Mafia Boss

Chapter ten

The attack came two days later. Not at the penthouse, which was a fortress, but at the café in Queens. They had found his sanctuary. It was a message of profound cruelty.

He was sipping his wine, waiting for Sofia, who was running late. The first bullet took Enzo, the old owner, square in the chest as he wiped the counter. The sound was a thunderclap in the small space. Then the world dissolved into noise and flying splinters.

Bruno was a blur of motion, his own weapon appearing, shoving Vittorio to the floor behind the solid oak bar. Gunfire erupted—staccato, deafening. Bruno returned fire, his shots measured and lethal. Vittorio heard a cry, a thud. His own gun, a sleek 9mm he hadn’t drawn in years, felt foreign in his hand. He peered around the corner.

Two men in black jackets, faces obscured, were advancing. Professionals. Not Marco’s hot-headed boys. Sokolov’s. Bruno took one in the throat. The other fired, and Bruno grunted, spinning back, his shoulder a blossom of red.

The remaining assassin swung his aim toward Vittorio, cornered behind the bar.

And then the door chimed.

Sofia stood there, frozen in the doorway, her scarf bright yellow, her face a mask of incomprehension. Her eyes met Vittorio’s across the c*****e—the dead owner, the bleeding bodyguard, the old man with a gun in his hand.

“Victor?” Her voice was a small, broken thing.

The assassin, startled, shifted his aim toward this new witness.

Time did not slow. It crystallized. In that shard of perfect, terrible clarity, Vittorio Conti saw the entire architecture of his life. The violence he had sown, now ripening, about to claim the only pure thing it had ever produced. The light, about to be snuffed out by the very darkness he had cultivated.

He did not think. The years fell away. The sickness, the fatigue, the regret—all burned off in the white-hot furnace of a single, primal need: protect her.

He rose. Not the slow rise of an old man, but the fluid, explosive motion of the young predator he had once been. His arm extended, the gun an extension of his will. His world narrowed to the front sight and the centre mass of the man threatening his granddaughter.

He spoke no command. He gave no warning.

He fired.

Once. Twice.

The shots were impossibly loud. The assassin jerked, slammed back into a table, and lay still.

Silence, ringing and absolute, descended.

Sofia was still standing, unharmed, her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were huge, fixed on him. Not on “Victor,” the retired businessman, but on the stranger who had just, with terrifying efficiency, killed a man.