They moved to the sitting room an hour later.
Not because the study was unusable — though it was — but because the sitting room was where the family had always assembled when things needed to be decided together. Romano’s instinct. The room recognized it.
Victor joined them.
Maps on the table. Intelligence reports. The traffic camera footage — clean as predicted but Victor had people working the gaps. The list of every Marchetti contact, every operator Ottavio had called in the past seventy two hours, every financial movement in the past week.
They worked.
This was what this family did when things became real. They worked. They didn’t fall apart — or they fell apart and then they worked, which was perhaps more honest and more functional than not falling apart at all.
Romano was metho
