Chapter 9

Years had passed since I had last laid eyes on him, but time had not softened Lorenzo Falcone. It had only sharpened him, the way a whetstone sharpens a blade left too long in its sheath. He was no longer the easy, approachable man I half-remembered from another life, the one who had once seemed like nothing more than a distant relation of the Family. He had become something else entirely. A man of undeniable elegance, of presence, of the kind of stillness that made a room understand, without a word, that its true center had just walked through the door.