Angela's Pov
I have stood in rooms that smelled like fresh death and called it Tuesday.
I have read obituaries of men I personally scheduled and felt nothing beyond mild satisfaction at the accuracy of the timing. I have sat across from generals, crime lords, and one sitting prime minister all of them trying very hard not to let their hands shake and I have handed them their terms with the same expression I use to order coffee.
I am Angela Voss. Right hand, iron tongue, and the only person in the known underworld King Dominic Veltrano that trusts with both his ledgers and his loaded guns.
Sentiment is a liability I surrendered a long time ago.
Which is why I found it deeply inconvenient that my chest had been doing something uncomfortably close to feeling things for the past three weeks.
The meeting room on the fourteenth floor of Mafia Industries' legitimate facade was dressed, as always, in charcoal and cold light. A table long enough to seat twelve, currently occupied by five. Five of the seven strays that had been collected over the years and then sharpened into something the world now had good reason to fear.
I stood at the head of the table with a folder in my hand and a list of assignments inside it, and I did what I always do.
I assessed.
The cigar smoke curls above their heads like something patient.
I watch them from the head of the table five young men dressed in suits that cost more than most people's monthly rent, arranged in expensive chairs that none of them entirely deserve yet, each one a particular kind of dangerous that I have had some personal hand in cultivating. The chandelier fractures light across their faces in a way that would look dramatic to someone who hadn't spent the better part of fifteen years in rooms exactly like this one.
I find it Tuesday.
"Gentlemen." The word leaves my mouth the way it always does precise, unhurried, carrying just enough irony that the intelligent ones catch it and the arrogant ones don't. Silence follows immediately, which is the correct response. Mateo's knuckle tapping stops against the mahogany. Across from him, Dante's particular brand of smile the one that sits on his face the way a blade sits in a sheath, ornamental until it isn't pulls fractionally tight at the corners.
Good. Attention secured. Five accounted for.
But two chairs remain empty.
My chest does something I choose not to examine as I let my eyes rest on those chairs for exactly as long as professionalism permits, which is to say not long at all, and then I open the folder in front of me.
Trying to focus but couldn't as a sensation I thought I'd buried a decade ago along with everything else that made me human. The absence of that one particular devil among the both should be a relief as Atlas "The Reaper" Kovač, whose brutality makes grown men weep was far less tamed compared to him.
Him.
The youngest and the most lethal I've seen a man get. The diamond in the rough that became a weapon sharper than any blade we'd ever forged.
Leonard.
Leo.
The Apex, they're calling him now.
Nineteen years old. Dark-eyed, unhurried, built and this is the part I find professionally inconvenient like God was making something beautiful and someone interrupted halfway through to make it lethal instead. The result is a face that reads, to the uninformed, as almost Enthralling. The kind of face that made people lower their guard in exactly the wrong moment, which I suspect he had understood and weaponised before he was old enough to shave.
Winner of this decade's Blood Gauntlet though we don't call it that in polite company. The Succession Games, the official records say as if slapping any type of prettier name on it would make the body count in these games any less damning.
The last person to claim that title was the from one of dangerous mafia groups called Thugs of Roses and Throns. Twelve years ago. Before the purge. Before some of these boys even learn to talk or walk.
"Angela." Kieran's voice pulls me back. He's watching me with those too-knowing eyes, green as poison. "You seem... distracted."
Distracted. That's one word for it.
I'm distracted by the fact that every crime family and such mafia groups from here to end of the world now has a target painted on the back of his head. I'm distracted by the knowledge that defeating him or killing him... let's be honest would earn any ambitious man who bested Leonard in sanctioned challenge could bring that victory to my Boss Lord and name a price that could not be refused. One favour. Unconditional. The kind of currency that didn't just buy things. It rewrote them.
Which meant every bloodthirsty, ambitious, glory-starved heir in the known underworld had just been handed both a target and a reason.
I think about Leonard.
This is not unusual. I have been thinking about Leonard in some form for years. Ever since the day I walked into a facility I am not at liberty to name and found a boy of eleven sitting outside a closed door. Back straight. Frenzy dark eyes. Hands folded in his lap. Waiting with the specific stillness that children only learn when showing need has been made dangerous.
