An eight-year-old girl walked straight up to a mob boss in a rainy diner, placed a jar of saved ice cream money on his table, and asked the one question nobody dared whisper.

"Who is your landlord, Maya?"

Vincent's voice was barely a whisper, yet it filled the empty diner with the resonant clarity of a tolling bell. He did not pull his open hand back; he left it resting palm-up on the scratched table, an offering of truce between two fundamentally different worlds.

The little girl sniffled, her small hand quickly rubbing across her nose, leaving a faint streak of grime on her pale cheek. "Mr. Gavalas. He has an office on Thirty-First Street with the green awning. He comes on the first of the month in a silver car with shiny wheels."

A dark, imperceptible flicker passed through Vincent’s eyes.

Gavalas.

Arthur Gavalas was a mid-level slumlord who operated twenty dilapidated tenement buildings throughout Astoria and Sunnyside. More importantly, Gavalas paid a monthly tribute of twelve thousand dollars to one of Vincent’s secondary capos, a greasy enforcer named Frankie "The Vole" Scarlatti, in exchange for "protection" against tenant unions, code inspectors, and rival shakedowns. Gavalas made his fortune by refusing to repair boilers in December, letting roofs collapse, and turning a blind eye to junkies in the stairwells, all while using the Romano name as a cudgel to terrify working-class families into silence.

The irony tasted like copper and vinegar in Vincent's mouth.

This child had walked through two miles of October gale to pay the Romano family fifty dollars to save her from a misery that the Romano family was actively subsidizing for twelve grand a month.

"And your mother," Vincent said, his voice terrifyingly quiet, the dangerous undercurrent returning, though now directed entirely away from the child. "What is her name?"

"Clara," Maya whispered. "Clara Lin. She works at the Sunburst Industrial Laundry. She washes the hotel sheets. The big ones from Manhattan."

Vincent’s gaze remained steady. "Does Gavalas bother her?"

Maya looked down at her damp sneakers, her left toe curling inward against the mud-caked untied lace. "He came two days ago. He banged on the door until the wood cracked. He told Mom that if the rent wasn't four hundred dollars more next week, he was putting our mattresses on the sidewalk. Mom begged him. She told him about the laundry, about my school... and he just laughed at her. He said... he said nobody cares about an immigrant with a broken door."

A thick, suffocating silence descended upon the diner.

Behind Vincent, Marco let out a low, venomous breath through his teeth. Marco was a murderer, an extortionist, and an enforcer who had buried rivals in the marshlands of New Jersey, but he had been raised by an Italian mother who scrubbed floors in Bensonhurst. There were rules in the old neighborhood—rules about widows, mothers, and the dignity of a working home. Rules that men like Frankie Scarlatti and Arthur Gavalas had spent twenty years ignoring in the name of profit.

Vincent did not move. He did not shout. But the muscles along his temples bunched like thick cables, and the crowned serpent on his neck seemed to tighten its coils against his skin.

He looked at Maya, who was watching him with a mixture of terror and desperate hope, her small hands still clutching the rim of her pickle jar. She had laid her entire world at his feet, gambling her ninety-one weeks of ice cream on the faint hope that the devil might have a sense of fairness.

"Maya," Vincent said softly.

"Yes, Mr. Romano?"

"Your mother was wrong about one thing."

The girl's eyes widened, a fresh wave of panic fluttering across her features. "About what?"