Chapter 2 - The Echoes of the Past
Inside the back seat of the Mercedes, the air was cold and silent.
"Boss?" Marcus, Dante’s chief of security and most trusted confidant for fifteen years, asked, looking at Dante through the rearview mirror. "Is everything alright? You were on that patio thirty minutes longer than usual. Do we need to check the perimeter?"
"No," Dante said, looking out the window as the brick row houses of Brooklyn passed by in a blur. "The perimeter is fine."
He looked at his hands. They were clean, immaculate hands that rarely touched dirty work directly anymore, but they were hands that had built a billion-dollar syndicate out of blood and iron.
"Marcus," Dante spoke again, his voice dropping into that terrifying, quiet tone that made even veteran hitmen sit up straight. "Who owns the building that houses Russo's Kitchen?"
Marcus blinked, pulling out a tablet from his seat pocket and tapping the screen rapidly. "It's held under a local commercial holding company called Southside Properties, boss. Why?"
"Who is behind Southside Properties?"
Marcus tapped a few more keys, cross-referencing public records with private intelligence databases. "A guy named Gary Miller. Small-time loan shark, operates out of a pool hall on 86th Street. He runs a few protection rackets, buys up commercial debts, and squeezes local tenants. Nothing that touches our operations, Mr. Corsetti. He’s small fish."
"Gary Miller," Dante repeated the name slowly, letting it sit on his tongue like poison. "Find out what his connection is to the young waitress with the child at Russo's."
Marcus turned his head slightly, surprised. "The waitress, sir?"
"Her name is Amelia Ward," Dante said, remembering the brass name tag pinned to her apron. "She has defensive bruises on her wrist and torso. She operates under severe fear. I want a full profile on her by midnight—her debts, her medical records, her living situation, and every man who has entered her home in the last six months."
Marcus didn't ask questions. In the Corsetti organization, when Dante gave an order regarding a detail that small, it meant something tectonic was shifting beneath the surface. "Consider it done, boss."
Dante leaned his head back against the leather headrest and closed his eyes.
He didn't want to think about Amelia Ward. He didn't want to think about Brooklyn. He had spent twenty-three years building an empire precisely so he would never have to feel vulnerable again.
When Dante was ten years old, his mother, Rosa Corsetti, had worked eighteen hours a day as a seamstress to keep a roof over their heads. She had been a quiet, gentle woman who cooked simple meals with tomatoes and garlic, teaching him that dignity was something no rich man could take from you. But when a local extortionist named Frank Vane had demanded protection money Rosa couldn't pay, Frank’s men had wrecked her small shop, breaking her hand and pushing her down a flight of concrete stairs.
Rosa had died six months later from complications of her injuries, leaving ten-year-old Dante alone in a city that ate the weak alive.
Dante had spent the rest of his youth climbing from the gutter to the top of the food chain, hunting down Frank Vane and every man who had stood by and allowed his mother to suffer. He had wiped them out, taking over their territory, their wealth, and their power.
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He had thought he had erased that weak, helpless ten-year-old boy forever.
But today, sitting on that patio, eating pasta that smelled like Rosa's kitchen, looking into the eyes of a little girl who wanted nothing from him, and seeing a mother hiding bruises under her apron... the ghosts he had buried twenty-three years ago had crawled back out of the earth.
