(Leonardo POV)
My office breathed like a tomb. Marble floors stretched into shadows that swallowed sound whole, polished to mirror black that reflected nothing but ghosts. The walls were lined with books no one read—leather-bound facades hiding the safe behind them, the secret that kept my empire's heart beating.
This room had seen confessions extracted with pliers. Blood mopped from marble that cost more than most men's houses. Promises broken and bones with them. But it had never been violated. Never been breached.
Until tonight.
The safe mechanism turned with the smooth precision of German engineering, tumblers falling into place like bullets sliding into a chamber. The steel door swung open on oiled hinges, revealing velvet-lined compartments that held the currency of power—blackmail photos, offshore account numbers, the deeds to souls I'd purchased.
But the small velvet box in the upper corner sat empty.
The absence screamed louder than a dying man.
My mother's locket. The only thing in this world that had never belonged to the business. Gold that had once rested against her throat, warm from her pulse. She'd worn it the day she told me stories about saints and sinners, back when I still believed in the difference. The last time I kissed her forehead, that locket had caught the hospital light like a prayer I couldn't say.
Twenty-seven years I'd kept it safe. Through federal raids that left my men in body bags. Through gang wars that painted Little Italy red. Through the long climb to the throne built on other men's bones. It had survived because I willed it to. Because some things were sacred, even in hell.
Now it was gone.
The rage didn't come hot. Heat was sloppy, wasteful—the domain of amateurs and dead men. Mine crystallized like ice in my veins, sharp enough to cut through steel. Methodical. Surgical. The kind of cold that turned breath to fog and hearts to stone.
"Rico."
I didn't raise my voice. I never needed to. He materialized in the doorway like smoke given form, six-foot-two of muscle and scars, suit tailored to hide the Glock against his ribs. The only man who'd seen me bleed and lived to forget it.
His eyes found the empty safe, then my face. His jaw set like concrete.
"It's gone."
"Impossible." But he was already moving, hands reaching for the security tablet. "No one gets past—"
"Don't insult me with impossibilities."
The word stopped him cold. My men gathered in the doorway—Matteo, Sal, the new kid whose name I hadn't bothered learning yet. They smelled the danger like animals sensed storms. The air in the room turned electric, charged with the promise of violence.
Rico's fingers danced across the screen, security feeds scrolling backwards through the night. Hours collapsed into minutes. Guards yawning. Cigarette breaks taken in shadows. Carelessness that would cost more than jobs.
Then—movement. A figure slipping through corridors that should have been sealed, past cameras that should have caught him, into my sanctum like a ghost made flesh.
The image froze on a face.
Marco Rossi.
The name tasted like ash on my tongue. A nothing. A bookkeeper who'd been skimming from neighborhood businesses for years, never worth the bullet it would take to erase him. A gambling addict with more debts than sense, too pathetic to warrant my attention.
But in his trembling hands, my mother's locket gleamed like captured moonlight.
Something fractured inside my chest. Not broke—breaking implied weakness. This was controlled demolition, the careful destruction of the last piece of my humanity.
I turned to Matteo—forty-two years old, three kids, a wife who made gravy on Sundays. The lieutenant who'd drawn the short straw for the graveyard shift. Who had failed me when failure meant death.
"You let him pass."
"Don Torrino, I swear I never—"
His denial died when I moved. Three steps closed the distance between us. My hand found his wrist—not grabbing, just resting there like a promise. Then I twisted.
The crack echoed like a gunshot in the marble tomb. Cartilage tore. Bone splintered. Matteo dropped to his knees, clutching his ruined hand against his chest, breath coming in sharp animal sounds.
"You were trusted with my house," I said, each word carved from winter air. "With my sanctuary. With what mattered most to me."
"Please—" Tears mixed with sweat on his face. "I have children—"
"And now you have a reminder." I released his wrist, let him cradle it like a broken bird. "Every time you look at that hand, you'll remember what happens when men disappoint me. You'll remember that I left you breathing when I could have left you buried. And you'll never—never—fail me again."
He crawled toward the door, leaving drops of blood on marble that would need scrubbing. The other men parted like the sea, eyes downcast, terror radiating from their skin like heat.
This was how empires stayed standing. Not through love or loyalty—those were luxuries for men who didn't rule from shadows. Through fear. Through the certain knowledge that crossing Leonardo Torrino meant walking into your own grave.
Rico remained. He always did. Steady as stone, loyal as gravity. The only man who'd earned the right to look me in the eye when I was painting the walls with other men's mistakes.
"What's the order?"
I looked back at the frozen screen. Marco Rossi's face stared out at me—weak chin, desperate eyes, the pallor of a man who was already dead but didn't know it yet. His name had already been written in my private ledger, the red book where every entry ended in silence. But this wasn't business anymore.
This was personal.
"Bring him to me." My voice stayed level, but underneath it something rawer prowled. Something that remembered what it had felt like to be sixteen and holding my mother's cooling hand while she slipped away. "Alive. I want my property returned. And I want him to understand—truly understand—what it costs to steal from me."
Rico nodded once. His phone appeared in his hand like magic, fingers already dialing numbers that would wake men from sleep and send them into the night. Hunters following a scent that ended in blood.
I closed the safe, spun the dial, rested my palm against steel still warm from the lights inside. The emptiness echoed like a hollow tooth, a wound that wouldn't heal until what was mine came home.
Marco Rossi thought he'd stolen jewelry tonight. Thought he'd grabbed some trinket to pawn for whatever desperate scheme drove him here, another gamble in a life full of losing bets.
He didn't understand that he'd reached into a lion's den and pulled out its heart.
When I took it back—when I made him pay for putting his filthy hands on something sacred—this city would remember why ghosts whispered my name.
Why no one stole from Leonardo Torrino and lived to spend the money.