Chapter 7 - The Master of Dust
The first three days after Elena walked out, the De Luca brownstone remained suspended in amber and rot.
Rafael had not slept. He had not showered. He had banished his security detail to the perimeter gates, refusing to let his lieutenants, his consigliere, or his domestic staff cross the threshold. The house was silent except for the low, monotonous drone of the grandfather clock in the dining room and the occasional hiss of rain against the terrace.
On the morning of the fourth day, his underboss, Marcus, forced his way inside through the kitchen entrance, his pistol drawn against the unnatural quiet. He found the Don sitting on the fifth step of the grand staircase, in the same low-slung trousers he had worn the night of the discovery, an untouched tumbler of scotch resting between his bare feet.
“Boss,” Marcus had said, his voice hesitant, cautious. “The Castellano family is moving on the Brooklyn docks. They heard rumors. They think you’re compromised. We need you at the table.”
Rafael had slowly raised his bloodshot eyes. His dark stubble had grown into a ragged, uneven beard; his skin was sallow, the vibrant ink across his chest looking like bruises in the dim light. “Let them take the docks,” Rafael rasped. His voice sounded like dry gravel. “If they step out of line, shoot them. Don’t bring their names into this house.”
His men knew better than to question him, but the syndicate began to whisper. The ruthless, calculating predator who had consolidated the five boroughs in his early thirties was disintegrating from the inside out. He attended meetings like a ghost, his decisions cold and perfunctory, his temper lethal. When Lucia’s father, an influential elder in the family’s legitimate real estate holdings, had attempted to schedule a private sit-down to plead for his daughter’s standing, Rafael had not even granted him an audience. He had revoked the Bianchi family’s protection within twenty-four hours, exiling them to an obscure corner of Rhode Island with a single, handwritten decree that promised a bullet in the throat of anyone bearing the name Bianchi who stepped across the New York state line.
Yet the violence brought no absolution. It did not fill the silence of the second floor.
Every night, Rafael stood outside the master bedroom, his hand resting against the mahogany door, unable to turn the knob. When he finally forced himself inside on the tenth day, the room remained exactly as Elena had left it.
The two crystal wineglasses still sat on the rumpled, unwashed sheets, the dried dregs of Brunello turned into dark, oxidized crusts at the bottom of the crystal. And beside them lay the folded white note.
Rafael had not touched it.
May you like
The man who had ordered executions without blinking, who had stared down federal grand juries with an icy smirk, was paralyzed by four inches of folded cream paper. He feared that reading her final words would make her absence legally, permanently real. He feared that whatever she had written would strip away the last remaining delusion that she might return.
So the note remained unopened, resting like an unexploded bomb between the two glasses on the bed. He slept in the guest room at the far end of the corridor, shivering under synthetic blankets, haunted by the phantom scent of bergamot and gardenia that refused to leave the walls.
