Chapter 8: The Fortress

"I'll see my father after the launch," I told Rocco that morning, with my mother's message still on the screen. "Give me two months."

"He'll be angry."

"He's always angry. I'd like to arrive with something to show him."

"Two months," Rocco said, and kissed my forehead, and went to work.

I texted my mother back: *Soon.*

Two months later, I was at the back gate at dawn, testing the new lock myself.

The oldest guard stood beside me and held out the only spare key.

"Nine blind spots, Mrs. Ferrante," he said. "Nobody found one of them in thirty years."

"Now there are none."

"The men say so too."

Behind us, boots crunched on the gravel.

Rocco came down the drive in his shirtsleeves, and every guard on the wall straightened.

He did not look at them.

He looked at me, the way he had looked at me across every table for two months, and I still had not asked him why.

"Mrs. Ferrante," he said, loud enough for the men to hear.

"Don Ferrante."

His mouth moved, only a little, and I remembered exactly what that mouth had done to me at two in the morning.

Then he went to work, and I went to mine.

My company, The Fortress, had its first contract.

The Ferrante family was building a new security center in Brooklyn, with a control floor, a server vault and a training yard.

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