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Vincenzo
I didn’t drag myself out of the depravity of the streets by indulging in softness. At ten, alone with the clothes on my back after my mamma died, I learned what happened to a boy who still believed in her kind of tenderness. He got used. Hurt. He got left in places worse than the one before. Twenty-nine years of clawing my way from the alleys of Skid Row to a penthouse office above Downtown LA has been built on a single rule. Soft is a luxury I cannot afford.
Lately, my maid has been doing things that are stirring emotions I long ago buried. A candle in a scent my mamma used to burn on Sundays. Warm biscotti on my counter. A folded throw over a couch I bought ten years ago and have never once sat on.
It’s time to find out what the hell is going on. But first, I must finish the day’s tasks, do what I’m supposed to do instead of think about the actions of a maid I shouldn’t even be aware exists, like the other maids I’ve had before.
Salvatore, my third-in-command, walks me through the night’s take. The city is still glittering even at five in the morning.
We stand at the tinted windows of the VIP suite on the top floor of Vizio, high enough over Downtown LA that the streetlights below look like beads on a string, close enough to the main floor of the nightclub that I can still feel the bass in my ribs. Cigar smoke curls under the amber sconces. Behind me, a bottle of Macallan I opened three hours ago for a Saudi banker is still uncorked on the low table, waiting for someone to remember it.
“Senator’s boy?”
“Down eighty on the roulette.” Sal’s voice is quiet, the way it always is at the end of a night. Eleven years he’s stood at my shoulder, and I’ve never heard him raise it. “We walked him out through the kitchen. He didn’t argue.”
“They never do at eighty. Wait until it’s two hundred.”
“The Russian oil heir booked the smoking lounge for next weekend. Paid up front, cash.”
“How much?”
He names a figure. It’s obscene. I nod once because obscene is exactly what Vizio is supposed to be, and I’m the one who built it that way.
I built this. Not by inheritance. Not by a name that opened doors. By over twenty years of showing up when nobody else would, saving what I earned instead of spending it, and finally sitting down across from the Morettis with a proposal and enough numbers behind it, they said yes. Vizio is mine. The Morettis take their agreed cut off the top, and past that they don’t tell me how the doors open or who walks through them.
Upstairs, past the door only three people in this city have keys to, the roulette wheel is still turning. That’s where the real money is. That’s where the leverage is. Fear is a kind of currency too, and Vizio prints both.
My phone buzzes against my thigh.
Dario Moretti’s name on the screen. Six in the morning is our usual time. He likes to catch me before I close for the night, and he’s already up at his ranch out in the hills.
I hold up a finger to Sal. Step through the connecting door into my office. Close it.
“Dario.”
“Vincenzo.” The voice I’ve reported to every week for two years, since his grandfather, the head of the Moretti family, sent him over from Sicily to take over LA. Dario runs the entire operation from a horse ranch in the hills east of the city. I run the club, the casino, and every dollar that moves through either of them. “How was tonight?”
“Clean. Take was up nine percent over last Thursday. The Russian heir is buying our smoking lounge for the weekend.”
“Good.” A small, satisfied sound. “And the shipment?”
“Moved through Long Beach at three yesterday morning. Buyer signed for it in Nevada by ten. No surprises.”
“Ottimo.”
A pause. Long enough that I know something is coming that isn’t business. Dario has been different in these calls over the last few weeks. Softer around the edges in a way I could only catch after two years of learning every version of his voice. He met a woman he obviously cares a great deal for.
“When was the last time you left that club before ten in the morning, Vincenzo?”
“Business is business, Dario.”
“Business is what your men are for. You trained them the way I trained mine. Mine can run the operation with me gone for a week, and I’ve had proof of it lately. Yours could run the club with you gone for just as long.”
He is definitely changing.
“I don’t leave the club to my men because I trust them less. I leave nothing to anyone.”
