Page 11 of The Hitman's Secret Baby
Smoke drifts from food stalls, curling around people moving through narrow streets.
In the distance, the skyline rises, sharp and unmoving against the sky.
The districts are divided in invisible ink—each block, each business, each corner of this city belonging to someone.
Some streets are owned by old Sicilian bloodlines, their power inherited, respected.
Others are run by the Irish, the Russians, the Dominicans—groups that rose and fell like tides, shifting with every decade, every war.
But the real power?
It sits in the smoke-filled rooms of men who don't flinch at the sound of a gunshot in the night.
It lies in the ink of contracts that dictate the price of blood, in the unmarked bills exchanged between outstretched hands, in the shipments that arrive under the cover of darkness, carrying goods worth more than human lives.
It's in the docks, where shipments flow in from every corner of the world: heroin packed into crates of imported cigars, diamonds nestled between bolts of silk, weapons hidden in false-bottomed cargo holds.
The longshoremen work with their heads down, pockets full of hush money, knowing better than to ask questions.
It's in the warehouses, where counterfeit pharmaceuticals are boxed up alongside stolen art and luxury cars stripped of their original identities.
Where bodies are sometimes stacked like inventory, waiting to be disposed of before the sun rises.
It's in the underground casinos, where money changes hands faster than the turn of a card, where fortunes are made and lost in a single night, and where debt is a chain no man can break—except in death.
And it's in the streets, where businesses pay their dues in quiet desperation, stuffing envelopes of cash into the hands of men who offer protection in return for obedience.
The ones who refuse?
They learn that fire consumes more than just buildings.
The lifeblood of Nuova Speranza runs thick with greed, with ambition, with the desperate need to survive.
And at the heart of it all is the Salvatore family.
But they didn't start out as kings of this city.
We were here first.
Decades ago, before the streets of Nuova Speranza pulsed with the influence of the Salvatores, my family had already laid the foundations of an empire that should have lasted for generations.
My great-grandfather, Giorgio Lombardi, was one of the first men to understand that real power isn't just taken but built.
And he built it well.
Back in the Prohibition Era, when men with ambition saw opportunity in the weaknesses of law, Giorgio was one of the few with the vision to weaponize vice itself.
While small-time crooks were still running back-alley bootlegging operations, Giorgio took control of the ports, ensuring that every barrel of whiskey, every crate of smuggled champagne from Canada, flowed through his network.
The docks became his kingdom, the unions his army.
But he knew better than to rule with brute force alone.
He cultivated politicians like he cultivated vineyards, grooming them, feeding them, ensuring their thirst for power could only be quenched with Lombardi wine.
By the time Prohibition ended, he had already shifted his operations into gambling, construction, and high-end textile imports that laundered millions with a single shipment.
Under his reign, the Lombardi family was untouchable.
