Chapter 8

The Capo’s Calculus

Lucien watched Brussels like a chessboard. From his mansion high above the river, the city’s lights were nothing more than moving pieces — ministers in black cabs, judges in late-night diners, businessmen slipping through private doors. He watched them not with the indulgence of a man satisfied, but with the patient hunger of someone risk and reward with each breath.

Power, he had learned early, was never given. It was taken, folded like a blade into one’s palm, and kept warm by fear. The Delacroix line had taught him that lesson with blood and bone; his father had carved that rule upon his heart before the city buried him. Lucien’s fingers still remembered the weight of a blade the way other men remembered a childhood lullaby.

That was why he had brought Alexei into his world. Not mercy. Not pity but investment.

He had watched the boy for months — first as a stray, then as a scavenger, then as a survivor who had stared at death and found something like composure. Where other boys cried and pleaded, Alexei had simply trembled and waited. Lucien had recognized in those eyes a useful quality: a detachment that could be trained, then weaponized.

Lucien did not lie when he said Lucien “invested.” The mansion had cost money, but the key purchases were intangible: time, insistence, rituals. He taught the boy the code of silence, the language of assassination; he taught him to move like a breath in velvet so that no one noticed until the heart stopped beating. He taught him how to wear silk without making a sound when he left the room. He taught him how to make fear feel inevitable.

Tonight, however, Lucien’s mind was on more than training. The city’s bones were shifting. Men he had fed for years were becoming a problem. New alliances formed, old debts went unpaid, and a whisper of rebellion crept through the corridors of power. A governor here, an overambitious councilor there, tremors that could destabilize months of laundering and influence. Lucien’s wealth was not only a means of indulgence; it was a tool to build a structure that would never crumble under scrutiny. That structure required men in the right places: mayors who obeyed, inspectors who looked the other way, judges who could be bought and sold like wine.

Which meant Lucien needed more than muscle. He needed leverage. He needed secrets.

He had secrets to collect, and he had hands to collect them with. Alexei’s hands.

There was artistry in how Lucien used him. The boy’s beauty worked as a key: doors opened for him that would have slammed against the faces of older men. Men relaxed around him, seeing only an attractive, youths. The more that men underestimated Alexei, the more effective he became. Lucien had turned underestimation into currency.

Lucien kept dossiers, not just paper ledgers but living files folded into memory. He watched ministers’ routines, late-night lovers, the contradictions between public prayer and private vice. He shadowed them for months, learning each habit like a map. Then he constructed setups that looked organic: a flirtatious meeting in a private club, a lost envelope that found its way to Lucien’s men, a staged “accident” that made a troublesome reporter disappear. Each piece was careful, each move rehearsed until there was no hesitation left between intent and action.

And Alexei moved the pieces. Sometimes he was the hand that slipped forged documents under a judge’s pillow. Sometimes he was the shadow that whispered an unguarded name into a waiter’s ear and then disappeared. Sometimes — and this was the part Lucien savored most — he was the blade.

Lucien had watched the first blood stain the boy’s hands. He had watched the panic in Alexei’s face, the same face that later leaned back into composure as if the motion of killing were an exercise that fit him like tailored cloth. That first kill had been a test and a baptism. Lucien smiled now, thinking of how willingly Brussels reacted: the sudden vacancies, the reorganized committees, the businessmen who called in favors with trembling voices. The city rearranged itself around the threat he represented.

What Lucien feared, more than anything, was irrelevance. Power could evaporate as quickly as money left an unsecured vault — a new Don, a scandal, an exposed ledger. He had seen dynasties fall because men grew complacent, because they trusted the wrong allies, because they loved when they should have hoarded suspicion. He feared losing the soft spot he had never intended to possess: the chest that warmed, the vulnerability that came with keeping something — or someone — close.

Alexei was supposed to be a tool, a perfectly honed instrument for extraction and elimination. But he had not remained a mere instrument the way Lucien liked. He had become something more complicated: a lodestone for Lucien’s affection that the Capo himself could not name without tasting the salt of danger. Possession, Lucien had long known, was what kept men loyal; he had never expected it to tangle around his own throat.

