Chapter 12 - The Restaurant Where Sadie Chose to Sit Beside the Wolf

Victor’s emergency meeting took place that night in the back room of a social club Dominic’s father had used for decades.

Dominic attended alone.

At least, that was what Victor believed.

Sadie, Carmine, and two technicians listened from a surveillance van parked three blocks away. Dominic wore a transmitter no larger than a shirt button.

Sadie hated the arrangement.

“You look like you’re waiting for a bomb to go off,” Carmine said.

“I watched a house burn this week. My imagination has improved.”

Inside the club, Victor stood before fifteen captains.

“Moretti attacks our mother,” he said. “Moretti shoots at a protected witness. Moretti kills Nathan Cole. And what does Dominic do? He stops retaliation.”

Murmurs moved through the room.

Dominic entered.

They stopped.

Victor turned with practiced surprise. “Nephew.”

“You called my captains without me.”

“Our captains.”

“No.”

One word changed the room.

Victor smiled thinly.

“I was trying to protect what your father built.”

Dominic took a seat at the head of the table.

“Then sit.”

Victor sat.

Dominic spent the next forty minutes pretending to be the man Victor expected. Angry. Suspicious of Moretti. Reluctant to share details. He announced that Marco Moretti had lied at the meeting and that retaliation would resume after Dominic identified the leak in security.

Victor relaxed by degrees.

In the van, Sadie listened to every word.

Then a technician pointed at a second audio channel.

“We have interference.”

Carmine frowned. “From what?”

“Another transmitter in the room.”

Sadie looked at him.

“Someone else is listening.”

They traced the signal to a receiver moving away from the club.

Carmine dispatched a team.

Ten minutes later, they intercepted a delivery driver carrying a modified phone.

The phone was transmitting the meeting to an encrypted number.

The driver insisted he had been paid cash to collect a package from behind the kitchen.

Inside that package was a second device.

Someone within the meeting had planted it.

Dominic emerged an hour later.

Sadie met him at the safe house.

“Victor?”

“Too comfortable.”

Carmine showed him the recovered phone.

“We may have a direct line to whoever he reports to.”

Dominic frowned. “You think Victor reports to someone?”

“Or coordinates with someone.”

The encrypted number was traced through three digital relays before it disappeared into an offshore provider. But one metadata fragment survived: the receiving device had connected repeatedly to a private network inside VCC Urban Development.

Victor’s office.

The evidence tightened.

Then the trap sprang.

At 1:17 a.m., fire alarms activated at a Moretti storage property the families had agreed to leave empty for their staged retaliation.

The building was not empty.

Three night cleaners were inside.

Dominic stood the moment he received the call.

“We never scheduled cleaners.”

“Someone did,” Carmine said.

Sadie felt sick.

The fake attack had been transformed into a real one.

If the cleaners died, the Castiles would appear responsible.

“Are they out?” she asked.

“Two are,” Carmine said. “One missing.”

Dominic headed for the door.

Sadie followed.

“No.”

She kept walking.

“Sadie.”

“You can waste thirty seconds arguing or accept reality.”

He swore under his breath.

At the warehouse, firefighters had contained most of the blaze. One cleaner remained trapped on a mezzanine where smoke rolled beneath the roof.

Sadie’s body remembered the brownstone before her mind did.

Heat.

Black air.

The sound of wood failing.

She took one involuntary step toward the entrance.

Dominic caught her arm.

“Absolutely not.”

A firefighter ran past them with a breathing mask.

Sadie did not fight him.

This time trained people were already inside.

Minutes later, they brought the missing cleaner out alive.

Sadie’s knees weakened with relief.

Dominic noticed.

“You were going in.”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you were.”

She looked at him. “Someone was inside.”

“So were you, last time.”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

She had no answer.

A fire investigator approached Carmine carrying a small device recovered near the ignition point.

It was a remote timer.

Attached to it was a printed label from a Castile-owned maintenance warehouse.

Too obvious.

Dominic’s mouth twisted.

“Victor wants evidence pointing at us.”

Sadie looked at the smoke rising into the night.

“No. He wants evidence pointing at you.”

Carmine understood first.

If Dominic appeared to order attacks after publicly refusing peace, his own captains would stop trusting his judgment.

Victor was not merely trying to restart the Moretti war.

He was trying to make Dominic look incapable of leading the Castiles.

Dominic stared at the burning warehouse.

The fire at Rosa’s home had targeted a witness and a ledger.

This one targeted authority.

Victor was no longer hiding his objective.

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He wanted Dominic’s chair.

On the drive away from the warehouse, Sadie watched Dominic in the reflection of the window. Victor’s strategy was becoming visible because it repeated one idea in different forms: create danger, assign blame, then offer himself as the man strong enough to restore order. The more Dominic reacted, the more useful he became to Victor.