Vincent Calder was thirty-nine, broad-shouldered, and famous for a chilling patience that frightened people more than shouting ever could—until a toddler told him to fix her stuffed rabbit.

The brief, golden warmth that had filled the library evaporated as quickly as steam off hot pavement.

Vincent Calder did not immediately answer the child. He sat with his elbows on the walnut table, his broad shoulders squared, his large hands resting flat on either side of the black calfskin folder.

Slowly, the smile that had softened his weathered, handsome features faded away. The lines around his hazel eyes tightened; the humor vanished from his lips, replaced by an expression of cold, impenetrable, and terrifying calculation. It was the face of the sovereign Don—the man who controlled the city's private docks, who moved politicians like pawns on a chessboard, and who had spent fifteen years burying adversaries who confused his patience with weakness.

He did not look at Lucy.

His eyes slowly rose from the polished timber, sweeping along the perimeter of the table, pinning each of the seven men in their seats one by one. His gaze lingered on Sal’s nervous hands; it paused on Frankie’s slick forehead; it bored into Marco’s downcast eyes with the weight of an approaching train.

Vincent reached forward with his right hand.

With slow, rhythmic deliberation, his index finger tapped the edge of the closed black folder. The sound was faint—a dry, muffled thud of flesh against leather—yet in the dead quiet of the room, it carried the acoustic finality of an executioner's gavel striking stone.

"Some days," Vincent murmured, his baritone voice dropping into a register so dark, so quiet, that it made the hairs on the back of Nora’s neck stand on end, "I wonder."

The words hung in the pressurized air like an open current of high-voltage wire.

At the far end of the table, Marco could no longer hold his master's gaze. The accountant’s head dropped, his eyes locking onto the blank legal pad before him, his fingers trembling as he pretended to review a column of figures. Beside him, Sal shifted his weight, his heavy suit jacket bunching awkwardly as he cleared his throat with a dry, strangled sound that died in his throat.

Not a single associate spoke. They looked like schoolboys who had been caught with matches in the basement, their collective arrogance crushed beneath the weight of three words and a closed folder.

Vincent held his gaze on the men for four long, agonizing seconds, letting the silence carve its lesson into the marrow of their bones.