Chapter 6 - The Steel Beneath the Wool
Victor hesitated. It was an unnatural motion for the security chief—a split-second stall that violated every principle of close-protection training. He looked at Roman, his pale eyes full of unspoken arguments about security perimeters, unknown variables, and the absolute vulnerability of an Outfit boss standing unshielded before an outsider.
"Now, Victor," Roman repeated, the command carrying an edge that Brooked no secondary debate.
Victor dipped his head once, sharply. He turned on his heel, his combat boots squeaking on the blue mat as he crossed over to the wooden bench where Noah was sitting. The fourteen-year-old looked up at Victor, his eyes wide and full of unresolved questions, but Victor placed a heavy, gloved palm between the boy’s shoulder blades and guided him firmly toward the far western corner of the facility, near the spectator bleachers and the water fountain. The two armed guards by the garage doors remained at their posts, their backs turned politely toward the center of the room, though their ears remained tuned to the hum of the space.
Roman waited until the boy was thirty paces away, out of earshot beneath the roar of the ventilation ducts.
Then, with an agonizing slowness that looked like an iron hinge rusting in real time, Roman let his breath out.
The transformation was devastating.
Without the rigid, performative mask of the sovereign Don, Roman’s frame seemed to compress by two inches. His broad shoulders rolled forward, his chin dropped, and his left hand instinctively moved to the small of his back, his fingers pressing hard through the fine wool of his charcoal jacket into the lumbar curve. A low, guttural groan vibrated deep in his chest—the sound of an animal that had carried a spear in its flank across twenty miles of tundra without daring to whimper.
"Six months ago," Roman said, his baritone rough, scraped raw by pain. "The Skyway ramp near ninety-fifth. Three black sedans from the North Side tried to run my convoy off the bridge."
Gia did not speak. She listened with the stillness of an athlete who understood the weight of trauma.
"We took the impact at eighty miles an hour," Roman continued, his eyes fixed on the blue vinyl beneath his oxfords. "The armor-plating held, but the vehicle rolled twice before hitting the concrete barrier. My driver took two rounds through the windshield. I crawled out the rear hatch with a broken rib and a dislocated shoulder. I shot two of them on the asphalt before Victor’s backup arrived."
He lifted his face. In the harsh industrial glare, the lines around his eyes were deep, gray trenches of chronic sleep deprivation.
"The shoulder healed," Roman muttered. "The ribs set. But the lower back... two weeks later, the left leg started going numb. By month two, I couldn't get out of my desk chair without my vision going black."
"Why haven't you seen a neurosurgeon?" Gia asked gently. "A simple microdiscectomy at Northwestern. Forty-five minutes on an operating table, three weeks of physical therapy, and you have your life back."
Roman let out a short, harsh bark of laughter that carried no humor at all.
"Northwestern?" Roman looked at her as if she were a child asking why the moon didn't shine during the day. "You think a man in my position walks into a university hospital, signs an intake form, and goes under general anesthesia for four hours?"
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He reached into his pocket, his hand emerging to gesture toward the blacked-out windows of the warehouse.
"The moment Roman DeLuca checks into a surgical wing, the news hits the commission within twenty minutes," he said, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp register. "The Marcone family would move on my riverfront warehouses before the IV drip was empty. Half my own capos would start looking at my seat at the table and wondering who was going to take the cut. In my world, Miss Bennett, a Don who cannot stand on his own two feet is already in a pine box. I show weakness... and Noah doesn't make it to his fifteenth birthday."
