Costanzo hated getting his hands dirty.

The dirty work was Salvatore's domain—his younger brother's specialty, carved out through years of street-level brutality and impulsive violence. Costanzo preferred to operate in the shadows, orchestrating through paperwork and strategy, keeping the family's complicated machinery running with surgical precision. He was the voice of reason among his brothers. The diplomat. The chess player who thought seven moves ahead while Salvatore was still deciding whether to flip the board. He took pride in his control, in his ability to maintain composure while lesser men crumbled under pressure.

Level-headed was the cornerstone of his identity. It was what separated him from the crude violence of his family. It was what made him invaluable.

Level-headed was very far from where Costanzo Moretti stood in this moment.

The rage that coursed through him was primal and consuming, a wildfire that had burned through every carefully constructed wall he'd spent decades erecting. His usually immaculate suit—charcoal gray, three-piece, tailored to perfection—was now decorated in crimson. The blood had soaked into the silk of his tie, stained the white cuffs of his shirt, spattered across the pale leather of his Italian shoes. It was a desecration of his meticulous aesthetics, and somehow that made it worse. He could still feel the man's teeth against his knuckles, the wet warmth of blood that wasn't entirely his own.

This was beyond pissed. This transcended anger. This was the manifestation of a man whose carefully maintained control had been shattered by a single, unforgivable transgression.

The man on the ground before him was barely recognizable. His face was a swollen landscape of violence—broken nose, split lips, eyes that had already begun to swell shut. His left arm hung at an unnatural angle, the shoulder dislocated somewhere during the last five minutes of Costanzo's rampage. The suited man's breathing came in wet, labored gasps, each inhale a gurgling symphony of pain and blood.

Costanzo took a moment to compose himself, to step back from the edge of the precipice he'd been teetering on. His chest rose and fell with controlled breaths—four counts in, hold for four, release for four. It was a technique he used during tense negotiations. It didn't help. Nothing helped.

He pulled the chrome chair from the corner of the room—his chair, the one he sat in during interrogations—and positioned it directly in front of the broken man on the floor. He sat down with deliberate slowness. His steel-gray eyes, cold as winter water, fixed on the ruined face before him.

"You just had to be handsy, didn't you?" His voice was controlled—which somehow made it more terrifying than if he'd been screaming. "You saw someone who caught your eye and you simply couldn't resist, could you? Couldn't keep your pathetic, grubby hands to yourself."

He reached into his jacket pocket with deliberate care, extracting a silk handkerchief and began methodically wiping the blood from his knuckles.

"Do you have any concept of who they are? Of what they mean?" His voice carried a dangerous edge now, something that suggested this wasn't about the man on the floor at all. "They work for me. They are under my protection. Every fiber of their being is accounted for, valued, considered. And you—" He paused, tilting his head with the kind of cold curiosity one might reserve for studying an insect, "—you thought you had the right to touch them. To grab them. To put your diseased hands on something that belongs to my world."

"You useless piece of shit," he sneered before his attention dragged itself up to the sound of the door opening.