooter tipped on its side near the curb, two hooded men and a woman caught in the space between them.
One of the men had a knife, my eyes moved to the woman.
Her fingertips were locked against her zipper, trembling slightly, her whole body drawn tight in the rigid, involuntary stillness of someone who had run out of options.
I raised one hand. Rio understood.
He fired wide and low, a clean warning shot that cracked off the pavement and sent the echo rolling out flat across the empty street.
People froze when they heard gunshots at close range.
I gave her no more attention than that.
I had fired that warning shot only to chase off the two thugs harassing some random girl out on the snowswept street. I had no intention of dragging an innocent bystander into our internal family reckoning.
I turned to Marco and said it quietly, "La sentenza è stata eseguita."
Then I caught it.
Her single step back.
Then her voice drifted over on the frigid night air, carrying farther than she must have meant for it to travel.
Every quiet murmur reached my ears sharp and clear.
"Made men. Sitdown. Family business."
She deployed those terms perfectly.
"Family business" spoken in that exact, guarded context did not belong to outsiders. You only learned that kind of vernacular through close, constant proximity to this world.
The two men walked away without looking back.
I watched her watch them go.
She was running a calculation, using their exit as a test, waiting to see whether we let two witnesses walk away clean before she committed to doing the same thing herself. The concern in her voice, the steadiness, the precise calibration of how much to tell them and how much to withhold — none of it had been for their benefit. It had been for hers.
Whoever she was, whatever corner of this world she had grown up in, she had not gotten that from luck. That kind of composure was earned.
That interesting.
I let her get as far as swinging the scooter around, and then I nodded to Rio.
Rio fired the second shot.
"Bring her to me," I said.
