Valentina's POV
I sat with the phone in my hand long after Moretti disconnected.
The strip of afternoon sunlight cutting across the floorboards had shifted, deepening into the amber hues of early evening.
Outside, the city of Palermo continued its ordinary business, traffic humming, distant voices drifting up from the street, oblivious to the mechanics of an operation consuming its own pieces in the precise order required.
Caruso was disappearing.
Not into a body bag weighted down at the bottom of the harbor, but into the cavernous, bureaucratic maw of the federal witness protection program.
It was a vanishing act that relied on paperwork and procedure rather than a bullet, but the result was effectively identical: Caruso, the man who had managed the family's empire for three decades, was about to simply cease to exist.