I looked at him and understood, with the particular clarity of someone who has spent years inside a cruel world that manufactures that kind of stillness, exactly what had been done to him.
That was eight years ago. He is nineteen now.
Nineteen, and heading somewhere I couldn't follow and couldn't stop him from going. Not because I hadn't tried to build him an exit. I had many, quietly, steadily, over years. But because the Veltrano's Mafia world didn't release things it had already claimed, and Leonard had been claimed early, and he was... he was the kind of person who honoured what he considered his debts even if the ones extracted from him before he was old enough to consent to the extraction.
The Veltrano name got to him early earlier than it reaches most. He doesn't discuss it. He has decided certain things are simply true the way weather is true, and does not trouble people with them. Never had I ever heard Leonard question about his family ever.
The Veltrano family. Every time that name crosses my mind, it arrives the same way heavy, old rich and cold, carrying the particular weight of everything I've watched it take. I have worked inside the shadow of that name for years. I am Dominic Veltrano's VP of operations, the clean face on a very unclean empire. I run the legitimate side: the property portfolio, the hospitality holdings, the quarterly filings that make us look, from the outside, like an aggressive but lawful investment group. I am very good at this. I have to be. The alternative is not a resignation letter but a death certificate.
Dominic is Leonard's grandfather. He does not claim him publicly. He never has and perhaps never will as that was the only thing Leonard had ask in return for his service. Leonard's mother some woman whose name I will not write even here and his father made the mistake of loving her as they both were categorised in such a way a collector categorises stamps: valuable, not valuable, already catalogued, not yet worth acquiring. She was not just valuable but priceless for any man from Mafia world. That was a tragedy bigger than mine.
Nevertheless I want for anything but tragedy for Leonard... before the cruel world finishes closing around him in the way it always finishes closing on the likes of us that we became unfit and unhabitable in normal world. I want for him to be nineteen. Briefly. Just that. To want something small and personal and a little foolish, the way every young adult is supposed to feel from the inside.
This is why I sold him the property last month. A cottage near the edge of Diana's land, quiet enough for a person to finish a degree without being interrupted by attempts on their life. At least theoretically as living out of spot light for sometime might diffuse the challenger coming claim his life for time being.
Diana.
I press the thought the way you press a bruise carefully, to track what it still costs. My oldest friend and my longest-running deception, the woman who knows the shape of my affection but not the architecture of my life. I am, in most respects, the bravest person I know.
But I can never be brave enough for Diana's uncomplicated affection.
Diana was part of one of my secret mission from my early work in underworld as femme fatale. We became closest friends quick. Before the Veltrano name took their revenge from her, one piece at a time and then all at once. I watched it happen from a distance that felt, most days, like complicity. After that mission I had no reasons. Good ones for me to have a life outside the shape they made. I crossed all boundaries and still I am...
For Diana still doesn't know what I do. She thinks I'm a VP at some corporation with sharp suits, city flat, a life that looks like ambition from the outside. When we call I give her something true enough to hold the shape of honesty without being it. She invites me to visit every few months, faithfully. But I never dared to visit. The particular courage her life takes ordinary, honest, daily, chosen is the kind I find hardest as I thrive on deception.
I love her. That's the worst part of it. It makes my deception towards her heavier instead of lighter. The only redeeming factor is that Diana's younger sister-in-law, and totally raised by her, shaped by her, carrying a vibe of the same quality I associated with people who had chosen their wounds instead of having them inflicted. Sharp as cut glass and built, apparently, out of promises. If not for that young girl Diana would have drown in ocean of sorrows years ago.
It was dear Roslyn...that sweet girl who turns nineteen last week. Rose made a promise to her mother that Diana told me this once, quietly, the way she tells me things she doesn't want to carry alone. No connections to that world. No family inside it. A hard line drawn in ink that had dried before the girl was old enough to understand everything the line excluded.
I hope she keeps it.
