Leo POV
During my first weekend at the academy, I did not go home. Instead, I lied to Elena. I constructed a plausible fiction of a mandatory school event and a demanding group project to finish.
"Are you eating enough?" she asked when she telephoned on Saturday afternoon, her voice tight with a manufactured cheerfulness.
"Yes," I lied.
"Is the room too cold?"
"No."
I fed her evasive, one-word answers until she finally ran out of domestic questions and hung up with a sigh I could almost feel through the line.
A heavy thud against my ribs broke my trance; Marco had tossed a basketball at my chest.
"Stop staring at the wall," he said. "Let's go shoot some hoops."
I caught the ball by reflex, grabbed my sneakers, and followed him out into the sharp afternoon air.
When the second weekend arrived, I had no choice. I needed my advanced physics notebook for an impending midterm project. I took the first bus back to the estate on Sunday morning.
I turned the key in the heavy front door and stepped into the vaulted foyer. The house was unnaturally quiet. My gaze was drawn to a pair of unfamiliar, scuffed men's sneakers, kicked carelessly against the mahogany wainscoting. They were much too small to be Victor's.
I walked up the sweeping staircase and pushed open the door to my old bedroom.
I halted on the threshold.
The room, once my own, had been thoroughly colonized. My heavy wooden desk was gone. My maps of the city, which I had pinned with great care, had been torn down. In their place sat a glowing gaming laptop on a cheap metal folding table. Empty soda cans stood in little clusters on the floorboards, sweating condensation onto the polished wood. Framed photos of Victor's teenage son, Luca, were affixed across my walls.
The sound of hurried footsteps echoed from the far end of the hall as Elena hurried up the stairs, wiping her hands on a damp dish towel.
"Leo," she gasped, her eyes widening. "You did not say you were coming."
"Whose things are these?" I asked, my voice a monotone that seemed to absorb the sound in the hallway.
Elena wrung the towel in her hands.
"Luca visits on weekends now," she explained, her words tumbling out. "He needed his own space to feel comfortable. Victor said since you were boarding anyway, it made sense to let him use the room."
I stared at the invaded space where my life used to be, a cold fist tightening in my chest.
"I just need my physics notebook," I said, refusing to give my anger a voice.
Elena nodded quickly, as if relieved by the simplicity of the request, and rushed down the hall to a cramped storage closet. She dug through a disordered stack of cardboard boxes before at last emerging with my notebook.
She handed it to me. As I took it, my gaze fell to the center of the dark blue cover, where the distinct tread of a shoe, outlined in dried mud, was imprinted.
I traced the ridges of the dirt with my thumb.
"It was accidentally stepped on while we were moving the boxes," Elena said, her voice shaking.
I looked at the footprint. Then, I looked back down the hall toward the stairs. The tread pattern perfectly matched the scuffed sneakers I had seen in the foyer.
"It's fine," I said, turning on my heel.
"Aren't you staying for dinner?" Elena called out, following behind me down the stairs. "I'm making a roast."
"No."
I reached the foyer just as the front door swung open. Victor and Luca walked in, their arms laden with paper bags of groceries. Victor's face broke into an exaggerated, overly enthusiastic smile.
"Leo! What a surprise!"
He shoved Luca forward by the shoulder. "Luca, say hi to your new brother."
Luca kept his headphones around his neck and completely ignored me, his eyes fixed to his phone screen.
I looked past the boy and directly into Victor's eyes. When I spoke, my voice dropped to a low, dangerous pitch.
"Don't ever touch my belongings again."
The smile on Victor's face did not so much vanish as it did seize; the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes froze, and a muscle in his right jaw gave a distinct, taut quiver.
For one brief moment, I saw it—the flicker of something cold and calculating behind his eyes. Not fear. Assessment.
He was sizing me up, recalibrating.
"Leo, I'm so sorry," he stammered, taking an involuntary step back. "It was just a misunderstanding. We just needed a little room."
I did not wait for him to finish his thin, hollow apologies. I changed my shoes, pulled open the door, and walked out into the failing light.
I descended the grand front steps of the estate, leaving the airless foyer behind me. As I marched down the long driveway, I stared down at the dirty footprint on my notebook.
The disrespect was no longer hiding in the shadows. It was tracking dirt across my name.
I stepped outside the heavy iron gates of the estate, letting the cold wind strike my face. Without a moment's hesitation, I pulled out my encrypted phone.
This time, my thumb did not suspend itself in doubt. I pressed the call button.
It rang exactly once before a voice answered, low and resonant, with the texture of fine gravel.
"Leo."
"Dad," I said, my grip tightening on the plastic casing. "I need to meet."
There was a fraction of a second of silence on the line. The Don of the Famiglia was clearly taken aback by my uncharacteristic demand.
"Where?" he asked, his tone shedding any trace of paternal warmth, becoming the clipped, precise instrument of command.
"The old diner. Wednesday."
"I'll clear my schedule," he said.
The line went dead.
I stood on the empty sidewalk, the encrypted phone still warm in my hand.
I hadn't called my father in eight months. Now I was summoning the most dangerous man in the city to a meeting.
Victor thought he was dealing with a dumb teenager.
He was about to meet the Don.
Whatever happened next, there was no turning back.
