Chapter 2 - The Whispered Song
Beside Landon Moretti sat a boy of four, drowning in an oversized navy blazer. His name was Leo. He was the orphaned son of Landon’s elder brother, Marco—a man cut down on the asphalt of a Roman turnpike fourteen months earlier.
Leo was not eating his buttered noodles. He was trembling, small fists balled against the damask tablecloth, his breathing coming in thin, stuttered gasps that signaled an oncoming panic attack. In the crowded restaurant, the sound of silverware striking porcelain, the low rumble of drunken laughter from Table Six, and the rhythmic clatter of cocktail shakers were too much for a child whose memories were punctuated by the deafening crack of suppressed automatic gunfire.
Leo began to cry. Not a loud, demanding tantrum, but a frantic, suffocating wail of terror that froze every waiter within twenty feet.
“Quiet him,” Landon murmured without turning his head. His voice had the flat, lethal cadence of a surgeon calling for a scalpel. It wasn't cruelty; it was survival. In the five boroughs, a Moretti who showed vulnerability in public invited wolves to the feast.
Dominic took half a step forward, his massive hand hovering awkwardly near the boy’s shoulder. Leo flinched violently, knocking over a crystal tumbler. Water cascaded across the white linen, dripping onto the imported rug. The restaurant went dead silent. The manager, sweating through his collar near the register, looked like a man preparing to be shot.
Paige Larkin did not think. Three years of disciplined invisibility, three years of scrubbing floors and memorizing bus schedules, evaporated under the instinctive pull of a child’s terror. She had heard that exact tone of weeping in the cellar beneath her family’s villa in Palermo while men with shotguns kicked in the front doors.
She grabbed a dry linen napkin, bypassed the velvet rope, and ignored Rick’s frantic hiss from behind the kitchen pass.
“Step back, Sarah,” Dominic growled, his jacket shifting as his right hand drifted toward the custom Sig Sauer beneath his armpit.
Paige did not look at Dominic. She didn't look at Landon Moretti either, though she could feel the heat of the Don’s gaze like an iron branding iron pressed against the back of her neck.
She dropped to her knees beside Leo’s chair. Her apron swept the wet carpet. She didn’t touch the boy—traumatized children bit when touched by strangers. Instead, she began dabbing the spilled water with slow, predictable sweeps, her posture rounded, small, and non-threatening.
Leo’s chest heaved. Tears cut clean tracks through the dust on his pale cheeks. He stared at Paige with wide, hazel eyes—eyes that held the exact shade of the Mediterranean Sea off the cliffs of Cefalù.
Paige’s voice dropped to a register so low it barely registered above the restaurant’s jazz soundtrack. It was a murmur, melodic and ancient, shaped by the harsh, poetic vowels of the Madonie mountains:
*“Vola, palummedda, supra lu mari,*
*Nenti c’è chiù chi ti po’ fari mali.*
*Dormi, picciriddu, sutta li stiddi,*
*Lu lupu nun veni pi chisti capiddi…”*
*Fly, little dove, over the sea / Nothing remains that can bring you harm / Sleep, little child, beneath the stars / The wolf will not come for these curls.*
It was not a standard Italian nursery rhyme. It was a specific, regional dialect from a forgotten village in the interior of Sicily, written by a grandmother who had buried three sons in the mafia wars of the nineteen-seventies. Only two families in the world had ever known those words. One had been wiped out. The other was the Moretti line.
Leo’s sobbing hitched. His breath caught in his throat. He looked at Paige, his trembling chin steadying as his little fingers reached out and curled into the hem of her cheap black polyester apron.
At the head of the table, Landon Moretti stopped breathing.
The wine glass in his hand did not drop, but the knuckles clutching the stem turned the color of chalk. His jaw tightened so hard a tendon jumped along his cheek. The boredom vanished from his eyes, replaced by a shock so profound and volatile that Dominic instinctively shifted his weight, anticipating violence.
That song had been Marco’s secret. Marco had sung it only to Leo, learned from their mother who had died before Landon was old enough to speak. Marco had sworn that the only other living person who knew those verses was the woman he had smuggled out of Palermo during the purge of the Falcone family—a ghost who had vanished without a trace three years ago.
Landon slowly set his glass down. The base hit the table with a soft, ominous *clink*.
“Look at me,” Landon commanded.
The words were not loud, but they carried the terrifying weight of absolute authority.
Paige froze. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. The adrenaline that had driven her across the floor drained away in an instant, leaving behind the sickening realization of what she had done.
*You fool. You reckless, sentimental fool.*
She kept her head bowed. “I’m sorry, sir. The spill—I only meant to clean the water. My apologies.”
“I said,” Landon repeated, his voice dropping into a lethal, velvet register that made the hair on Dominic’s arms stand up, “look at me.”
Paige didn’t move. She released Leo’s hand with agonizing gentleness, rose to her feet with her eyes fixed firmly on the brass buttons of Landon’s waistcoat, and took one step backward.
“I have other tables, sir,” she whispered, her American accent forced, flat, and brittle.
She turned and walked toward the kitchen swinging doors. She did not run. Running was an admission of guilt. Running invited the bullet.
Landon stood up. All six-foot-two of him uncoiled with terrifying grace. He didn’t care about the patrons staring. He didn’t care about the rain outside or the meeting scheduled in thirty minutes with the docks union.
He stared at the swinging door as it rocked back and forth on its hinges.
“Dominic,” Landon said, the room turning ten degrees colder.
“Boss?”
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“Lock down every exit. Kitchen, basement, delivery alleys. Bring the manager to me. If that girl leaves this building, you will answer for it with your life.” Landon’s dark eyes burned with an obsessive, electric fire. “Find her. Now.”
***
