Chapter 8 - THE LEDGER
The silence that followed was deafening.
The five enforcers looked at the gold signet ring on my finger. They looked at Salvatore, who was nodding slowly, confirming the impossible. A female boss.
Slowly, almost simultaneously, the five older men lowered their weapons entirely.
Richard’s eyes went wide. Panic finally cracked his arrogant facade.
“What are you doing?!” Richard shrieked in English. “Shoot them! I have the bomb! I have the Ledger!”
“You have nothing,” Gabriel said.
With a roar of pure, desperate rage, Richard pressed his thumb down on the detonator.
Nothing happened.
Richard stared at the small plastic device, pressing the button again and again.
Gabriel smiled coldly. “Cell service is jammed in the subterranean vaults, Richard. I turned on a military-grade scrambler in my pocket the second we walked down here. Your detonator is a paperweight.”
Richard dropped the plastic trigger.
He didn’t surrender. He lunged.
He pulled a switchblade from his pocket and charged directly at me.
Gabriel intercepted him flawlessly.
It wasn’t a gunfight. It was a brutal, intimate, desperate clash of bodies.
Gabriel drove his knee into Richard’s stomach, grabbing the hand holding the knife. Richard twisted, slashing wildly, tearing the fabric of Gabriel’s jacket.
But Gabriel had been trained by the deadliest men in New York. Richard was just a manager who thought he was a gangster.
Gabriel disarmed him with a sickening crack of bone. Richard screamed as the knife clattered to the floor. Gabriel grabbed him by the throat and slammed him violently against the brass doors of the lockers.
Richard slumped to the ground, defeated, gasping for air.
It was over.
I unrolled the vintage train ticket from my wooden rosary.
I stepped past Richard’s broken body and slipped the yellowed paper into the mechanical slot of Vault 404.
The heavy brass door clicked and swung open.
Inside sat a thick, black leather-bound book. The Ledger of Palermo.
I pulled it out. The power to destroy the Commission, the power to protect my family, rested heavily in my hands.
“You did it, Angelo,” Salvatore whispered, his voice trembling.
I turned around.
Salvatore was swaying. His face was gray. The adrenaline that had carried him from Astoria to Grand Central was completely gone.
The old man’s cane slipped from his fingers, clattering loudly against the marble floor.
He collapsed.
“Dad!” Gabriel yelled, dropping to his knees beside the man who had raised him.
I rushed over, clutching the Ledger to my chest.
Salvatore’s breathing was shallow, his eyes unfocused. His heart, weak for years, was finally giving out.
Gabriel held the old man’s head, tears streaming down the face of the hardened enforcer. “Stay with us. We won. You’re safe.”
Salvatore smiled faintly. He reached up with a trembling hand, grabbing Gabriel’s jacket.
“You were never… a fake prince, Gabriel,” Salvatore choked out, coughing weakly. “Blood makes a soldier. Love… love makes a son. You are my son.”
Gabriel broke down, pressing his forehead against the old man’s chest.
Salvatore shifted his gaze to me.
He looked at the gold signet ring on my finger.
“Theresa,” he whispered, using my true name for the last time. “Burn the book. Change… the rules.”
His eyes drifted shut. His chest stopped moving.
May you like
The great Don Rossi was dead on the floor of a train station.
And I was the head of the family.
