He Satisfies His Enemies—I Bury Them Chapter 01

He Satisfies His Enemies—I Bury Them Chapter 01

I stitched his bullet wound while his mistress waited in our bed.

Thread through skin. Knot. Cut. Repeat.

Dante Moretti didn’t flinch—not from the needle, not from my silence, not from the fact that I could hear her humming through the bedroom wall.

“Tighter,” he said, looking at his phone.

I pulled the suture tighter. Not gently.

He didn’t notice.

Blood ran down his ribs in thin red rivers, pooling on the kitchen marble I’d selected myself—Calacatta gold, imported from Carrara, chosen because it hid stains well. I’d known, even then, what kind of life this countertop would see.

His phone buzzed. He smiled at the screen.

That smile. The one that used to be mine. The one I hadn’t seen aimed at me since our wedding night, when he’d carried me across the threshold of this Brooklyn brownstone and whispered, “You and me against the world, piccola.”

That was three years ago. Now it was him and Bianca against the world. I was just the woman who kept his world running.

“Done,” I said, snipping the last thread.

He stood, rolled his shoulder, tested the wound. “Good work.”

Good work. Like I was staff.

“The Bratva meeting tomorrow,” I said, washing his blood from my hands. “Volkov wants to renegotiate the port split. He’s bringing three men. You should bring five.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“He’s going to lowball you. I ran the numbers—the container volume alone justifies a sixty-forty split in our favor. I left the analysis on your desk.”

“I said I’ll handle it.”

He walked toward the bedroom. Toward her. Paused in the doorway without turning around.

“Sera.”

My name in his mouth like an afterthought.

“Don’t wait up.”

The bedroom door closed. Through the wall, I heard Bianca’s delighted squeal. The bed creaked.

I stood at the sink, hands dripping, and stared at the blood swirling down the drain.

Three years. Three years of building the Moretti family from a mid-level Brooklyn crew into the most feared organization on the Eastern Seaboard. Every alliance I’d brokered. Every territory deal I’d structured. Every cop, judge, and politician I’d bought and cataloged in a system so sophisticated that the FBI’s own forensic analysts couldn’t crack it.

Dante thought he was the king of New York.

He was the fist. I was the brain.

And the brain had decided to leave the body.

I dried my hands, walked to the study, and opened the floor safe behind the bookshelf—the one Dante didn’t know existed because I’d had it installed while he was in Miami with Bianca last November.

Inside: two passports, $200,000 in cash, a burner phone, and a USB drive containing every financial record, every criminal transaction, every secret the Moretti empire had buried for three generations.

I touched the drive. Cold metal against warm fingers.

Tomorrow, Dante would go to the Volkov meeting unprepared because he hadn’t read my analysis. He’d accept a bad deal because he didn’t understand the numbers. And he’d come home to an empty house.

Because tomorrow night, I was disappearing.

And Dante Moretti—the man who couldn’t be bothered to look at me while I stitched his wounds—was going to discover that the wife he’d ignored was the only thing holding his empire together.

I closed the safe.

Through the wall, the bed was still creaking.

I poured myself a gin, sat in the dark, and counted the hours.