Chapter 4 - The Old Man's Gaze
Sophia looked down at her own hand.
The realization of what she had done hit her like an icy plunge into winter water. The ten years of muscle memory—the brutal, unending drills her father had beaten into her reflexes in the unheated basement of their rowhouse—had bypassed her conscious mind entirely. When a strike arrived within her perimeter, her body answered before her intellect could intervene.
She released her grip immediately.
Her fingers opened, and she pulled her hand back to her side as if she had touched molten iron.
Deprived of the support that had been holding her aloft, Victoria stumbled awkwardly, her high heel skidding on the wet marble before she managed to catch herself against the edge of a mahogany service table. The glassware on the table rattled violently, but did not fall. Victoria stood there, clutching her ankle, her face pale, her breathing ragged, staring at Sophia as if looking at a ghost.
Sophia remained on her knees, her eyes wide, staring at the white towel.
I'm dead, the thought screamed in her mind. They will bury me in the harbor. I broke the protocol.
Near the mezzanine stairs, by the first violin section, an elderly man slowly pushed himself up from his velvet-lined armchair.
His name was Don Vincente Falcone. He was seventy-four years old, his hair snowy white, his back slightly bent by age, but his dark eyes remained as sharp and predatory as they had been during the gangland wars of the nineteen-eighties. Falcone was one of the few surviving founding figures of the Five Families—a man who had seen every hitman, every enforcer, and every martial art style that had crossed the city’s docks over half a century.
Falcone’s fingers tightened around his silver-topped cane until his knuckles turned ashen.
His breath came in a ragged whistle. He leaned over the polished brass railing, staring down at the kneeling housekeeper with an expression of stunned, unadulterated awe.
"That style..." Falcone murmured into the dead silence of the room, his gravelly voice carrying across the lower floor. "That style is impossible."
Beside him, his two bodyguards tensed, their hands dropping beneath their tailored silk jackets. "Don Vincente? What is it?"
"The intercept," Falcone whispered, his voice trembling slightly. "The bone-lock on the lead tendon without shifting the hips. The Iron Gate of the Seventh District. There was only one man in this hemisphere who knew the mechanics of that deflection."
Falcone’s eyes drifted from the floor across the wide expanse of the ballroom, landing on the raised VIP dais at the far end of the room.
May you like
Sitting behind a low table of black granite, surrounded by three of his top caporegimes, was Alexander Ashford.
Alexander had seen it.
