03

Chapter 03

In the depths of a dimly lit apartment in Palermo, Arthur Cage Nicastro lay sprawled across a bare mattress, his designer suit wrinkled and stained from sleepless nights. His arm draped across his forehead, attempting to shield himself from memories that haunted him even in darkness. The million-euro watch on his wrist—a Patek Philippe that could buy several lifetimes of comfort—ticked away seconds that felt like centuries.

The room reeked of despair and expensive whiskey. Empty bottles littered the floor like fallen soldiers, their amber contents long since consumed in futile attempts to drown out the screaming in his head. Three laptops lay scattered among crumpled papers—each screen dark, each containing encrypted communications with his family in Sicily, financial records of the Nicastro family's operations, and intelligence reports that could topple governments.

This was the private hell of the man who controlled the Nicastro crime family's operations—a mafia boss whose name was whispered in fear from the bustling streets of Palermo to the shadowy corners of Naples.

*“Forgive me, Arthur, if I leave you again,”* the voice echoed in his mind, soft and broken. *“You always give me everything, shower me with favors, but the simple act of living beside you... that's something I can never give back. I—I’m so helpless...”*

The nightmare seized him with familiar cruelty. Arthur found himself in that room again—that cursed room in Palermo where time had stopped forty years ago. In his arms lay a woman, her body frighteningly thin, skin pale as Sicilian marble. His sister. Always his sister.

*“I failed to save you again,”* he whispered to the phantom, knowing she couldn't hear, knowing she never would.

Flames erupted around them, consuming everything—the room, the memory, the last fragments of his sanity. The inferno roared with the fury of all his failures, all his regrets, all the blood spilled in the name of vendetta.

Arthur's eyes snapped open, pupils dilated in the darkness. The dingy ceiling stared back at him, water stains forming patterns that looked like accusing faces. He sat up slowly, running trembling fingers through his disheveled black hair. The Patek Philippe's luminous dial showed 2:03 AM.

"Three minutes," he muttered, his voice hoarse from screaming in his sleep. "I only slept for three minutes, but that nightmare... it felt like a year of torture."

His hand found another bottle—Macallan 1926, worth more than most people's homes. Empty. With a snarl of frustration, he hurled it against the wall. The crystal shattered into a thousand glittering pieces, each fragment reflecting his fractured soul.

Arthur slumped against the wall, cradling his head in his hands. The irony wasn't lost on him. Arthur Cage Nicastro—boss of one of Sicily's most feared crime families, a man who commanded an empire spanning from the Mediterranean to the heart of Italy—had never experienced a single moment of genuine happiness. Not one second, not one heartbeat of peace in forty years.

Living was torture. Breathing was agony. Every sunrise was a mockery, every sunset a reminder that he'd survived another day when she hadn't. That he'd endured four decades after fleeing to this life was less an achievement and more a testament to his inability to let go.

The blood on his hands had long since dried, but the stains remained. Hundreds? Thousands? He'd lost count of the lives he'd taken in the name of La Cosa Nostra, their faces blurring together into a crimson tapestry of violence. Names forgotten, reasons buried beneath layers of tradition, honor, and survival. And the one person he'd considered family in this world—the only soul who'd mattered after Sicily burned—now looked at him with such revulsion that even being in the same room was unbearable.

"What's my purpose?" he whispered to the darkness. "What would Papa think of me now?"

The door creaked open, interrupting his spiral into despair. A man in an impeccable black suit entered, head bowed in deference. Despite the late hour, his appearance was flawless—not a hair out of place, not a wrinkle in his clothing. This was efficiency personified, trained in the old ways of respect.

"Padrino," the man said, using the traditional title of respect. "I've contacted Abbott. They're waiting for us at the docks. Our personnel are in position and ready. The shipment from Napoli arrived without incident."

Arthur lifted his gaze, green eyes cold as the Mediterranean in winter. He studied his lieutenant for a moment before rising to his feet with practiced grace. The transformation was immediate—from broken man to apex predator, from haunted soul to Sicilian don.

The convoy of black Mercedes S-Classes cut through the Palermo night like sharks through dark water. Each vehicle bore subtle markers—a small silver cross hanging from the rearview mirror, a saint's medallion on the dashboard—signs that these men still honored the old traditions even in the modern world.

