Chapter 8 - The Empire Strikes BackAn hour later, sitting in the warm, flour-dusted kitchen of the bakery with a steaming mug of black coffee between my hands, I opened the ledger to its final, unread page.
Mia sat across from me, bandaging a small scrape on her forearm with quiet competence.
"What happens now?" she asked, looking at me not as a helpless vagrant, but as a man who commanded an invisible army. "Gino’s men are in town. If they find out Marco is dead..."
"They won't have to look for me," I interrupted. I pulled a burner phone from the inner lining of my soaked jacket—a secure satellite device with a single encrypted number programmed into its memory.
I pressed dial. It rang twice before a gravelly, terrified voice answered on the Boston end.
"Castellano secure line. Identify."
"It's Rocco," I said quietly.
A sharp intake of breath echoed through the receiver. "Rocco? Boss? Rumor in the city was you went off grid—Gino took over the board—"
"Gino is retiring effective immediately," I cut him off, my tone dropping into pure, arctic ice. "Listen to me very carefully, Salvatore. I want every dock supervisor, every accountant, and every captain in Boston on a conference call in twenty minutes. Tell them the true heir of the Castellano family has returned from the dead."
The line fell dead silent for three seconds.
"Yes, Boss," Salvatore whispered, reverence returning to his voice. "Consider it done."
I hung up the phone and slid it across the table toward the leather ledger.
May you like
Mia looked at me, her eyes wide with a mixture of awe and apprehension. "You're going back to war."
"Not war, Mia," I said, standing up and buttoning my damp flannel shirt, my posture straightening into the commanding stance of a syndicate king. "Correction."
