The van screeched to a halt. The back doors swung open, and Vito was hauled out like a sack of trash. His knees scraped against rough pavement as soldiers dragged him forward.
He couldn't see through the blindfold, but he could hear. The night was quiet, filled only with the rustling of leaves and the faint chirp of crickets. No city noise. No gunfire. Just silence.
That silence terrified him more than the gunfire ever had.
Enzo's boot kicked him forward, forcing him onto his knees. "On the ground, rat."
The cloth was yanked from his eyes.
---
The stink of liquor lingered in the night air. Vincenzo wrinkled his nose slightly as he looked at the man kneeling before him. Vito's eyes were wild, his words slurred, and his breath carried that unmistakable sour bite of cheap wine.
Drunk, Vincenzo thought. He must have picked a fight with my guards while drunk. Foolish. No wonder they dragged him here. I just wanted an hour of quiet, and now I have to smell this nonsense.
He kept his voice even, cold out of habit, though in his chest he only felt weary.
"Don't let this happen again. Take him outside."
To Vincenzo, the order was simple: remove the disturbance, throw the drunk out of the park so people could walk without fear. He even thought he was being merciful, sparing the man humiliation by not calling the city police.
But Luca and Enzo exchanged the briefest of glances, their cigarettes glowing faintly in the dark. In their ears, those words meant something very different. Don't let this happen again. A command. Take him outside. A sentence.
"Understood," Luca said softly. Calm, absolute.
Enzo's grin showed white in the lamplight. "Come on. You heard him."
Two men lifted Vito by the arms. He kicked and whimpered, begging, but Vincenzo only sighed, shaking his head. Pathetic drunk. He'll wake up with bruises and a story to tell his buddies. Maybe that'll scare him straight.
He leaned back against the bench, eyes drifting upward. The stars were faint tonight, smothered by city haze, but one flickered stubbornly through. He allowed himself a moment of peace, convinced the interruption was over.
They dragged Vito a few steps farther from the bench, where the maple trees threw thick, black pools of darkness.
Vincenzo felt a tightening in his chest—not the cold, practiced detachments of the Moretti image, but a small, human flare of alarm. He thought of the two men who had been posted close, the ones he had expected to be watching from behind hedges. For a beat he imagined them as his invisible shields; then he realized there were fewer near him than he'd assumed. His cousins had gone to take care of trouble, with most of the men; only the two closest guards kept their distance. They left me with less than I assumed, he realized on a wash of private dread—if he had known how few watched his back, he might have stood and run.
He did not move. He had learned to be a statue against the city's heat—better to be still and survive than to panic and invite a single blade. Still, the unexpected squeeze of fear made his stomach hollow.
Two of Enzo's men guided Vito to the deepest ring of shadow and pushed him face-first into wet leaves. Metal clicked—too quickly, a small, efficient sound—and the blindfold that had protected him was re-tied, stiffer now. They wanted to muffle his last pleas. They wanted the act done where no light could show the shape of the thing they would unmake.
"Say what you must," Enzo said, his voice close enough to the blindfold for Vito to feel it on his cheek. "Talk. Make it pretty."
Vito's jaw worked, words bubbling like bitter foam. "They—they—your men… they were nobodies. We beat them. We taught them a lesson. Please—" His words were slurred, useless. He searched for mercy as a drowning man searches for air.
Then—very softly, as the dark closed in, as boots shifted impatiently toward the deed—Vito began to talk not in supplication but in that small space where men tell truths they've hoarded for safety and courage both. His voice crawled like a rat through the grass, and he now already knows who were this people that just made him more terrified
"They say—" he hiccuped, "they say you… you don't forget. You… you're not like the others. Top men—don't cross you. They keep in line because they're afraid. Afraid of what you do when you… when you don't speak. Afraid of what you let your hands do. They call you…they call you the thing that keeps the city quiet."
The imagery in his drip of breath was clumsy, assembled from tavern gossip: don't cross them; they take men at night; they make quiet examples. He meant it as a warning, as an attempt to buy his life by inflating the threat of the stranger on the bench.
Enzo laughed. It sounded like a small animal being crushed. "Good lines," he said. "Keep going. Tell me about all the men who bowed."
Vito pushed the mutter on, frantic for any leverage. "They—top ones. Big bosses. They don't step on Moretti. They say he—he keeps lists. Names go away. They warn their kids. They—" His breath hitched. "Please. I didn't know."
There was an edge in his voice then—something like reverence wrapped in terror. He was confessing to a myth he'd heard in dark rooms, and now he had been delivered to the myth's feet.
Luca's hand hovered, measuring the world in microseconds. He might have heard the last of Vito's fragmented sentence. He might even have felt a small, private sympathy for the man's terror. But he thought of more practical things: appearances, silence, and the usefulness of finality. Vincenzo wanted peace; the cousins would guarantee it.
The van's engine idled at the curb—a small, neutral sound that for Luca meant erasure rather than drama. A hand pressed at a throat, a soft strangling noise, a grunted falling of a body onto wet leaves. The men worked quickly. No argument. No drawn-out savagery. A methodical, efficient ending. Vito's last words shivered into the darkness like a rain of coal: half warning, half plea.
Farther away, in the shadows beyond the trees, muffled noises rose briefly—strangled protests, a thud in the leaves, silence swallowing sound. But Vincenzo didn't hear them, or if he did, he thought it was only the city shifting in its sleep.
When Luca and Enzo returned, their coats neat, their expressions unreadable, Vincenzo simply asked, "He's gone?"
"Gone," Luca said, calm as stone.
Enzo exhaled smoke, eyes gleaming. "Won't be back."
Vincenzo nodded, satisfied. To him, the park was safe again. Trouble had been removed without spectacle. He let his gaze drift back to the path, noticing a few people leaving hurriedly. He thought they were frightened only by the scene of a drunk being dragged off.
He didn't know their whispers would grow into something else entirely.
And somewhere in the dark, Vito Santoro's final thoughts had spilled into the dirt—fearful ramblings about the Moretti name, about how no great criminal dared cross them, about the man with dead eyes who needed only a few words to decide life or death.
Those words would never reach Vincenzo's ears. But they would reach the city. And the myth would grow.