Arthur sat in the back of the lead vehicle, a silver flask of aged bourbon in one hand, a cigarette in the other. The city lights blurred past the bulletproof windows, each one a reminder of the empire he'd built in Sicily, the kingdom he'd carved out for the Nicastro family.

He took a long pull from the flask, feeling the burn chase away the lingering taste of nightmares. The cigarette smoke curled around him like incense from a Sicilian funeral. They were heading to the docks for a deal that would net the family millions—arms bound for their allies in the East, drugs that would flow through their networks across the Mediterranean.

As they exited the city proper, heading toward the industrial district where even the corrupt Palermo police feared to tread, a figure suddenly darted into the road. The driver slammed the brakes, tires screaming against asphalt. The convoy came to an abrupt halt.

Instantly, doors flew open. Arthur's soldiers poured out of the trailing vehicles, weapons drawn, forming a protective perimeter. They moved with military precision—many were former Italian special forces, recruited into the family's service. Each knew their role; each had sworn the blood oath to protect the Nicastro heir.

"Oh my God! Please, I don't want to die!" A woman's voice, high and terrified, cut through the night. "I have so many dreams! I haven't even tried that famous arancini yet, or seen the festival of San Gennaro!"

Arthur stepped out of the vehicle, his long coat billowing in the wind. His men had surrounded a young Sicilian woman who lay prostrate on the ground, babbling prayers and pleas in a mixture of Italian and English. She looked to be in her early twenties, wearing clothes that had seen better days, her long black hair tangled and wild.

Before Arthur could assess the situation, two more vehicles screeched to a halt nearby. The dragon emblems on their sides made his men tense, weapons swinging toward the new threat.

"Nicastro!" The shout came from the lead vehicle as men in red suits emerged, their own weapons drawn. Chinese Triads—competitors in the Italian underworld, occasional allies, more often enemies.

"Triads?" Arthur's voice was calm, almost bored, but his mind was already calculating angles, distances, probable outcomes. This was their territory by agreement with the Commission back in Sicily. The Chinese had no business here.

The woman's head snapped up, her eyes darting between the two groups now facing off in the middle of the empty road. Her prayers stopped, replaced by a stream of creative profanity in three languages.

Arthur suppressed a sigh and massaged his temple. More complications. More bodies. More reports to file with the Commission. The night that had started with nightmares was rapidly devolving into an international incident.

"I hope," he said, his voice carrying despite its soft tone, "that your organization knows whose territory you're trespassing on. The agreements between our families were quite specific."

The Triad members hesitated. They knew the name Nicastro. Everyone in the international underworld did. The family that had survived Mussolini, the Fascists, and government crackdowns. The clan that had spread from Sicily to every corner of the globe. But orders were orders, and they'd been sent to retrieve the girl.

The woman screamed as Arthur's men opened fire without warning. The night erupted in muzzle flashes and the sharp crack of gunfire. In seconds, it was over. The Triad soldiers lay still, their red suits now darker with spreading blood.

The woman knelt frozen, eyes wide with shock, staring at the carnage. Bodies littered the road like discarded dolls. She'd seen death before—everyone in Palermo's underbelly had—but never with such casual efficiency, such Old World brutality.

Slowly, she turned to look at the man standing before her. The streetlights were sparse here, and his wide-brimmed fedora—a style he'd inherited from his grandfather in Corleone—cast shadows across his face, but she could see his eyes clearly. Green like poisoned emeralds, cold as the grave.

Arthur wasn't surprised by her expression—that mixture of terror and revulsion, the look that said she was staring at a monster. He'd seen it a thousand times before. It was the only honest reaction anyone had to a man who carried centuries of Sicilian violence in his blood.

"Boss," one of his men approached as Arthur turned back toward his vehicle. "What should we do with the woman?"

"Let her go," Arthur said, his tone suggesting supreme disinterest. "Don't waste any more bullets or time. We have more important matters to attend to. Don Amordo is expecting our call."

He'd taken barely two steps when arms wrapped around his leg. The woman had lunged forward, clinging to him like a drowning person to driftwood.

"Please!" she cried. "Take me with you! Don't leave me here!"

Everyone froze. Even Arthur's most hardened soldiers—men who'd killed for the family from Palermo to Prague—looked shocked. No one touched the underboss. No one.