I also hoped though this was the more complicated hope, the one I hadn't fully examined but thought intutively that Rose might be exactly the kind of ordinary human presence Leonard had been missing his entire life without knowing the name for it.
I didn't plan anything as I could never be that calculating with Leonard, or at least I know I wasn't.
I'm not engineering anything. I am selling a property. Mentioning things. Letting geography or what people call fate decide.
I look back at my folder.
And then the door opens.
Atlas enters first, face brusied with fresh wounds, unrepentant, jacket from an unidentifiable source, wearing the specific expression of a man who has recently done something the room is better off not knowing about. He drops into his chair with the loose limbed ease.
Then the room shifts.
Not for Atlas.
As two steps behind him, Leonard walks in.
He doesn't hurry. He has never, in all years I've known him, hurried toward anything. Everything he has ever needed has either waited or ceased to matter, and he has always seemed to understand which was which before anyone else in the room did.
He looks and I note this with the flat professional detachment I have spent considerable effort constructing exactly as he always looks. Fair, unhurried, with eyes so dark they read as black in this light, and a face that has no legitimate business belonging to someone who has done the things I know he has done. Not soft, precisely. Something adjacent to it. The kind of beautiful that the world has not yet fully learned to be afraid of, though I'm sure once he became public figure world won't take long catching up to him.
He reads the room in the time it takes most people to find their chair. Exits. Faces. Threat assessments. I have watched him do this since he was fifteen and it still registers as something slightly outside the ordinary category of human reflex.
Then he looks at me.
The particular quality of his attention and this is the other thing, the thing I have been managing since three weeks ago when he sat in this exact room and said, with the unhurried certainty of someone delivering a weather report, I like you, Angela. I thought it fair to tell you, is that it does not perform anything. It simply arrives. Patient and direct and carrying, underneath the surface calm of it, something warm enough to be inconvenient.
Especially last week.
I'd been in the Boss Lord's study, delivering reports, when Leonard appeared in the doorway like a specter. His white shirt had been unbuttoned at the collar, his dark hair mussed, his grey eyes fixed on me with an intensity that made my skin prickle.
"The Boss isn't here," I'd said without looking up.
"I know. I came to see you."
That's when I'd made my mistake. I'd looked at him.
He'd stood leaned on door frame but long enough until I finished my work that I could smell his cologne something dark and intoxicating close by.
"Finished? Have dinner with me," he'd said.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you're a child."
His smile had been slow, wicked. "I'm of age now, Angela. And I've done things that no child would do."
"I don't blush." I did.
"Let me try."
I'd stood, putting the desk between us like a barricade. "I'm thirty-five, Leonard. I've been doing this since before you hit puberty. The answer is no."
"For now," he'd said, straightening. "But you might want... Eventually." Then he'd left, and I'd stood there in the Lord's study, heart hammering, wondering when exactly I'd lost control of the situation.
"Angela."
He is nineteen. I am thirty-five. He is one of Lucian's. He is one of mine, in the ways that matter and the ways that should preclude everything else.
The scrape of Leonard's chair pulls me out as he sits down.
"You started without us," Leonard says. Not even apology for being late, he's becoming way too comfortable here.
"I started on time," I reply. Not a reprimand.
The almost-smile at the corner of his mouth finishes becoming a real one. He opens the folder I'd placed at his seat already prepared, because I am always prepared, because preparation is what keeps sentiment from becoming operational failure and reads the first line of his assignment with the same expression he brings to everything.
Unhurried. Unafraid. With a smile this nineteen years old was sitting like he's not at all in the centre of a world that had just put a price on his head that would make grown men salivate, wearing it the way he wore everything else.
My chest, the unreliable thing, says nothing useful.
"Now," I say, and my voice is exactly what it has always been level, dry, giving nothing away. "Let's discuss how none of you end the month dead. Some of you," I add, eyes forward, folder open, not looking at anyone in particular, "are going to find that harder than others."
Somewhere to my left, Kieran exhales.
Across the table, Leonard turns a page.
Outside this building, the world is already sharpening its knives.
God help whoever came for him.
God help me for the reasons I couldn't yet afford to name.