CROWN OF ASHES

Chapter Two — The Devil in a Suit

“Do you ever sleep, Matteo?”

The question landed soft, like the heat of a cigarette pressed to a palm. Matteo didn’t answer at first. The room smelled of cheap tobacco and stale espresso. Outside, rain tattooed the cafe’s metal awning. Inside, the light was forgiving enough to hide tiredness and thin enough to show the edges of a man who had not forgiven the world yet.

Across the table, Cesare Romano folded his hands like a man who had never once been wrong about anything. The suit fit him like armor. The linen shirt suggested wealth; the tilt of his chin announced menace. He was called many things across Naples, but tonight he wore the nickname with an ease that made Matteo feel younger and twice as foolish.

“You look like you belong in the ground,” Cesare said. “Not here sipping wine. It offends the dead.”

Matteo looked down at his cup. Steam rose in a thin column and disappeared. He could have struck the man at that moment, ended the conversation with a movement as clean as a blade. He didn’t. There was work to do. Rage that moved with patience.

“You ever think about what names do?” Matteo said finally. “How they can carry you or bury you?”

Cesare’s mouth twitched. “Is this philosophy from a burned man now? Forgive me for expecting bullets.”

“Names give you a place to fall,” Matteo said. “Or a place to hide.” He met Cesare’s eyes. “You gave Alessio a place to hide. You gave me a place to die.”

The laugh that answered was small and brittle. “You make it sound theatrical. Business is blunt, Matteo. Agreements are currency. Your brother chose to trade. Who am I to stop commerce?”

“You traded family for a ledger,” Matteo said. The words tasted of ash.

Cesare’s expression did not change. “I gave him something better than violence. A future where his son wouldn’t have to pull a trigger to eat.”

“And what about eating tonight?” Matteo asked. “Who makes his son eat now?”

The line between them thickened. Around the cafe, life continued. A waiter refilled an elderly man’s water without glancing their way. A radio in the corner played a song Matteo couldn’t place. Everything ordinary. Everything hateful.

Cesare set the stem of his glass down with a soft click. “You could leave, you know. Go where ghosts are welcome.”

“I’ve tried going once.” Matteo’s voice dropped. He remembered the warehouse, the fire, the way metal had sung as it died. He remembered Alessio’s face as he stepped into a white light that was not prayer. “I came back.”

“Then you’re stubborn.”

“Or alive.”

There was a beat, and in it a dozen unspoken calculations shifted like cards. Then Cesare’s smile folded back into wealth. “Tell me what you want.”

Matteo made himself slow. He had learned, in other lives, that sudden moves were punished. He owed patience to the men who had died for him and to the ones who might die to carry his plan. He owed patience to himself.

“Names,” he said again. “Who else was at the docks? Who signed the contracts? Who gave the word?”

Cesare took the question as if examining a mild skin rash. “You ask for a list as if ink binds men. Men bind themselves with fear, Matteo. You think names make chains. They are only paper.”

“And yet someone wrote my name on that paper the night the warehouse died.” Matteo’s fingers tightened on his cup. “Someone who sat at a table with your people and blessed the blaze.”

For the first time, a small flash passed over Cesare’s face. Not fear. The subtle annoyance of a man being reminded of his own decisions.

“You think your brother wrote the check,” Cesare said. “Alessio loves opulence. He loves tidy solutions. You were getting in his way.”

“What if I don’t want tidy solutions?” Matteo asked. The cafe hummed around them as if reality refused to be pulled into their small war.

Cesare’s laugh was luxury. “Then you die messy.”

Matteo rose. He did not draw his weapon. He did not need to. There was power in a man who could walk away from killing and still mean it.

“Tell Alessio,” Matteo said, low and simple, “when I come for him, I will not leave anyone to tidy up.”

He left the cafe before Cesare could summon a guard. Rain swallowed the streets and he felt the city close; cobbles turned slick, and the smell of salt drifted up from the harbor. He lit a cigarette with hands that trembled not from cold but from a hunger that had nothing to do with food.

He thought of his father’s voice, older and rough: Power is a debt you collect with patience. Not with fury. Fury spends itself. Matteo had spent fury. He had nothing left but collection.

At the docks, the water moved like a black tongue licking the pier. Men moved under tarps. A few familiar faces nodded as he passed. Enzo had kept his promise. Enzo was waiting beneath the corrugated roof of a warehouse that smelled of oil and old bread.

“Matteo,” Enzo said without ceremony. He hadn’t wasted time pretending grief for a man who was back from the dead. “You look the part. Burned enough to be credible.”

“You always had a way with compliments.”

Enzo’s laugh was short. “I had a way with survival. Sit.”

A faded wooden table held cans and a thermos. The men gathered around—three of them, the handful he had left. Even in numbers diminished they looked whole enough. Matteo took in each face. Trust was a currency taught in learning how to die for someone else. Few people still carried it.

“Well?” Enzo asked.

“Well what?” Matteo said.

“Well, Commander Ghost, what is your plan?” Enzo’s voice was a challenge wrapped in warmth. This was the man who had once taken a bullet for Matteo. He had scars that told stories Matteo promised to repay.

“We hurt them where they breathe,” Matteo said finally. “Not with shouting. With hunger. We choke their shipments. We dry up their accounts. We take back what they think is solid and show them it is hollow.”

A man at the table spat. “You want to play accountant.”

“I want them bankrupt of arrogance,” Matteo said. “Arrogance is easier to kill than men.”

Enzo considered this. Then, with the kind of slow acceptance Matteo had seen when men chose to die rather than bend, he nodded. “We’ll suffocate them. Quiet hits, crooked ledgers, people who forget how to count receipts. Make them bleed paper until they open their hands.”

“You remember how to fight?” another man asked. He was younger. Fear fresh on his face, not carved by long loss.

Matteo looked at him the way a teacher looks at a student ready for a task. “If the city asks for blood, we will give it. But first, we make them sick of winning.”

They slept little that night. Matteo walked the pier while others rested. He watched the Romano tower skewer the sky, its windows like eyes. He thought of Alessio in his suit, of Cesare’s smile, of the list he had to build. Strategy required more cruelty than he had used when a gun would suffice.

A delivery truck rolled by, lights dimmed. Matteo followed its shadow to the next block and watched how men boxed treasures and counted the ribbon of numbers that made them rich. Nothing about the life they had chosen was sacred. It was all accounting, and loopholes, and people whose names you could make vanish if you knew the right clerk with a cheap bottle and a debt.

When the first truck failed to pull into the Romano yard at dawn, someone noticed. Men checked their phones. Texts flew. Fingers pointed at the gaps. For the first time that week, Cesare Romano raised his head with worry instead of command.

Matteo watched from the edge of a building and allowed himself a small, private satisfaction. It was not satisfaction carved from hate. It was the cool when a fever breaks. One problem at a time. One miscount, one missing shipment, one wound opened where people kept their pride.

As sunlight eased into the city, Matteo thought of the man he might become if he let the hunger keep him. He sat on a low wall and felt the damp of the stone through his trousers. He was not a saint. He knew that. He was not a monster either. Not yet.

He was a man who had walked through a fire and come out wrong and therefore dangerous. In a world where men like Cesare wore suits as plates, wrongness was the best weapon.

He tapped a message into an old phone and sent it to Enzo: Start with the docks. Paper first. Then he destroyed the device, folding the screen into a pocket so it could not be traced.

He walked away before the city remembered his name.