"Signor Falcone, you need to take it easy. You were the one who put hands on a man under our roof first. We're only keeping to the house rules—"
"Rules? I am the rules! Let me make this plain. Until you cast that little tramp out and put her on her knees to beg my pardon, this is far from finished!"
That was when Dante Caruso came out through the doors of the social club.
He found me at once and crossed the floor to me, taking my hand as easily as drawing breath.
"Been waiting long?"
"No, just got here."
I smiled up at him, and Lorenzo Falcone caught all of it.
The instant he saw how close we stood, something turned over behind his eyes.
"Marchetti, I knew it was your hand on the strings! Casting my sister out wasn't enough for you, so now you've sent men to have me thrown out of my own place too!"
He wrenched himself free of the enforcers' grip and came at me with his fist already cocked.
Dante's face went to stone. He pulled me in behind him and drove a kick into Lorenzo's gut.
"Take him out of here."
The two soldiers moved as one, dragging Lorenzo toward the street.
"Marchetti, you dare move against the Falcone Family, and my father will never let it lie. You just wait!"
Lorenzo's cursing thinned into the distance, and Dante looked at me with something close to worry.
"Don Falcone's been one of this city's most respected men for years. What's really underneath all this, that you'd go this far?"
I shook my head, unwilling to say more.
That night, a call came from a number both unfamiliar and impossible to forget.
It was Don Falcone.
Twenty years.
Hearing that voice again, my heart still gave an involuntary twist of pain.
"So you're the Marchetti woman. They tell me you head the whole Syndicate."
On the other end, his voice carried that old trace of looking down from a great height.
"Speaking."
"Who gave a girl like you the nerve to move against my children?"
I let out a scornful laugh and answered without a shred of mercy.
"Don Falcone, you must be confused. Set against the Marchetti name, the Falcone Family is something the territory has already left behind. Why would I waste my hours moving against a dying line?"
"You—"
My words took him past the edge. A man like that had likely never been spoken to this way by anyone younger in the whole of his life.
I could hear him breathing hard down the line, and beneath it, faint and quick, the sound of his signet ring beginning to tap against the table.
"Fine. Very good. Young and reckless, no idea how this world is run!"
"You think the Marchetti name is so untouchable? Then let's see how many days you last on it!"
"I'll be waiting."
I gave him the three flat words and ended the call on him.
Don Falcone moved fast.
First thing the next morning, my assistant came in clutching her phone, her face drawn tight.
"Don Marchetti, you need to see this."
It was already running across every paper and account the Falcones owned, in heavy black print: 【The Marchetti Don — A Private Life in Ruins】.
I read down the column.
A handful of bought gossip sheets had run long pieces, all of them claiming a woman barely past twenty could never have taken the head of a Syndicate without some powerful man propping her up beneath the sheets.
Then came piece after piece, every line hinting that the Family's operations didn't hold up under weight, that we were running on whisper and reputation and nothing more.
"Don Marchetti, several of the allied families have already sent word asking what's true," my assistant's voice was shaking. "If we don't put this down soon, they may pull back from the table."
Before I could answer, a knock came at the office door.
A man from our information men hurried in with a laptop.
"It's bad, Don Marchetti. Bianca Falcone just put a recording out across the channels too."
I took the laptop and watched.
On the screen, Bianca Falcone sat before the camera, painted flawless, walking through every job she claimed to have handled during her time planted inside our operation, one by one.
"These are all the matters I saw through during my time as an associate in the Marchetti operation. Every one of them was my own work, and I stood first among all of them. And yet Don Marchetti cast me out in front of everyone, without a single word of reason."
