Cesare didn’t go home.
He went hunting.
By midnight, the East District had heard his footsteps- bartenders swallowed questions, doormen developed selective blindness, and the backrooms that once bowed to Dario now trembled for his brother. He shook trees softly at first: a bribe here, a whisper there, a name pressed against a wall until it confessed.
Two things kept surfacing.
Emilia.
Rafael.
Not together. Never together- at least not in front of eyes that lived long enough to talk. But near each other. Around each other. Orbiting the same heat.
Cesare poured himself into a corner booth at Oblong, a jazz club where the saxophone sounded like sin. He waved off the hostess, loosened his cuff, and nodded at the man sliding into the seat opposite him: Renzo, the envoy with a memory like
