The interrogation was a quiet thing, a slow machine built to break the small truths out of frightened mouths. Lorenzo liked noise when it suited him — the thunder of engines, the angry roar of men — but tonight he wanted silence. He wanted the sound of the truth to stand alone in the room and nothing else.
They brought the maid in like an animal brought to the slaughter: hands bound, eyes frantic, lip split, mascara smudged into tracks on her cheeks. She had been paid, bought and then shoved into the role of traitor for a few bills and a promise. She babbled at first, words tumbling like loose coins. Lorenzo listened. He let her speak until the sound had no armor left.
Matteo and two others stood at the door, watching the scene unfold. No one moved when Lorenzo stepped forward. In his hand he held an old cigarette case — a habit he hadn't had time for but kept as a talisman. He opened it, closed it, let the small metallic click carve time into the room.
"Who sent you?" he asked, voice flat like a slab of glass.
The maid's voice was a wet whisper. "Luciana… she—she paid me. I swear—she said she wanted her humiliated. She—she gave me the envelope and the money—"
"Who carried out the plan?" Lorenzo moved closer, the heat of him a law in the air. "Name them."
She named names, small men with small loyalties. She thought naming them would buy her mercy. She thought words could be the currency that kept her alive. Lorenzo watched the confession slide between them like a stain spreading through linen.
When she stopped, trembling and emptied of lies, Lorenzo reached into his pocket and pulled out the blue chain. He had taken it from the foyer because the object had told him everything he needed; now he held it between two fingers and watched the color catch the light. The chain found its way to her hand as if she'd been holding it when she left — a damning, impossible piece of proof.
The woman's breath hitched when she saw it in his fingers. "No—no—" she stammered. "I didn't— I just—"
"You carried it?" Lorenzo asked simply.
She nodded like a thing with a broken spring. "She asked me to place it. She told me to leave it where he'd find it— make it look like—make it hurt him. I put it there. I swear I didn't mean—"
His face was unreadable. For a moment something like a memory unlatched behind his eyes, soft as grief and awful as winter. He could see Elena in the basement, the small body curled, the desperate sound she had made. He felt the empty absence of a heartbeat that should have been under his palm. The blue chain in his fingers seemed to pulse with that absence.
His men watched his face for a sign. He gave them none.
"You could have left it," he said at last, and the voice that came out of him was as cold as ice melting. "You could have run. You could have turned it over to someone who would have kept you safe."
She sobbed with a small animal sound. "I was scared! They gave me money. My mother—my brother—they said they'd—please—"
Lorenzo's thumb brushed the tiny beads of the chain. Rage, clean and surgical, rose in him. It was not a stranger's rage; it was the hot retribution born when something irreparable had been taken. He had given warning once, when he'd told his men to look for truth. The warning had been ignored. The cost had been a life that had never had time to breathe.
He set the chain down on the table like an indictment. His eyes flared and then cooled, finished.
"Tell me everything," he ordered. "If you lie now, there will be nothing left of you."
She coughed up the names — quickly, stumbling, terrified she'd missed something — and handed him every scrap of detail she thought he wanted. He memorized each syllable the way a hunter memorizes the shape of tracks in the snow.
When she had given him all she knew, when her throat had been scraped raw with confession, Lorenzo did something cruel that felt intimate: he offered her a way out. "You could live," he said. "Tell me everyone who paid you. Tell me where they keep their accounts. Help me find who ordered the drink. Help me bring Luciana down."
For a breath, a small, filthy hope lit in her eyes. "I can tell—" she began, voice peaking with relief.
He watched the lie form like a spider web and break it with a single, precise motion. He raised the gun.
Matteo inhaled a breath sharp enough to be a scream. The maid's face folded as if someone had pressed the air out of her. For a second the world held its breath. Lorenzo's hand did not tremble. The gun looked like a tool, not an emotion. He had said he would let her live — he had said it to his men — and now he was testing the truth of the offer. She began to speak again, a rush of names and places and weak pleas, but then her eyes flicked to the chain on the table — to the thing that had been meant for his child — and in that moment the last of the mercy left him.
He raised the gun and fired once.
The sound was not loud in his ears. It was an absolute punctuation. The maid's mouth formed a last small, astonished O of disbelief as she fell forward, life leaving her like air being sucked from a room.
Silence pressed in around the small, flat sound of her body hitting the floor. Matteo made a noise — not a sound of sorrow but of stunned compliance. Lorenzo did not look away from the body; he watched the lie end and the lie's cost lay before him in human terms.
"Take her," he said to his men, voice calm and final. "Dump her body on Via Cardo. Let the city find her where the street eats people alive. Let the ones who thought they could hide in plain sight step out when they see what happens when you touch what's mine."
They moved with trained speed. Two men knelt and checked the maid's pockets for anything useful; one bagged the small papers, the other wiped down the chair where she'd sat as if to erase fingerprints that mattered to him more than the lives involved. They wrapped her quietly, their hands steady; in this life, death had a ritual and the ritual needed to be clean.
As they carried her out, the blue chain slid slightly from where it had been placed. Lorenzo watched it glint and felt an emptiness like a bite inside his chest. He did not flinch from the fact that blood had been paid in coin and consequence. He had promised retribution; he had delivered it. The scream he had heard in the basement had an echo now — a small permanent knowledge that would color the city for a long time.
Outside, he ordered quietly. "Do it clean. No cameras. Take her out west. Leave her on the main road. Make them find her and feel it in their bones."
They obeyed without question. The men folded back into the shadows, carrying this necessary thing out to the street, making sure the body would be found and that the message would be clear.
Lorenzo stood inside the dim house for a long time after they left, feeling the residue of violence like frost on his skin. The chain in his pocket was warm from his hand. The blue was the color of lost promise and the color of the thing he would now make them pay for.
He did not cry. He had never been a man who cried for what he took back with his own hands. Instead he turned to his phone, calling names, making arrangements in that low voice that would send men moving like iron. Tonight would not be a tantrum. Tonight would be method, cold and perfect. He would break what supported them first, then watch the rest fall like rotten fruit.
The city, a heartbeat away, would wake to a body on the street and know without being told: the De Luca ledger had been rewritten. This was not mercy. This was a lesson.
And Lorenzo — holding the memory of his wife's cry, the blue chain heavy in his pocket — walked into the night and let his dark do what dark must do.