Page 111 of Brutal Crown
Which is why he now has one eye and eight fingers.
He wasn’t a member of the Society, so he couldn’t be killed for leaving. But he couldn’t leave without a scar either, probably an attempt to keep his mouth shut.
After a brief investigation, I find out the one thing he can’t afford to lose.
His daughter.
The next time I show up, it’s with a picture of her stepping out of the elementary school she teaches at.
Heavily pregnant.
That is when he talks.
“He forged a letter,” Pietro tells me, pulling a folded document from a drawer in his desk. We are seated in his home office. I glance around at all the old awards and accolades on his walls and desk.
He slips the letter toward me.
“I got a photocopy. He stamped it with the Elders’ seal. Said it was an execution order.”
I remain quiet.
“The man he had killed,” Pietro continues in a low voice, “was a doctor. He was a member of La Mano Nera,but he’d refused to stay quiet after treating one of the Elder’s guests—a girl barely fifteen, bruised, drugged, and raped. The Elder ran an underground sex trafficking ring.”
My jaw tightens.
He taps the paper in my hands. “That letter made it look like the Elders ordered the kill, so no one questioned it. That was not the first or the last. He eliminated anyone who had any kind of dirt on him.”
By the time I’m done gathering the information I need, I’m filled with anger, but also a twisted satisfaction.
One Elder bought power with Society funds and allied with outsiders.
Another corrupted the purity of the bloodlines.
And the third abused the Society’s seal.
Three founding families. Three unpunished betrayals.
It’s like someone scattered the pieces of a puzzle across time, hoping no one would ever bother to put them together. And they were right. No one ever did. Because each secret on its own is just another dirty thing in a world already crawling with filth. But together? The root of their rot eats deep.
I sit alone in my quiet room that night, all three names on a sheet of paper in front of me.
The information I have is not a big enough weapon to bring them down. Not yet.
But it’s the truth, and I’ll hold onto it.
And then I find the last piece.
Through one of my contacts, an old bookmaker-turned-snitch, I find the information that unites everything.
“Every year before the Society’s Reckoning Ceremony, quiet payments are made to other Society families who know the truth. Little secrets. Big secrets. The price depends on the gravity of what they know.”
Blackmail. Silence money. All protected behind ceremony and tradition.
“For how long?” I ask him.
“Since before I was born.”
Decades.
