Page 141 of The Hitman's Secret Baby
"You were never one of us," Luca comments.
Giovanni chuckles. It sounds like something unraveling.
"I was more Salvatore than half the bastards in this house. At least I had vision. My father saw what this family could become. He offered you power beyond these dusty walls, and you spat in his face."
Luca steps closer, lowering himself into the chair behind the desk, one leg crossed over the other.
He picks up the glass of whiskey at his side and sips it, not rushed.
Not stirred.
"Cesare Gotti wanted to marry influence. Merge our empires. Share our bloodlines. But he didn't want an alliance. He wanted a seat at my table with a knife hidden beneath the cloth. So, I answered in kind."
Giovanni's jaw tightens. "You buried his men in ports and rivers. You starved his contacts. You lit Corsica on fire and thought that would be the end. But you left one seed."
"And what exactly was your plan?" Luca asks, his voice bored now. "To sit beside me until I died and hand over the estate to your father like a well-wrapped gift?"
"To bring this house to its knees," Giovanni snarls, rising shakily to his feet. "To make it bleed from within. So no one could pretend it was ever unbreakable."
He's panting now, veins taut in his neck, the fever of too many lies breaking through the surface.
"Cesare trusted me. And I delivered. Your allies questioned you. Your name lost its shine. You spent years watching your empire shrink while I was feeding every crack in the foundation."
Luca finishes the whiskey and places the glass down with care.
"And now?"
Giovanni swallows. "Either way, he'll move without me. You've already lost."
I step forward, my gun heavy at my side.
Luca leans forward. "Finish it."
I don't hesitate. The gun fires once. Giovanni's body jerks, then folds. There's no last word. No defiance. Just blood soaking into the rug of a family he was never truly part of.
I lower the weapon. Luca doesn't look away. "You know what your next assignment is, Enzo. It has to be quick. It has to be clean."
Even as I begin to nod, there is a reckoning rising in me, in the shape of something I cannot yet name, but that I've begun to want.
The kind of life that does not demand blood for loyalty.
A different rhythm.
A slow one.
Sun-warmed.
Distant.
A small farmhouse maybe, far from the ports, where my hands can hold more than knives.
Where Aria stands at a line of laundry, her dress brushing her knees, eyes lifted when I walk in from the fields.
Where Gabriel runs without looking over his shoulder.
I don't say any of this out loud.
Instead, I meet Luca's gaze, steady and unflinching.
