While I worked late cleaning a mafia boss’s mansion, someone spent six nights terrorizing my five-year-old daughter outside her bedroom window. I’d brushed aside her fear, so she asked Long Island’s most feared man to lend her his guard dog—and that dog led us to a passage hidden inside his walls.

For three beats of a heart, nobody breathed.

Then Silvio chuckled. It was a raspy, dry sound, like dead leaves dragging across concrete. He reached up with his trembling right hand and turned the brass anchor ring around his arthritic finger.

“You’re taking the word of a cleaning girl, Dante?” Silvio said, his voice mocking. “A hysterical widow who jumps at shadows in the rain?”

Dante didn't answer right away. He looked at me, his gaze calculating, weighing three years of quiet, obedient service against seventy years of family blood. Then he looked down at his uncle.

“Silvio,” Dante said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “My father gave you that ring when you took over the Brooklyn dry docks in 1994. There’s only one like it.”

“I was at the funeral, Dante!” Silvio snapped, his voice gaining strength as he abandoned the facade of frail old age. “I stood beside your mother when we put your father in the ground! I built this family while you were still running around prep school in New Hampshire!”

“You built a pipeline to the Castiglione family behind my back,” Dante countered, stepping around the table until he was three feet from his uncle’s chair. “You were the one who hired the crew to hit that bakery in Greenpoint. You weren't trying to intercept Miguel’s warning—you were trying to find his accounting ledger before my mother got her hands on it.”

Silvio sneered, leaning back in his chair. “Miguel Vance was an idiot. He had three million dollars in untraceable bearer bonds passing across his desk every month, and he lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn with a sick kid and a wife who scrubbed floors for twenty dollars an hour. He could have taken five percent and walked away rich. Instead, he threatened to call the feds.”

Up on the mezzanine, my knuckles turned white against the balustrade. The truth hit me with brutal finality. Miguel hadn't died in a random shooting; he had died because he was an honest man surrounded by wolves.

“Where is the man who was tapping on the window, Silvio?” Dante asked, his hand drifting toward his sidearm. “Who was in that tunnel tonight?”

Silvio smiled, a mouthful of yellowing teeth. “You think I’d send an amateur into this house, nephew? The boy outside the window wasn't there to kill your little cleaner. He was there to pull your security away from the main perimeter.”

Suddenly, the heavy glass of the conservatory windows on the east side of the mansion shattered inward with a deafening roar.

*CRACK-CRACK-CRACK.*

Automatic gunfire tore through the lower floor, shredding the antique tapestries and blowing the mahogany doors of the library off their hinges. Splinters and plaster rained down like shrapnel.

“AMBUSH!” Marco roared, diving across the table and dragging Dante down behind the heavy oak furniture just as a volley of high-caliber rounds perforated the walls.

Up on the mezzanine, I was thrown backward onto the carpet by the concussive force of the blast. Bruno threw his massive body over my torso, shielding my neck with his heavy jaws clamped shut, growling like a demonic engine.

Down below, the room erupted into chaos.

Julian screamed as a round caught him in the shoulder, sending him tumbling into the corner. Silvio didn't run; he stayed low behind his high-backed leather chair, pulling a small silver revolver from inside his coat with the practiced ease of a veteran street soldier.

“Dante!” Silvio shouted through the din of gunfire. “The Castigliones send their regards! You should have kept your nose in the books and left the docks to me!”

Three men in black tactical gear and full-face ballistic masks—the masks without mouths that Sophie had described—swept through the blown conservatory doors, weapons raised.

They weren't here for a conversation. They were here to wipe the Moretti bloodline off the map.