Chapter 3 - THE EMPIRE BENEATH THE FLOWERS
Vittorio sent Sophia to the guesthouse with Teresa, his seventy-year-old housekeeper and the only person on the property he still trusted without calculation.
Then he and Alessio searched Renzo’s garden office.
Behind a row of fertilizer receipts, they found a notebook filled with license plates, freight-container numbers and dates. Renzo had marked Marco’s visits in red.
Several entries matched mornings when Isabella had encouraged Vittorio to travel.
One page contained the name Gabriel Vale.
Vittorio closed the notebook.
Isabella’s older brother had died in federal prison six years earlier. He had been convicted of racketeering after someone inside the South Florida organization gave prosecutors his meeting schedule.
Isabella believed Vittorio had done it.
She had never accused him directly. She had simply asked questions over the years—who knew the routes, which captains hated Gabriel, why Vittorio had canceled a Miami meeting the night before the arrest.
Vittorio had treated those questions as grief.
Alessio watched him. “You see it now.”
“She married me because she believed I betrayed Gabriel.”
“She may have loved you eventually.”
“That makes the car easier to forgive?”
“No.”
A horn sounded near the front gate.
Two of Vittorio’s captains had arrived, but only one came inside. The other remained in his car, speaking urgently into his phone.
The family was already dividing.
Marco had begun calling lieutenants and telling them Vittorio had fled before the Sicily meeting. Rumors spread that Palermo had discovered Vittorio was cooperating with federal investigators. Accounts were being emptied. Drivers were abandoning routes. Men who had toasted Vittorio three nights earlier were waiting to see who survived the morning.
The assassination attempt had been designed to become a succession.
Vittorio’s legitimate company employed more than two hundred people at the Port of Palm Beach. If Marco triggered a war inside the business, innocent workers would lose jobs before anyone knew why.
He called the company controller and ordered every outgoing transfer suspended.
“You’ll expose the shell accounts,” Alessio said.
“Good.”
“You understand some of those accounts lead back to you.”
Vittorio met his brother’s eyes. “I understand.”
Sophia appeared in the doorway before Teresa could stop her.
She carried a folded sheet of paper.
“My dad told me to give this to Uncle Alessio if he didn’t come home.”
It was a hand-drawn map of Morelli Coastal Freight’s warehouse district. One building had been circled beside the marina.
May you like
Below it, Renzo had written:
Ask Alessio what happened to Gabriel. He has waited too long to tell you.
