Notes of a forgotten past

Vigliacchi

CHAPTER 5

Dante's POV

Sleep had never come easily to me and lately, it had stopped bothering to come at all. I was at my desk by 4am, going over the security rotations for the northern supply route. Something about the last two weeks had felt off to me, a pattern in the Reignsmen's movements. They knew things they shouldn't know and I wanted to find out how before it cost me something I couldn't get back.

My phone rang at 4:47.

I looked at the screen. Marco.

Marco did not call at 4:47 in the morning with good news.

"Talk," I said.

"The Reignsmen hit the northern route last night." His voice was flat and controlled. "Two convoys. They took almost everything."

I was silent for a moment. "Almost."

"We split the route the way you instructed. The southern branch got through. Maybe thirty percent of the total."

"How many men." I asked

"Eleven on the northern route. They surrendered without a fight, Dante." A pause. "Without a fight."

I stood up.

"The warehouse," I said. "One hour."

I dressed in the dark. No suit this time. Dark trousers, a plain shirt, the kind of clothes that don't matter if something gets on them. I took the elevator down to the private exit and got into the car that was already waiting and said nothing to my driver the entire way across the city.

Milan at five in the morning is a different city to Milan at any other hour. I watched it move past us.

I was not angry, anger is wasted energy. What I felt was colder than that.

The warehouse was on the eastern edge of the city, one of four that Moretti Acquisitions used officially for storage and one of eleven that it used for everything else. By the time I arrived, Marco was already there, standing just inside the entrance with his hands clasped in front of him and his expression carefully neutral. Behind him, further inside the warehouse, my men stood in a loose group. Eleven of them. The ones from the northern route.

I walked in slowly.

Nobody spoke. The only sound was my footsteps on the concrete floor and the distant low hum of the city outside. I stopped in front of them and looked at them one by one, taking my time, giving each face a proper moment of my attention. Some of them held my gaze. Most didn't.

I clasped my hands behind my back.

"Trentadue casse," I said quietly. Thirty two crates. "Gone."

Nobody responded.

"The Reignsmen sent how many men." It was not a question.

One of them, a broad shouldered man named Fausto who had been with me for three years, cleared his throat. "Twenty, maybe twenty-five, boss. They came from both sides of the route at the same time. We were—"

"You were eleven," I said. "Armed. On a route you have driven forty times."

Fausto stopped talking.

I looked at them all again. The ones who had stood on a road with weapons in their hands.

"Vigliacchi," I said softly.

Cowards.

My gun went off.

The first shot hit the man on the far left before anyone registered that I had moved. He dropped without a sound. The second shot came immediately after, clean and precise, the man beside him folding at the knees and hitting the concrete floor with a weight that echoed through the entire warehouse.

Two bodies. Two men who had stood on that road and put their hands up.

I lowered the gun slowly and looked at what was left of them.

"That," I said quietly, "is a warning to the rest of you."

The silence that followed was total. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. Nobody even shifted their weight. Fausto was staring straight ahead with his jaw locked and his hands completely still at his sides and I could see the effort it was costing him to hold himself together. The remaining men stood frozen. A few of them had gone pale. One near the back couldn't stop his hands from shaking and was trying very hard not to let it show.

I uncocked the gun and held it loosely at my side.

"The Reignsmen will receive a response," I said, in the same quiet voice I had used throughout. "Marco will give you your assignments. You will carry them out completely and without error." I looked at Fausto specifically. "Are we clear."

"Yes boss," Fausto said. His voice was steady.

I turned and walked toward the back of the warehouse where Marco was already waiting. He said nothing about what had just happened. That was one of the things I valued most about Marco. He understood which moments required words and which ones didn't.

"There's something else," he said instead, and held out a folder.

I took it.

On the front in Marco's precise handwriting: Liora Vale. Background Report.

I looked at it for a moment. The warehouse behind me was still completely silent.

I tucked the folder under my arm.

"The Reignsmen's eastern depot," I said. "Tonight."

"Understood," Marco said.

I walked out into the grey morning light and got back into the car and sat in the back seat with the folder in my lap. I didn't open it immediately. I looked out the window at the city waking up slowly around me.

Then I opened the folder.

Her photograph was the first thing inside. A performance still, taken at some small concert hall, her hands on the piano keys and her eyes closed and her whole face doing something that I did not have a precise word for. Something between peace and pain. The kind of expression that only appears on a person's face when they think nobody is watching.

I looked at it for longer than I needed to.

Then I closed the folder, leaned my head back against the seat, and closed my eyes.

The fragment came again, uninvited and partial the way they always were. A piano. A girl's voice beneath a melody. Something warm.

I opened my eyes before it could finish.

Not yet.