The Meeting

Declan POV

I don't negotiate. I have people for that.

Men in suits that cost less than my watch who sit across mahogany tables and smile in a way that says we are being civil, for now. Negotiation is theater. I've never had patience for theater. I want the result — what someone needs, what they'll take for it, whether their word means anything once the room empties. Everything else is noise. Which is why sitting in a Little Italy restaurant at eleven in the morning waiting for Marco Conti is making the muscle in my jaw work harder than it should. Ten minutes early. Always. Back to the wall, every entrance in my sight-lines, know the room before the room knows you. Twenty years of staying alive has made certain habits structural. I can't turn them off if I wanted to. I don't want to.

Conti arrives exactly on time. Silver-haired. Built like a man who was powerful his entire life and has let himself so!en just enough to be underestimated — which means he's done it deliberately, which means he's smarter than his reputation su'ests. Four men. I count them without turning my head. He moves the way old lions move. No wasted motion. Nothing to prove.

I'm already revising my read on him when I see who's standing at his left shoulder and my focus — the focus that built the Callahan syndicate from a Brooklyn street operation into the most dangerous Irish organization on the Eastern seaboard — goes completely sideways. Tall. Dark hair. Charcoal suit that $ts like it was built specifically or her. A face held in a stillness that isn't boredom or discomfort. She's reading the room. Every exit, every face, every angle. I know exactly what she's doing because I do it every time I walk into an unfamiliar space. I don’t know who she is. I know already she's going to be a problem. “Callahan." Conti settles across from me. Spreads his hands — that theater of openness. "I appreciate you making time."

"We're both busy men." I keep my eyes on him. It takes more effort than it should. "My daughter. Seraphina." She steps forward and takes the chair to his right like she's done it a hundred times which she has, I'd bet on it. I look at her directly. The

way I look at everything I'm assessing. She looks back. No smile. No offered hand. No performance of any kind. Just holds my gaze with an

expression that says she's been studied before and found the exercise unremarkable. “Mr. Callahan," she says. Low voice. Measured. New York in her bones. “Ms. Conti." I hold the eye contact a deliberate beat past polite. "I wasn't told you'd be joining us." “No," she says. "You weren't."

Filed. A don who brings his daughter into rooms like this is either making a statement or trusting her in ways our world doesn't usually trust its women.

Either way interesting. Dangerous interesting, which is the only kind that matters. I feel her eyes on me the entire time I'm talking. Not obviously, she's

too careful for obvious. But I've spent my life learning what attention

feels like from across a room, and hers is specific. She's not just listening to what I say. She's cataloguing how I say it. What I choose to

lead with. What I leave out.

Interesting, I think again, reaching for my coffee.

And those two things, in my experience, are almost always the same.