He Chose My Copy I Became The Law Chapter 09
Porto Aurelia offered me the chance to begin again.
I interred my former life and stepped into the Family’s innermost ranks. My first responsibilities were examining laundering accounts and settling commercial conflicts among the gangs.
No one there knew what my existence in Ravenport had been, or that mourning my lost child had come close to destroying me.
To the men of that ancient city, I was simply a young northern widow: quiet, reserved, and possessed of an icy gaze.
By day, I worked in the study, turning page after page of accounts and verifying every transaction tied to the Family’s wineries, gaming houses, and cargo docks.
At night, I studied in Cesare’s subterranean library, memorizing the bloodlines of the Six Houses and three decades’ worth of obligations. Each weekend, I shut myself inside the underground archive without windows and remained there from morning until night.
Cesare proved to be the harshest of teachers.
“It took your father three minutes to uncover falsified accounts,” he often reminded me. “I expect no less from you.”
Three months afterward, a dispute over unloading privileges at the docks drove two volatile Capos to pull weapons on each other across the negotiation table.
I brought no bodyguards. I merely opened the door and entered the antagonistic conference room alone.
As their lethal stares followed me, I placed two black coffees and several slim financial statements on the table before them with perfect calm.
Those pages provided indisputable evidence that both men had siphoned enormous sums from the Family. A handful of sentences revealed exactly what they had done and quietly extinguished a gunfight before it began.
The two Capos, who only moments earlier had been howling for each other’s blood, stared at the statements and began to sweat. Thoroughly chastened, they bowed their heads.
From beyond the partly open carved doors, Cesare witnessed everything.
Then he voiced his approval before every senior member present. “Gentlemen,”
The elderly man’s words carried through the corridor. “Like her father’s, this woman’s mind can take a bullet on behalf of the Family.”
That evening, dressed in a floor-length gown of black velvet, I drove alone to the Family burial ground beyond the old city’s limits.
Their names had been cut into the marble gravestone, followed by a Mafia maxim: Blood remembers; honor endures.
I bowed my head and traced the frigid engraving with tender fingers, speaking softly into the night breeze. “Papa, Mamma. I’ve come home.”Â