Chapter 15 - The Verdict of the North End
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Don Castellano—a seventy-year-old North End veteran who had lost two nephews in the 2008 retaliatory war against the Russians—picked up the top photograph with trembling fingers.
Staring up from the glossy paper in stark black-and-white clarity was a younger Salvatore Bellini standing inside Grigori Volkov’s study in October 2008 with a smoking pistol pointed at the back of Marco Moretti’s slumped head!
"Madonna mia..." Castellano breathed, his weathered face turning purple with volcanic rage as he slammed the photo down in front of DeLuca and Santini. "Salvatore—that’s Marco in that chair! You told the Commission the Russians ambushed him on the Thruway! We lost twelve good men in Brighton Beach fighting a war you started!"
Salvatore Bellini shoved his chair back from the table, his grandfatherly mask ripping away into a snarl as his four bodyguards along the wall instinctively dropped their hands toward their suit jackets—only to freeze as Enzo’s six soldiers raised compact Heckler & Koch submachine guns from beneath their coats, locking twelve laser sights onto their chests!
"That photograph is a doctored Russian fake!" Salvatore roared, slamming his fist onto the tablecloth and glaring at the three captains. "Are you old fools blind?! Enzo wants to take over my East Boston piers, so he bought some fake negatives from Brighton Beach to frame his own godfather!"
"A fake?" a quiet, crystal-clear female voice asked from the open double doors at the end of the banquet hall.
Every head at the table whipped toward the entrance.
Jade walked into the sunlit room, her heels clicking deliberately against the parquet floor until she stood directly at Enzo’s right hand at the head of the table, laying Grigori Volkov’s original 2008 leather ledger open beside the espresso cups.
Salvatore Bellini stared up at her face—at those unmistakable, piercing Venetian-emerald eyes and the dark hair pulled back to reveal the scarred Roman numeral IX behind her left ear—and looked as if the devil himself had just crawled up through the floorboards.
"Who is this woman, Enzo?" Don Santini asked, squinting at Jade’s face as a haunting, twenty-year-old memory tugged at the old captain’s mind. "Wait... those eyes... Sofia Conti?"
"She has her mother’s eyes, Santini," Enzo said, his voice ringing like iron through the silent hall. "Because on the night of November fourteenth, 2003, when Salvatore Bellini murdered Lorenzo and Sofia Conti in their beds and burned their North End townhouse to the ground... three-year-old Elena Conti didn't burn in her crib. Salvatore sold her for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Grigori Volkov’s child-trafficking camp in the Catskills so he could steal her mother’s forty-million-dollar Venetian shipping trust when she turned twenty-five!"
A collective gasp of pure horror and revulsion tore from the throats of the three old-school captains.
In the Italian underworld, men killed men over territory every week—but selling the three-year-old daughter of a beloved brother into Russian slavery while weeping at her parents' funeral was a sin so vile that even Salvatore’s own four bodyguards along the back wall slowly took their hands off their holsters and stepped two paces away from their boss in disgust!
"Look at the wire receipt on page twelve, Don Castellano," Jade said coldly, sliding the open 2008 ledger in front of the senior captain. "Signed in Salvatore Bellini’s own hand from his account at Banco di Napoli, alongside the Swiss power-of-attorney forms he prepared last month to claim my mother’s estate."
Cornered, abandoned by his own guards, and staring at certain death, sixty-five-year-old Salvatore Bellini lunged beneath his suit jacket not for a negotiation—but for a snub-nosed .38 revolver tucked into his waistband, swinging the barrel wildly not at Enzo, but straight at Jade’s heart!
"You should have burned in that crib like your father, little bitch—!" Salvatore shrieked.
He never even got the barrel level with the table edge.
Enzo didn't draw a gun. With the blinding speed of a striking cobra, Enzo snatched the heavy stainless-steel steak knife from the place setting in front of him and drove the six-inch blade straight through the top of Salvatore’s gun hand, pinning the old traitor’s palm and the revolver flat into the mahogany dining table with a sickening thunk!
Salvatore howled in agony, collapsing forward onto his knees against the table edge as blood poured across the white linen tablecloth.
Enzo looked calmly at the three captains sitting at the table.
"Does anyone at this table object to Elena Conti reclaiming her father’s house, her mother’s trust, and Salvatore’s East Boston piers?" Enzo asked softly.
May you like
Don Castellano stood up, spat on the floor beside Salvatore’s kneeling shoulder, and bowed his silver head respectfully to Jade.
"Welcome home to the North End, Donna Elena," Castellano said gravelly. "And leave this piece of filth to us—the harbor crabs haven't eaten since yesterday."
