ENZO
THREE DAYS AGO
Italy smelled the same. Cold marble, damp air, a hint of cigars still clinging to the curtains of a man who’d been dead barely a week.
I stood in my grandfather’s study, the one no one but him was ever allowed into, and all I could think was how small it looked now. The shelves that used to tower over me when I first joined the Moretti family, the same desk where he’d press a heavy hand to my shoulder and tell me a man’s power came from silence—it all felt stripped of life. Empty.
The lawyer was talking. Something about the will, the division of assets, my share of the family’s holdings. I wasn’t listening. My eyes stayed fixed on the chair where he was found dead and the old cigar tray beside the desk, ash still in it, like he’d left in the middle of a thought.
