Page 21 of Deadly Confessions
The drive home takes twelve minutes. I park in the garage. Take the elevator up. The penthouse is dark. The Bay of Naples through the floor-to-ceiling windows is a sheet of black glass, the lights of Capri and Ischia scattered across the horizon like something spilled. I don't turn on the lamps.
I pour a whiskey. Macallan 18. Two fingers. Neat. I stand at the window holding the glass without drinking. The bay absorbs the city's light the way the confessional absorbs words. Takes everything in. Gives nothing back.
Fifty kilos of product. Two men injured. Trust fractured in a room full of captains who are now looking at each other sideways, wondering which one of them is leaking to theFerrantes. That suspicion is its own poison. It works faster than bullets. A family that doesn't trust itself is a family that's already lost.
My father wouldn't have held a meeting. He would have picked the two most likely suspects, had them brought to a basement, worked on them until one confessed or both were dead. He called it efficiency. I watched him do it once when I was nineteen. A man named Giulio who ran numbers for us in Secondigliano. My father suspected him of skimming. He was right. Giulio confessed after forty minutes. My father shot him in the head with the same calm he used to order espresso.
I am not my father.
I don't know if that's a strength or a liability. Most days I think it's both. Today, with two men bleeding and fifty kilos in Ferrante hands, it feels like a liability.
I drink the whiskey. It burns the way good whiskey should. Not punishment. Just warmth with edges.
My mind drifts.
Her.
The waitress. Hair tucked behind her ear when she's thinking. Glasses she adjusts with one finger on the bridge, pushing them up her nose without interrupting whatever she's saying. The dry humor that arrives without warning, the kind that makes you lean forward because you want to catch the next one.
I set the glass down.
Non ora. Non lei. Lei non appartiene a questa parte della mia vita.
(Not now. Not her. She doesn't belong in this part of my life.)
I finish the whiskey. Wash the glass. Go to bed. I don't sleep. I lie in the dark thinking about supply chains, communication pathways, the geometry of betrayal. Someone in my operation is talking to the Ferrantes. Someone close enough to know the Mergellina schedule. Close enough to know the details that turned a routine transfer into a four-minute rout.
I will find them.
In the morning, the sun comes through the eastern windows at 6:12 AM. I shower. Dress. Make coffee on the stovetop, the moka pot my mother used, the only thing I kept from theold house. Three cups. Black. I stand at the kitchen counter drinking coffee the way I imagine normal men drink coffee, except normal men aren't calculating which of their captains might be selling them to a rival clan.
I spend the day on the problem. Calls. Meetings. The audit begins. Enzo's team starts pulling communication records, mapping every person who had access to the Mergellina schedule.
By evening, my head is full of names, timelines, suspicion.
I need to not think for two hours.
La Terrazza di Napoli. I walk in at 7:30 PM without a reservation. The maître d' finds me a table near the window. I sit. Open the menu I've already memorized.
She appears.
Hair pulled back. Glasses catching the warm light. A small notepad in her apron pocket, a pen tucked behind her ear. She sees me and something shifts in her expression. Not surprise. Recognition that has settled into expectation. Like she knew I'd come back.
"The usual table," she says. "No reservation."
"I like the window."
"You like my section."
I look up from the menu. She's not smiling, but the architecture of a smile is there. The scaffolding. The foundation. She's holding it back because holding it back is funnier than letting it go.
"Maybe I like your wine recommendations."
"You haven't taken a single one."
She's right. I've ordered the Barbaresco every time. She recommended the Taurasi on the second dinner. The Aglianico on the third. I ignored both. She noticed.
"I'm a creature of habit," I say.
