Chapter 13 - Shadows in Turin
While peace flickered inside the fortified walls of the Langhe estate, the underworld of Turin was boiling over.
Don Salvatore Barone sat in the leather-paneled office of his luxury villa overlooking the Po River, slamming his fist onto the glass desktop so hard his heavy gold rings cracked the surface.
"What do you mean, they didn't come back?!" Barone roared at his chief lieutenant, a scarred brute named Vincenzo. "It was a simple snatch-and-grab! A maid and a brat! How hard is it to pull a three-year-old out of a country house?"
Vincenzo swallowed hard, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Santoro was waiting for us, Don Barone. Our men didn't even reach the perimeter fence before his security neutralized them. And... and word on the street is that Santoro himself hunted down the extraction team in the vineyard."
Barone’s face twisted into an ugly snarl. "He thinks he’s untouchable because he sits on his mountain of wine and blood. He thinks Il Marmo cannot be broken. If we can't take the child, we take his revenue. Burn every shipping container he has docked in Genoa by midnight. Let’s see how much marble he has left when his empire bleeds dry."
"Consider it done," Vincenzo muttered, turning to leave the office.
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Neither Barone nor his men knew that every word spoken in that room was being recorded.
Back in Milan, inside a secure monitoring van parked three blocks away, a tech specialist tapped a key on his encrypted console, routing the audio file directly to a private terminal in Matteo Santoro’s study.
