POV: DANTE
The documents spread across Dante's desk were financial reports from the last month of operations.
Territory consolidation in Brooklyn. Preliminary numbers on the Japanese business deal. Preliminary assessments of how many dealers in Dimitri's secondary operations could be turned or scared away.
Dante sat back in his chair and looked up from the pages.
Salvatore's photograph sat on the corner of his desk, framed in dark wood. His brother's face, captured in a moment of rare laughter, frozen forever at age twenty-eight. Three months and some change since Dimitri had put a bullet in him in a Rome alley. Three months since that debt had become personal in a way that went beyond business, beyond territory, beyond anything else.
Salvatore.
That was why this all started. That was the anchor point, the justification, the reason Dante woke up every morning with vengeance burning in his chest like a fire that couldn't be extinguished or contained or reasoned with.
