CROWN OF ASHES

Chapter 3- The House of Wolves

“You think you can walk into our city and pretend you are not a wound?”

The voice was low and taunting, but it carried the kind of truth that made men look away. Matteo Rossi did not look away. He stood under the yellow light of a backstreet lamp, rain cooling the heat under his collar, and watched the man who spoke like he was reading a sentence Matteo had written for him.

Rico Falcone had the face of a man who believed in luck and knives. Young, too quick to smile, too eager when someone else’s life tightened under pressure. He was the breed Matteo had fought against in his first life: loud, dangerous, the kind of man whose mouth outpaced his thought.

“I did not come to pretend,” Matteo answered. His voice was flat, practiced. He had learned to keep the thunder inside so moves came like winter. “I came to collect.”

Rico took a breath, the streetlight catching the sweat on his upper lip. “Collect what? Old scores? Jobs missed when you were supposed to be dead? You think a few missing trucks make a man king again?”

Matteo let a small sound pass—half a smile, half a shrug. “They make men notice who is moving their empire. They make men remember who has hands they cannot buy.”

Rico barked a laugh that was too eager to wash away the edge. “We are not afraid of ghosts.”

“You will be,” Matteo said simply.

They stood in a cul-de-sac by the eastern docks where the oligarchs rarely came and the rats kept better time than the police. A few of Rico’s men lounged in the shadows, the silhouettes of youth, guns catching light like teeth. Matteo did not count them. He counted the chance he had: the Romanos’ attention broken, a name in a ledger shifted, a clerk whose loyalty could be bought for a year of silence. That was the new war, and he had learned the rules fast.

Rico moved closer, voice dropping. “You think you can starve a family to death by taking shipments, Matteo? You think commerce will fold for you because you feel wronged?”

Matteo’s look slid toward the water where bay lights trembled. “I think men who mistake calico for cloth will find their shirts are rags when the cold comes.”

Rico’s laugh died. “Poetry is not a weapon.”

“It can be,” Matteo said. “If you use it to tell the truth.”

Rico spat on the cobbles. “You will rot in a gutter before you see justice.”

Matteo’s answer was a movement, so small it could have been mistaken for impatience. He stepped forward until Rico’s breath brushed him. Up close, Rico smelled like cheap cologne and fear. Matteo could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands trembled when he tried to hide them in his pockets.

“You tell your boys that,” Matteo said, “and when they wake up to empty invoices and silent docks, you tell them who you trusted.” He turned and walked away before Rico could answer. The wet stones swallowed his footsteps. Behind him, Rico’s voice called out—threats, mostly. Matteo kept walking.

---

Inside the warehouse that served as Matteo’s command center, men moved with the efficiency of a place used to quick decisions. Old crates marked with faded shipping labels, a battered map of the port pinned to the wall, and a board covered with red string like a surgeon’s plan. Enzo Vitali paced near the center, cigarette in hand, the ash long and patient.

“You did more than threaten,” Enzo said without looking up when Matteo entered. “You rattled them.”

Matteo peeled his coat off and hung it on a peg. Rainwater dripped down in thin lines. He let the world wash over his shoulders before he answered. “Rico will scream. Screams make men careless.”

“And the Wolves?” Enzo asked. The name fit the room like a scar. They had used it when they were small boys to name everything that hunted them before their hands learned to bite back. “They are getting bolder.”

“They are getting greedy,” Matteo said. He crossed to the board and peered at the map, tracing the lines where shipping lanes met the docks the Romanos had controlled. “Greed makes mistakes.”

Giulia Ferraro looked up from the ledger she had been studying. Her expression was paper-precise—numbers and risk and the cool patience of someone who loved balance sheets more than guns. “You have resources,” she said. “Enough to cause disruption but not to replace an entire shipping line. If this escalates, we need to be ready to lose a ledger and gain a port.”

Matteo’s thought flicked to Alessio and to Cesare’s calm face. He thought of the Romanos sitting in glass towers, inflating statements and polishing cufflinks. He thought of the men in their payrolls—drivers, clerks, crooked inspectors—who let numbers become answers. If he could make those numbers lie, he could watch the house of cards topple.

“What we do is surgical,” Matteo said. “We take shipments that have Romani seals. We reroute them. We leave the paperwork intact so it looks like everything is normal. Then we sell what they value most to people who do not ask questions. They will try to chase ghosts by force, and while they are burning men with guns, their ledgers will dry.”

Enzo’s laugh was brief. “You are thinking like a man who has spent too long reading accounts.”

Matteo did not smile. “I am thinking like a man who used to die for other men’s numbers.”

A murmur skittered around the room—approval and worry braided together. They were a small crew: a dock-hand who could drive anything, an ex-accountant who had learned to falsify in a hurry, and a tech kid who preferred code to conversation. They were more rag than regiment, yet loyalty glittered in their eyes like resolve.

Outside the warehouse, early delivery vans hummed and the city kept breathing. Matteo stood at the doorway, feeling the night press against the glass. He thought of the men whose faces would color tomorrow’s nightmares—the ones he had once called brothers. He thought of the ledger that had turned his life to ash and of Alessio’s neat handwriting.

“Do we trust any of our old men?” Giulia asked quietly. She flipped a page in the ledger and tapped a name. “Delivery manifests show a new clerk, last two months. Paid through offshore. He used to work directly for Cesare’s logistics. He hasn’t cashed a check in months.”

Enzo’s eyes narrowed. “He is the scent.”

“Make him the path,” Matteo said.

They worked until the sky lightened, forming the machine of their plan. They practiced patience like a weapon, rehearsed silence like a prayer. Matteo watched their faces—young men with laughter that had been frozen into a poker mask. No one moved carelessly here. No one made jokes about death.

When they dispersed, Matteo did not leave. He wandered the docks alone, eyes on the dark water that swallowed lights and names. He felt, for a brief moment, like the city and he were two animals circling an invisible kill. Not all kills came with a spear. Some bled slowly through miscounted invoices and diverted manifests and the dull ache of unpaid wages.

At dawn, the first of their moves began. A container marked for a Romano front was unloaded at a different pier. The clerk who signed the papers blinked at a falsified manifest and placed his stamp where he had been paid to stamp. A truck meant for a Roman warehouse drove instead to a courtyard where Matteo’s men waited.

The Romano machine jolted. Men in suits looked at empty docks and then at ledgers that showed nothing missing. They called, and their mouths carved names in panic. The first shot across a bow had been a phantom. The second would be quieter, but the hurt would spread.

Back in the warehouse, Matteo watched the updates come in. A text came from Giulia: Shipment diverted. Invoice cleared. They called it theft at sea.

He let a breath go that might have been a smile. He thought about the irony: the Romanos had made their money from the sea, and now the sea would take back what the Romanos had tried to own.

Rico would come for answers. Cesare would send men with suits and smiles, their hands empty of ledger but full of guns. Matteo welcomed both. The ledger war had begun, and it was the kind of war men with suits were terrible at.

He stood on the dock until the sun lifted over the harbor and painted the Romanos’ tower in gold. For the first time since the fire, Matteo felt a small, steady pulse of triumph that was not all vengeance. It felt, dangerously, like hope.

Hope, he knew, was more combustible than gasoline. He also knew how to burn it for his advantage.

Behind him, Enzo touched his shoulder. “They will howl,” he said.

“They are wolves,” Matteo answered. “Every pack will learn what it means to be hunted.”

They had started as a ragged crew. They would become a lesson. The House of Wolves did not know they had already been marked.

Matteo walked away from the water and toward the city. He carried no torch, only the cold knowledge that fire could be a beginning.