Chapter 2: The Boy Who Became A Monster
1324 Words
Dante Marchetti woke at five forty-five.
Not because of an alarm.
Sleep just…stopped. The way it always did. Like his body had decided rest was something other people got to have.
He lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling.
Then his hand moved under the pillow before anything else.
The gun was there.
He checked the chamber without sitting up. Thumbed the safety. Set it on the nightstand.
Then he got out of bed.
His suit was already laid out.
Dark charcoal. His father's style. His father's idea of what a man should look like walking into a room.
Dante buttoned it in front of the mirror and kept his eyes on his hands the entire time.
Breakfast was black coffee at the long dining table while the house moved carefully around him. The staff had a way of being present without being visible when he was in a room – a skill they'd developed on their own, without being asked.
He'd noticed it a long time ago.
He'd stopped thinking about what it meant.
Enzo's message sat at the top of his phone. Call me when you're human.
Dante read it, almost smiled but he didn't
He finished his coffee and picked up the phone and the morning began.
The meeting was at eight.
Six men around the table in the east wing. Captains. Route managers. A lawyer who'd learned to study his notepad during silences.
Dante stood at the head. Jacket buttoned. Hands in his pockets.
"The Ferraro payment." He looked at Sarto — thick-necked, perpetually nervous, a man whose knuckles announced his feelings before his face did. "It’s three days late."
Sarto's knuckles cracked. "They've had some complications on their end, the route's been…"
"Where is the money, Sarto."
This wasn't a question and Sarto understood the difference.
"Tonight." He straightened slightly. "You have my word."
Dante moved on without responding.
The lawyer's pen kept moving.
Marco was in the study.
His father had a way of making rooms feel smaller just by standing in them — not through size or noise, but through something denser than both. He was at the window when Dante entered, hands clasped behind his back, silver hair catching the grey morning light.
He didn't turn around immediately.
That was also a habit.
"The Romano situation," Marco said.
"Handled." Dante stopped in the center of the room. "Ferraro pays tonight. Northern route is clear."
Marco turned then. His eyes moved over Dante the way they always had — not warmly, not coldly, just with that particular measuring quality that had made Dante feel, for most of his childhood, like something being assessed for usefulness.
"There's a shipment at the eastern dock." Marco's voice was even. Almost casual. "Tonight. Eleven o'clock. I need you there."
Dante held his gaze. "What kind of shipment."
Marco's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes did — a brief, almost imperceptible shift, the way a door closes without quite latching. "The kind that keeps this family running." He turned back to the window. "Be there."
Dante looked at the back of his father's head for a moment.
"Fine," he said.
He was halfway down the corridor when it came.
It always came without warning. That was the thing about memory — it didn't wait for permission. A certain quality of light, a half-open door, and suddenly he wasn't thirty-one years old anymore.
He was eight.
Standing in the hallway outside his mother's room, still in his pajamas, confused because she'd missed breakfast and she never missed breakfast. She always sat across from him with her coffee and sometimes, if his father wasn't at the table, she'd read to him while he ate.
The door had been open.
He'd pushed it wider.
And then his father's voice, from behind him — calm, unhurried, the way Marco approached everything. "Come away from there, son."
He'd turned. Marco had been standing in the hallway with his hands clasped behind his back, face arranged into something that wasn't grief, wasn't nothing — something between the two that eight-year-old Dante hadn't had a word for yet.
"She was weak," Marco had said. The way he said all facts he considered self-evident. "Weak women break. That's what they do. Don't be weak, Dante."
And then he'd walked away.
Left his eight-year-old son standing in that hallway.
Dante's hand was on the corridor wall.
He didn't remember putting it there.
He straightened. Adjusted his jacket. Walked the rest of the way to his office and closed the door behind him without looking back.
Eleven o'clock.
The eastern docks. Salt water and diesel and something underneath both that Dante had trained himself not to name.
Fausto was already there, he was older, broad-shouldered, a man whose face had long since run out of expressions worth reading. He had a clipboard, which he always did, which Dante had eventually understood was just somewhere to look.
Beside him stood Ric, a young man, eager in the way that hadn't been beaten out of him yet, eyes tracking Dante's face for cues about how to feel.
"Numbers match the manifest," Fausto said, not looking up from the clipboard. "Ship docked forty minutes ago."
"Open it," Dante said.
Fausto's pen stopped moving. "Standard procedure's to wait for…"
"Fausto."
He didn't need another warning.
"Yes, sir."
The doors swung wide.
The smell reached him first.
Then the silence – that particular, devastating silence of people who had learned that sound made things worse.
His eyes adjusted slowly.
Small shapes in the dark interior. Chains. Eyes that caught the dock lights and reflected them back, wide, glassy, animal-still.
A boy near the back, nine years old, maybe ten, pulled his knees to his chest when the light hit him and pressed himself into the corner with both arms over his head.
Just waiting. The way a child waits when they've already learned what comes next.
Dante looked at him.
The boy's shoulders were shaking.
Something in Dante's chest split open, the way ice fractures before it gives, and he grabbed the container door and swung it shut.
He walked to the far end of the dock.
His steps were measured and even, to the shadows behind a stack of crates at the water's edge, and then his body made its own decision.
When it was over, he straightened.
Stood at the edge of the water and breathed through his nose and looked at the dark surface of the harbour until his hands stopped.
They didn't stop immediately.
"Sir." Ric's voice sounded behind him, carefully, like a man approaching something that might be dangerous. "Are you… do you need…"
"I'm fine." Dante turned around.
Ric looked at his face and looked away. "Should I tell Fausto to hold the…"
"Tell Fausto to process them." Dante's voice was level. It was always level. "And tell him I want the count confirmed before morning."
"Yes, sir." Ric left without another word.
Dante stood alone on the dock.
His hand moved to his gun, not to draw it. Just to feel the weight of it. The familiar thing. The thing that was supposed to remind him who he was and what he was for.
His hand was shaking.
He looked down at it.
The boy's arms over his head. That flinch, practiced, instinctive, the flinch of a child who'd already learned to make himself small before the blow came.
Dante knew that flinch.
He'd worn it once, standing in a hallway in his pajamas while his father told him not to be weak.
‘What are you doing?’
The thought came from somewhere he didn't visit. Somewhere quiet and old and more honest than anything Marco had ever taught him.
‘What are you becoming?’
His hand stayed on the gun.
The dock workers moved around him in the dark, and Dante stood completely still, and he had no answer.
Not one he could live with.
- Writer
