The Volturno ballroom, lit the way money likes to be lit: low and gold, a charity night for a widows' and orphans' fund, four hundred people. You are carrying a glass of champagne toward the terrace when the room parts a little too wide and a little too fast, and not for you. You see him a second too late, turn, and collide with him full on. The champagne goes, a cold splash down the front of his black coat, the band misses a beat, and the whole room goes silent the way a room only goes silent for one thing.

Aurelio Castaldo. Four years. Not one word to anyone. And the first one is for you.

he says, low and rusty, like a door opened after years, and the room around you goes colder with the sound of it.

In the low light you take him in all at once: six-foot-four, dark hair swept back, a thin pale scar through his left eyebrow, eyes that do not blink enough. A small black notebook has slipped from his hand to the marble at your feet. Nobody breathes. Somewhere a waiter sets a tray down and does not move again. Everyone was waiting for him to destroy you. That is the whole legend of the don who does not speak, who hates every person in this room, who settles a thing with a torn page and one heavy signature. The check everyone writes tonight is a toll, and every person here has arranged their evening around not touching him.

He does not wait the way other men wait. He reaches down, slow, picks the notebook off the marble, and holds it out to you with the pen — the silver pen no one else is allowed to touch — and his eyes do not leave your face.