Chapter 5 - The Council of Wolves
The sun did not rise over the D’Angelo estate so much as it bled through the heavy autumn smog, casting a sickly yellow light across the gravel drive where four black Lincoln Navigators idled in a neat, menacing row.
Inside the formal dining room—a space large enough to seat thirty, dominated by a massive mahogany table inlaid with mother-of-pearl—four men sat in silence. They were the regional capos of the syndicate: Carmine "The Bull" Rossi, who controlled the Hunts Point meat markets and the union loading docks; Vincent "The Hook" Moretti, master of the financial laundering networks in downtown Manhattan; Salvatore "Sal the Fish" DeLuca, who ran the container freight lines out of Elizabeth; and Marco Vance, whose legal firm was currently shredding three years of forged tax returns in the basement shredder.
The heavy double doors swung open with a slow, theatrical creak.
Roman walked in alone. He was wearing a black three-piece suit, his shirt collar unbuttoned at the top, his silver-streaked dark hair combed straight back from his forehead. He wasn't carrying a weapon visibly, but everyone in the room knew the Sig Sauer was holstered beneath his left arm, and that Savage was standing on the other side of the oak doors with an MP5 submachine gun across his chest.
Roman didn't sit at the head of the table—the traditional seat of the Don. Instead, he pulled out a chair halfway down the long side, right across from Carmine Rossi, a massive man with shoulders like a bull and a gold chain half an inch thick disappearing into his open collar.
"Where's Helena?" Carmine asked without preamble, his thick fingers drumming a heavy tattoo against the mahogany surface. "Word on the street is the old lady took an unexpected trip to Europe last night. Without her passport."
"My mother has retired," Roman said evenly. His voice was quiet, almost conversational, but the silence that followed was absolute. "She found the climate in Brooklyn too humid for her joints. She’s currently residing in a very quiet, very stone-walled monastery on the coast of Calabria where she can spend the rest of her days praying for the souls of everyone in this room."
Vincent Moretti shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his hand straying toward his gold-plated Cartier watch. "Roman, with all due respect, the old lady managed the syndicate's operational reserves. The federal payoffs, the municipal contracts, the Zurich accounts—they were all routed through her office. If she's gone, the entire financial apparatus goes dark by Monday morning."
"It's already dark, Vincent," Roman said, leaning forward and resting his forearms on the table. He pulled a manila folder from inside his jacket and dropped it squarely in the center of the mahogany. "That's an audit of the last thirty-six months. My mother wasn't just paying off judges and buying union votes. She was skimming twenty percent of every container that came through Elizabeth to fund a private slush fund under Sanctuary Holdings. And while she was doing that, she was telling my wife I was dead and letting my daughter starve in a basement in Queens."
The four capos stared at the folder as if it were a venomous snake coil ready to strike. Nobody reached for it. Nobody spoke.
"You let her do it?" Sal DeLuca muttered, his face darkening. "Or you didn't know?"
"I didn't know," Roman said, his grey eyes locking onto Sal’s with a look so cold the older man actually leaned back in his chair. "Which means there are two possibilities. Either my mother was running an empire behind my back without my knowledge—making me look like a blind fool to my own captains—or some of you knew about the skim and kept your mouths shut because you were getting a cut of the runoff."
Carmine Rossi let out a short, explosive laugh, though there was no humor in it. "You think we were cutting deals behind your back with the old lady? Roman, Helena was iron. You didn't audit her books unless you wanted your tongue nailed to the front door of the Social Club. If she was skimming, she did it alone."
"Then she did it alone," Roman agreed softly. "Effective immediately, the D’Angelo syndicate is restructuring. No more blind trusts in Zurich. No more offshore accounts managed by old women with religious delusions. Every dollar coming in from the docks, the markets, and the legal fronts goes through a single ledger on this desk. My ledger."
"And if we say no?" Vincent Moretti asked, his voice shaking slightly despite his best efforts to keep it steady. "If the captains decide they want a different kind of leadership—someone who doesn't drag family drama into the boardroom?"
Roman didn't answer immediately. He slowly reached into his pocket, pulled out a small, silver-plated baby rattle—the one Sophie had dropped in the hallway—and set it gently on top of the audit report.
May you like
The metallic clink echoed in the high-ceilinged room like a hammer hitting an anvil.
"Try it, Vincent," Roman whispered, his lips curving into a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Try walking out those doors and telling my men on the wharf that the boss is weak because he cares about his daughter. See how many blocks you make before Savage’s boys catch up with you."
