Page 165 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince
I take a step closer, lowering the barrel of my gun only slightly. "Talk."
He exhales, slow and steady, as though he has practiced these words in the mirror for weeks.
"Rafa Rossi did not create Il Sangue Nero. He found it. A skeleton crew of old loyalists buried by consolidation and history. Men discarded when the Salvatores rose. Men like me. Arditi did not die. He went underground. I helped him. I helped them all. Because I believed then, and still believe now, that legacy means nothing if you let your enemies write the record."
His voice does not rise.
He does not flinch.
"But Operation Umber was not about survival. It became about inheritance. About reviving the lines of power, not just stealing them."
I don’t move.
"You wanted war."
"No," he says. "We wanted structure. Order. Il Sangue Nero would rise, absorb what the Salvatores built, and what the Rossislost. The city would stabilize. Under blood that remembered what it meant to bleed."
"And Gianna?"
His eyes soften, just enough to disgust me.
"She was never supposed to be a pawn. She was the key. The final consolidation protocol was written by her father, with biometric locks tied to his bloodline. The documents we needed were hidden, and we could not access them without her. The encryption was genetic. He didn’t trust anyone. Not even me. By the time Signor Rafa figured this out, she was already gone." His upper lip curls in disgust as he stares at me. "To you."
"You kidnapped her."
"I returned her to her rightful place," he says, as though it’s a favor. "Her father’s codes are embedded in the safehouses, in the clean banks, in the old trading lines. She doesn’t need to know them. She only needs to breathe near them."
"Rafa used her."
"Rafa loved her," he corrects. "But love cannot stand in the way of legacy. Not when legacy is the only thing that survives."
I raise my gun again.
My finger rests on the trigger.
"She’s not a key. She’s not a code. She’s my wife."
Renato inclines his head, as though accepting a final move on a chessboard he thought he controlled. "And you are too late."
I shoot him once through the heart.
He drops with no fanfare.
No final word.
Just the dull sound of old flesh hitting older stone.
Marco moves to clear the altar while I step past the body.
My mind is already shifting forward.
The key and the answer lie within this monastery.
There’s no mistaking that.
But where could they be hiding within a place that is otherwise so small? What am I missing?
We’ve cleared almost every visible section of the monastery by the time Tomas calls out from the corridor near the eastern wall.
