Chapter Six—Dominic—
1284 Words
Listen to Bullet by Jared Benjamin for the full experience!!!
Dominic used to think love was a weakness in other men. Now he understood it was just leverage waiting to be discovered.
Before anything else—before thought fully settled, before the weight of the room could reassert itself—Dominic reached for his phone.
He stepped just slightly away from the table, not because he needed privacy, but because decisions like this required distance from witnesses.
The call connected quickly.
"Yes," Dominic said, voice even. "We're moving the timeline up."
A pause.
His gaze didn't change.
"Lorenzo has made his position clear. He's not aligning with the family. And he won't complete the operation without assistance."
Another pause on the other end.
Dominic's jaw tightened faintly—not frustration, but calculation adjusting in real time.
"Then it's no longer conditional. It's now. Remove her from the equation before it escalates further. She's in the ICU now. I could just send Gabriele to flush her with something but no doubt Lorenzo will be there till she's discharged to recovery care." He rambles on. Thinking. Strategizing.
"He'll take her to her place when she's cleared to be go home. He won't want her near me. Do it then."
He didn't wait for confirmation.
The call ended.
Only then did he return the phone face-down to the table.
The basement of the Cabaret was quiet at this hour—quieter than it had any right to be. The kind of quiet that didn't mean peace, only pause. Above him, the building slowly began to breathe again: music muffled through floorboards, laughter began to stretch thin through stone, velvet and sin. Life continuing as if nothing in the world had ever been paid for in blood.
Dominic stood at the edge of the room, sleeves rolled just enough to suggest ease he didn't feel. His watch ticked softly against his wrist. Measured. Patient. Unbothered.
He liked objects that kept time properly. People rarely did.
Matteo waited near the corridor with Antonio and Dante, all three of them careful in the way men became when they'd learned not to ask questions. Dominic didn't look at them. He didn't need to. He could feel their attention anyway—hovering, restrained, obedient. They were Lorenzo's men but they were there because Lorenzo had ordered them to wait till he returned from taking the girl home apparently needing privacy, only— he hadn't made it that far.
The aftermath of his anger was still settling in the structure like a pressure that hadn't fully released, and Dominic had not moved from the room since.
Good. Obedience was cleaner than loyalty. Loyalty broke when it hurt enough.
He turned a glass slowly between his fingers. Whiskey, untouched now. Not because he didn't drink—he did—but because tonight required clarity more than numbness.
There was a difference most men never learned to recognize.
His phone rested face-down beside him. It had already done its job.
A simple confirmation. A correction to a developing problem. A contingency set in motion. That was all it was.
Dominic exhaled once, slow and even, as if the breath itself could flatten what was building behind his ribs.
Lorenzo.
The name didn't feel like a name anymore. It felt like a trajectory.
He saw it the way he saw all dangerous patterns: not as emotion, but as sequence of events the Fates deemed necessary.
Boy meets girl.
Boy believes himself different.
Boy forgets what world he stands in.
Then comes the fracture.
Always the fracture.
Like—Isabella.
The thought didn't arrive as language first. It arrived as sensation.
Not sound. Not image. Absence.
He was no longer in the basement for a moment. Not physically. Not logically. He was somewhere quieter.
A room that no longer existed the way it used to.
Isabella's presence had never been loud. That was what made it worse in memory—not intensity, but normalcy. The way she had filled space without demanding it. The way her absence had not removed sound from a room, but changed the meaning of every sound that remained.
He could still remember the silence that followed her—not immediate, but unfolding. Gradual. As if the world itself had needed time to accept she was gone before it began behaving accordingly.
And Lorenzo had been in that same room of time without understanding it yet.
Too young to name it.
Old enough to inherit it.
Do it Nic.
Save our family.
Save my Shaw.
Dominic did not linger there. Lingering was indulgence. Indulgence was what made men hesitate.
And hesitation was what turned powerful men into widows of their own decisions.
Above him, a laugh echoed faintly through the ceiling—now distorted slightly by distance and pressure. The basement absorbed it differently this time.
Dominic's jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly.
Not anger.
Recognition.
He had seen this film before. He already knew how it ended. That was the curse of experience—nothing ever felt new, only replayed with different faces and slightly altered names.
He set the glass down.
Carefully.
As if precision could keep memory from becoming prophecy.
Fuck. The Fates.
"They think it's love," he said at last, Italian rolling off his tongue as smooth as negotiations did.
Matteo shifted slightly in the hallway, but didn't respond.
Dominic didn't expect him to.
"Love is what people call it when they lacked vocabulary for inevitability." He spits.
When they lacked survival instinct.
He finally turned his head just enough to glance toward the corridor.
"They confuse attachment with immunity," he continued. "As if proximity makes them untouchable."
His voice stayed even. That was important. Calm was authority. Calm was distance. Calm was control. And control was the only thing that ever kept history from repeating in exactly the same shape.
Except—It always repeated anyway.
That was the part men like him refused to accept.
He reached for his phone again, turning it over in his hand. The screen was dark, but he could still see it—could still see what it represented. A line already bending toward collapse.
Mercy, he told himself. Not destruction. Mercy was easier to live with.
He leaned back slightly against the table, gaze unfocused for a moment—not lost, never lost, just calculating inwards.
If Lorenzo never reached the point of loss...
If the girl was removed before attachment calcified...
Then Lorenzo would remain intact.
Unshaped. Unbroken. Safe.
The words should have softened something in him.
They didn't. Instead, it tightened everything.
Because Dominic knew what men became when they were forced to grow around a wound instead of through it. He had become one.
And he would not survive watching his son become the same.
A faint vibration hummed through the phone again—confirmation, delayed echo, finality disguised as routine.
The plan was already panning out.
Dominic's fingers still rested on the edge of the device.
For a moment, he allowed himself something dangerously close to reflection.
Not regret.
He didn't believe in regret.
Only outcomes.
And yet—There was always that moment after the decision, where silence felt heavier than sound.
He stood slowly, straightening his cuffs, reclaiming his shape the way men like him always did: by becoming presentable again.
Above him, the Cabaret breathed louder.
Unaware. Or pretending to be.
Dominic turned toward the stairs.
"He'll thank me later," he said quietly.
Matteo didn't answer. Neither did the building.
But Dominic didn't need them to. He had already seen the ending.
And that was the problem.
He never stopped to consider whether being right still mattered when it cost everything it was meant to protect.
- Writer
