Chapter 8
I asked Isabella one question I had avoided.
“Why stay hidden after Adrian died?”
Silence.
Then:
“Because I learned Adrian wasn’t the top.”
Victor looked away.
Of course.
Never one man.
Never one clean ending.
But Isabella’s answer was more specific.
Adrian had been funded by someone inside the old Ravello generation.
Not a captain.
Someone retired.
Someone whose name still made younger men stand straighter.
My uncle, Matteo Ravello.
Seventy-one.
My father’s younger brother.
Publicly retired to Florida.
Privately still respected by half the old house.
Victor cursed.
I looked at him.
“You knew.”
“I suspected.”
“Same thing you told Isabella about me?”
He stopped.
Good.
Isabella continued.
Matteo believed I had modernized too much.
Too many legitimate businesses.
Too much centralized control.
Too much power in one man.
He wanted the family returned to a council of older bloodlines.
The fire was supposed to remove Isabella because she had learned enough to connect Adrian to Matteo.
My shooting three days earlier had not been random either.
I felt the room tighten.
“Matteo ordered it?”
“I think so.”
Not certainty.
Important.
I would not turn suspicion into truth simply because betrayal made it tempting.
Victor spoke.
“Adrian ordered the shooters.”
“That you know?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“He tried to recruit Marco Hale’s old crew.”
No Marco here. Wrong family. Victor corrected himself.
“He tried to recruit three of my men.”
There.
Victor’s hidden crews had begun partly as protection against Adrian.
Then Victor realized private armies were useful for other reasons too.
Protection became leverage.
Leverage became control.
That was the story of men like us.
May you like
Rarely evil at the first step.
Dangerous because the second step felt justified by the first.