Arthur looked down at the woman clinging to his leg, tears streaming down her face. She was babbling about ghosts, about being haunted by the men they'd just killed, about her fear of spirits and retribution.

"Cazzo," he muttered in Italian, the curse carrying all his exhaustion and irritation. Her grip was surprisingly strong for someone so terrified, and she showed no signs of letting go.

"Put her in the trunk," he ordered, his patience finally snapping. "Make sure she stays quiet and doesn't cause trouble."

His men moved quickly, prying her off his leg and dragging her toward one of the trailing vehicles. Her protests were cut short by duct tape across her mouth, her struggles ended by zip ties around her wrists and ankles. They deposited her in the trunk with the same efficiency they'd shown in killing the Triads—clean, professional, without emotion.

Arthur settled back into his seat, taking another pull from his flask. The convoy resumed its journey, tires crunching over the bodies in the road as if they were nothing more than particularly large potholes.

His phone, resting on the leather seat beside him, suddenly lit up. The caller ID made his jaw clench.

**Son calling...**

"This son of a bitch," Arthur growled, snatching up the phone and accepting the call.

"How are you, Dad?" The voice on the other end was young, confident, with an undertone of mockery that made Arthur's blood boil. "Did you receive my birthday present earlier? How was it? Did you like it?"

Arthur's mind flashed to the package that had arrived at one of their safe houses—a severed hand wearing the Nicastro family ring, a traditional sign of disrespect in their world.

"Aron," Arthur's voice was dangerously low, "let's talk, you motherfucker. Do you think Don Amordo will let you walk away after everything that's happened? Do you think the Commission will forgive betraying your own blood? Do you have a death wish?"

His knuckles were white around the phone, jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached.

"Why, Dad? Isn't this what you wanted?" Aron's voice dripped with false innocence. "You're the one who trained me, remember? You taught me how to hold a gun, how to read people, how to survive in this world. You showed me the old ways, taught me omertà, made me memorize every family's history." A pause, then the voice turned cold as a Sicilian winter. "Dad, remember this—the motherfucker you raised will be the one to kill you. You'll die before me. Don't interfere with my operations, and wait your turn. Even the Commission can't protect you from your own blood."

The line went dead.

Arthur's driver—also his right-hand man, a soldier who'd served the family for three generations—could see his boss's rage in the rearview mirror. The temperature in the car seemed to drop several degrees.

Aron. Arthur's adopted son, twenty-two years old, and the designated heir to the Nicastro family's operations. The boy he'd raised from childhood after finding him orphaned in the streets of Naples, trained in every aspect of their brutal world, groomed to one day sit at the Commission's table. And now that same boy had turned against him, creating his own organization that systematically undermined both the Nicastro operations and those of rival families.

The driver understood his boss's anxiety as a father, the worry that gnawed at him despite everything. But he also knew the truth that Arthur refused to acknowledge—Aron wasn't just any ordinary young man. Arthur had trained him too well, shared too much of his own personality and tactical brilliance. The student had learned every lesson, absorbed every strategy, inherited every calculating instinct. Worse, he'd learned the family's secrets, their codes, their hidden weaknesses.

Two years. It had been two years since Aron had vanished into the shadows, taking with him several of their best soldiers and millions in family money. Despite Arthur's vast network of informants spanning from Rome to Palermo, they had no idea where he was. On the rare occasions they got close, none of their men could bring him back. The boy—no, the man—his son had become was too dangerous, too clever, too much like Arthur himself.

The convoy continued through the night toward the docks, carrying a Sicilian prince in exile haunted by nightmares, a woman trapped in a trunk, and the weight of a son's betrayal that violated every code of honor their family had lived by for centuries. The city lights of Palermo faded behind them, swallowed by darkness that seemed to press in from all sides.

Arthur took another drink and stared out at the night, wondering if Aron was out there somewhere, watching, planning, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. In the old country, such betrayal would have been met with swift retribution. But here, with the family's power stretched thin across Italy, the old rules seemed to blur and fade like morning mist over the Mediterranean.

The hunter had become the hunted, and the cage he'd built for others had become his own prison. The nightmare wasn't over. It was just beginning.

And somewhere in the distance, a phone rang in a hidden location, where a young man with his father's green eyes smiled coldly and began planning his next move against the Nicastro empire.