Chapter 8 - The Scent of Gunpowder and a Midnight Betrayal
“What do you have there?” Dante asked, his voice low and sharp.
Sienna stood up slowly, her heart pounding. “I found this in the planter. Dante… Alberto Rossi has been taking payments from Rocco Santoro for six months. He gave them the route today.”
Dante took the ledger from her hands, his eyes scanning the detailed ledger entries. With every page he turned, the air around him grew colder, until the temperature in the winter garden seemed to plummet below freezing.
“Alberto has been with my family for twenty-five years,” Dante said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “My father treated him like a brother.”
“What are you going to do?” Sienna asked, frightened by the murderous stillness in his posture.
“Treason in the Valente family has only one sentence.”
Dante summoned Enzo and four trusted enforcers. Within twenty minutes, Alberto Rossi was brought into the underground wine cellar beneath the mansion, oblivious to what had been discovered.
“Dante, why the late meeting?” Alberto smiled nervously, rubbing his hands. “We need to discuss the port shipments—”
Dante threw the black ledger onto the table between them.
The smile died on Alberto’s face. The color drained from his skin until he looked like a corpse.
“Dante… listen to me… Santoro threatened my family! He had my daughter!” Alberto fell to his knees, sobbing. “I had no choice!”
Dante looked down at the weeping man with eyes devoid of humanity. “You always have a choice, Alberto. You chose gold over blood.”
Dante did not pull a trigger. He simply looked at Enzo. “Strip him of everything. Turn him over to the federal authorities with a complete dossier of his tax fraud and Santoro’s racketeering operations. Let him spend the next forty years in ADX Florence.”
Alberto gasped, expecting a bullet. “You’re… you’re not killing me?”
“Death is too quick for a traitor,” Dante said coldly. “You will rot in a concrete box, knowing you betrayed the only family that ever protected you.”
As Alberto was dragged away, Dante stood alone in the cellar. Sienna, who had watched from the shadows at the top of the stairs, walked down and stood beside him.
“You showed mercy,” she said softly.
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“I showed strategy,” Dante replied, though his eyes looked exhausted. “The feds will dismantle Santoro’s shell companies using Alberto’s records. It weakens him without starting a gang war in the streets.”
He turned to Sienna, reaching out to gently brush a stray lock of hair from her cheek. “You saved my family today, Sienna. If you hadn't found that ledger, we would have walked into an execution tomorrow.”
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