“You motherfuckers!” Giorgio bellows instantly.
I walk up towards him. Still stunned by how fast their world is crumbling to pieces, his men part like bowling pins to let me through.
The moment I reach Giorgio, I slug him hard in the gut, forcing him down to his knees in front of me.
“Let’s try this again, shall we?” I say pleasantly. “Tell your men to drop their weapons.”
When he remains silent, I grab him by the scruff of his neck and yank him up to his feet. Then I withdraw the knife in my boot and hold it up to his throat.
“You should re-think your current security systems,” I tell him. “My men have been in your house all morning and you didn’t even know it.”
I press the knife to his throat, leaving a tiny cut that allows out only a drop of blood. “I don’t like repeating myself, Giorgio. Give the order.”
“Drop your weapons,” he mutters reluctantly.
His men lower their guns. As soon as they hit the floor, my soldiers rush around and strip them all out of reach.
“Who are you?” Giorgio says in a low, frightened voice.
Irritation flickers across my eyes. “Seriously?” I glare at him without removing the knife from his throat, though I do take note of the large whale tattoo that covers most of his flushed skin. “You should know who I am, you stupid motherfucker. You’ve been encroaching on my territory for months now.”
I shake my head and sigh. Some men never learn until it’s too late.
“If it had been a matter of simple ignorance,” I continue, “I would have taught you a lesson and we could have put all this ugliness behind us. But this was never about ignorance. This was about disrespect. You chose to challenge my clan and I am here to assure you that that was a mistake, my friend. Problem is, when you ask for trouble, you better be fucking sure you can handle it.”
He looks at me with dark eyes. Hope is fading from them quickly. He has only minutes left in his life. Maybe not even that.
“Your men slaughtered everyone in my house,” he says in horror. “The halls are filled with blood.”
I look him in the eye. “Helena Selznick.”
“What?” He blinks in utter confusion.
I give Oisin the order—a silent raising of my fist—without ever looking away from Giorgio.
The cacophony of gunshots extinguishes all other sound. Giorgio flinches again and again and again.
More sounds follow.
The thump-thump-thump of dozens of Lombardi bodies hitting the ground.
A few bedraggled moans from the unfortunate survivors, quickly silenced as Oisin and Conor stride around to finish them off.
“Helena Selznick,” I repeat when silence resumes.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“A month ago, you gave the order to storm an O’Sullivan warehouse. She was one of the women working there when your men arrived. Helena Selznick. A single mother with a ten-year-old daughter named Corinne. Helena had brought Corinne to work that day. Do you want to know what happened to her?”
“No,” he bleats. “No, God, no!”
I force him onto his back. He’s trembling from head to toe and tossing his head everywhere as if praying that someone, somewhere, will intervene to save his miserable life.
But no matter where he looks, all he can see are the dead, rotting bodies of the men he thought would protect him.
No one is coming.
No one cares.