Marcus did not lunge for a weapon. He was too seasoned for panic. He laid the unlit cigar on the rim of the glass and let his shoulders drop, the mask of the loving godfather slipping away to reveal the cold, corroded pragmatism beneath.

"Why?" Marcus echoed, a bitter smile tugging at his lips. "Because you were turning soft, Dominic. Because you were taking forty percent of our cash flow and funneling it into clean energy bonds, real estate developments in Queens, and children's hospitals."

"It was the exit strategy," Dominic said. "We agreed. Ten years to transition out. Our children weren't going to live like this."

"Your children!" Marcus sneered, his voice finally carrying venom. "What about my legacy? What about the men who bled in the alleyways so you could sit in an Italian marble mansion and pretend to be an Astor? Isabelle was the one filling your head with that poison. She was the one who told you that the life was dirty. She made you weak."

"She made me a father," Dominic corrected.

"She was going to take the girls to Europe," Marcus spat. "She had the passports ready. She was going to leave you, Dominic, and when you followed her, the whole family would have collapsed into the hands of the Genovese. I saved the Romano family. I did what a consigliere is sworn to do: I eliminated the vulnerability."

Salvatore made a muffled sound of pure disgust by the door.

"And the girls?" Dominic asked, his hands flat on the table. "You left three children in the backseat covered in their mother's blood."

"The hitman was supposed to wait until she dropped them off," Marcus said, his voice entirely devoid of remorse. "His timing was off. But it worked out better, didn't it? The girls were so broken they couldn't speak. They became your penance. You stayed here, buried in your grief, and I ran the empire. I grew our revenue by thirty percent this fiscal year, Dominic. Look at the balance sheets!"

Marcus slammed his hand on the paperwork.

"You didn't grow an empire, Marcus," Dominic said softly. "You built a tomb."

Dominic stood up.

Marcus instantly went for the Walther PPK tucked into his ankle holster, but before his fingertips could clear the cuff of his trousers, Salvatore Gangi was behind him. Sal’s heavy forearm wrapped around Marcus’s throat like a hydraulic vise, dragging him backward out of the chair, while Sal's right hand drove the barrel of a suppressed Beretta into the soft space behind Marcus’s ear.

"Don't kill him," Dominic said quietly.

Marcus gasped for breath through crushed windpipes, his heels drumming violently against the linoleum. "You... you don't have the stomach... Dominic..."

"I have three daughters at home who have just started to speak," Dominic said, looking down at his former friend with eyes that were entirely dead. "I will not let their first memories of their father's voice be an execution order. Sal, take him down to the salt cellar in Red Hook. Don't touch him. Let him sit in the dark. Let him listen to the silence."

***