That tangle made him watchful in ways that no ledger nor guard detail could fix. He found himself leaving rooms merely to see how the boy slept. He caught himself arranging nights and assignments so that Alexei would return early, then staying up in the office long after the men had left, tracing the lines of the city on maps until the dawn turned the sky into a smear.

Tonight, Lucien had a plan that required both the boy’s beauty and his learned ruthlessness. The Consortium — five men tied together by international contracts and a supply of secrets that bled profit into orphan accounts — had been too much of a nuisance. They had to be severed cleanly and invisibly. Eliminating them would not only remove a threat; it would make the entire market of influence cleaner for Delacroix operations. Once those five men were gone, Lucien could plant his own candidates in the void: mayors who would usher in policies that favored his enterprises, judges who wrote rulings with graceful nods, inspectors who could be relied upon to look the other way.

Lucien ran a finger along the leather of a dossier and smiled. Alexei would do the first three — the ones whose families would not raise a scandal but whose businesses would crumble without snapping fingers; Matteo and Yvan could be given lesser jobs clearing the peripheries. But the final two required a different hand, a more public, more delicate removal. For that, Lucien needed a scandal so precise that the courthouse would rearrange itself without suspecting the invisible hand that had nudged it.

He poured himself a glass of wine and watched the city through the pane. In the glass, the reflection of his face looked older than he felt. He pictured the boy on rooftops, in tunnels, in hotel rooms—Alexei moving like a ghost with Lucien’s intent heavy in his chest. Every mission the boy completed tightened Lucien’s grip around the city’s throat. It made his empire less of a fragile construct and more of an iron lattice.

Yet even as strategy moved like clockwork in his head, the ache of possibility niggled. What if other men noticed what he saw? What if the Mayor who smiled at charity functions, who placed bouquets with such calculated hands, looked back at Alexei in a way that was not ownership but desire? What if the inspector who had scowled at street kids and later found himself mesmerized by a shadow began to come too close? The notion that someone else might covet the boy stung like a brand.

Lucien was not naive. He had cultivated the Mayor, François Lambert, with dinners and discreet largesse. He had papered the police with favors. He had the Governor’s staff on retainer. Yet there were currents in men that could never be fully controlled — greed, lust, ambition. He understood instinctively that a man who wants everything can accidentally reach for what someone else already gripped.

So Lucien put a new rule into his calculus: proximity, keep your weapons close. Keep your favorites closer. He altered mission rotations, arranging so Alexei’s routes would pass through only what Lucien had sanctioned. He handled introductions himself, rather than delegating, so Alexei’s encounters would be measured and annotated catalogued.

Tonight, before sending Alexei out to cut the Consortium’s first head, Lucien called him in. The boy stood in the doorway, suit, eyes like chipped ice.

“You move like a ghost tonight,” Lucien said, stepping into the room as if he had nowhere else to be.

Alexei’s face tightened. “I move as you teach me.”

Lucien’s hand brushed the boy’s sleeve, a touch that felt like a promise and a claim. “Remember why you do it.”

Alexei’s voice was flat. “Because you command it.”

Lucien smiled, but there was hunger in the curve of his lips. “Because you survive. Because if we do this right, the city will bend the way I want it to. Because you will not be a forgotten boy again.”

Alexei looked at him for a long time. “And you?”

Lucien’s eyes flicked away for a moment — then back. “I get what I have always wanted: control,” he said. “And… a better future.”

The ellipsis tasted like something Lucien refused to name. He let it hang between them.

When Alexei left that night, he carried a dossier and three clean instruments in his pocket. The moon carved a path for him along the rooftops as if the city itself had agreed to be complicit.

Lucien watched him go until the figure became nothing more than a silhouette swallowed by the urban night. He stood on his balcony longer than usual, cigarette smoke curling into the sky, and thought of the knife his father had taught him to use, the ledger that had been their family’s bible, and the boy whose hands now held both the blade and the ledger’s secrets.

Power, he reminded himself, was a craft to be honed. It required discipline, patience, and, sometimes, a dangerous tenderness disguised as indifference.

He flicked the cigarette from his fingers into the dark and heard the sizzle as it struck the river below.

“Keep the city honest,” he murmured to the night, as if instructing a child. “Or make it so afraid it cannot do otherwise.”

Then he closed the door and waited.