Her name was Vera Solis, and she had worked for Carlo De Luca for eleven years before Carlo De Luca died and took with him the particular category of protection that made certain knowledge safe to carry.
Damian had not seen her in fourteen years. He had not thought about her often, which was not indifference so much as the way memory worked when the periods it contained were ones you had moved past and had not revisited. She existed in the part of his history that belonged to his father’s operation, the years before he took over and began the slow, deliberate process of moving De Luca Enterprises from the grey margins toward legitimacy. Not all the way. Not completely. But significantly enough that the current legal exposure was manageable and the future, with continued discipline, was cl
