Page 64 of The Hitman's Secret Baby
"You're not going to die here," I murmur, testing my blade against my thumb. "But you will beg."
He whimpers again.
Tries to speak.
His tongue fumbles around the cotton of his fear.
"No more lies," I say, and press the edge of the blade lightly under his ear. It doesn't cut, just kisses the skin. "Or I make a map out of you."
He begins to sob in earnest.
I don't care.
The crying is just another kind of silence, but it won't last.
The history of our business is written in blood and bricks, old oaths and family names etched into marble headstones.
Salvatore. Moretti. Conti.
In this world, power doesn't shift, it calcifies.
When it cracks, the fallout lingers for decades.
Luca understood that better than anyone.
He built this new empire on a blueprint older than the city itself, took the shattered pieces left after the collapse of the old dons, and restructured the organization into a fortress, cold and elegant and impenetrable.
Except once.
Five years ago, the walls cracked with the disappearance of Valentina. The Don's wife, gone early mroning, with no note, no farewell, no sign of a struggle.
One moment she was there, and the next she was gone.
Of course, there were rumors.
A woman like Valentina, elegant and exacting, did not simply walk into the dark without someone helping her disappear.
Her disappearance was not a private affair.
It was a rupture.
For a few days, the city held its breath.
Then a name started to circulate.
Not official, nor confirmed.
But it was spoken often enough in the right rooms that it might as well have been.
Aria Lombardi.
The youngest daughter of a once-formidable house.
Once that name reached the boss, the response was immediate.
No Don can afford the perception of weakness, especially not in any organization where loyalty is measured in silence and strength is defined by what happens when someone comes for your blood.
A man can lose a soldier and move forward.
