The Don

※※※Cross

Salvatore Damingo’s study was always the same: aged leather and expensive cigars. I stood in front of that desk, my hands clasped loosely behind my back, my posture tense. I’d been summoned. Not called. Summoned. That was never good.

He was finishing a call in low, rapid Italian. I kept my eyes fixed on the bookshelf behind him, on the spines of books I knew he’d never read. They were for show, like the serene landscape paintings on the walls. The real story of his life was written in the ledgers locked in the safe behind the Botticelli reproduction.

He hung up the phone and leaned back in his high-backed chair. For a long moment, he just looked at me. His gaze wasn’t angry. It was worse. It was disappointing. Calculating.

“Enzo,” he said finally, his voice a gravelly baritone that held no warmth. “You’ve done good work lately. The situation with the Koreans was handled with... finesse.”

“Thank you, sir.” I knew a compliment from Salvatore was just the preamble. The hammer was coming.

He steepled his fingers; his eyes, the same shocking blue as his daughter’s but hardened by decades of ice, pinned me. “My daughter. Lissa.”

My heart didn’t just skip a beat; it seemed to freeze solid in my chest. I kept my face a blank mask. “Sir?”

“Don’t ‘sir’ me with that bullshit, boy. I have eyes. I have people. I know you’ve been taking her out on that motorcycle. I know you’ve been to the cliffs.” He leaned forward, the chair creaking. The casual power in the movement was immense. “I told you, when I brought you into this house, when I gave you a place, that your loyalty was to me. To this family. That it came before anything. Before your own wants. Do you remember?”

“I remember.” The words dashed my hopes.

“I also told you,” he continued, his voice dropping to a deadly quiet, “to stay away from her. Not because you’re not good enough. Christ, you’re the best soldier I’ve got. But because she is not for you. She has a destiny. A path laid out in stone since the day she was born. The Union. Four years. Then she comes back, and she takes her place. There is no room on that path for a... distraction. Especially not one that could make her weak.”

“I would never make her weak,” I said, the defense torn from me before I could stop it.

He smiled, a thin, cold stretching of lips. “You already have. She looks at you as if the sun rises and sets on you. She argues with her tutors about leaving. She’s building fantasies, Enzo. Fantasies that will get her hurt. Not by me. By the world. If she goes to the Union clinging to some girlish dream of you, they will eat her alive. They will see that soft spot, that vulnerability, and they will exploit it. They will break her to make her fit their mold.”

He stood up, walking around the desk to stand in front of me. He wasn’t a tall man, but his presence filled the room. “So here is what is going to happen. You are going to end it. You are going to make the distance. I don’t care how you do it. Be cruel. Be a bastard. Find another girl. Be too busy. I don’t give a single fuck. But you will make her believe it is over and that it is your choice. You will make her hate you if you have to.”

The cold in my chest was spreading, reaching my fingers and my toes. “Sir, I-”

“If you don’t,” he interrupted, his voice now a whisper that carried more threat than a shout, “I will drag her to that plane myself. And I will make sure her time at the Union is a special kind of hell. They have ways, Enzo, for recalcitrant heirs. Isolation. ‘Corrective’ training. They will break her spirit by force, and she will come back to me a hollow, obedient shell. Is that what you want? Because your selfishness will be the cause.”

He placed a hand on my shoulder. It felt like the weight of a mountain. “Do the hard thing, son. The loyal thing. Break her heart cleanly now, so I don’t have to break her spirit later. Make her strong enough to leave you behind. It’s the only real gift you can give her.”

He stepped back, his expression shifting back to the calm, implacable don. “You have your new duties. The Genovese problem needs a permanent solution. Focus on that. Earn your new title. Be the man I know you can be. And leave my daughter to become the woman she must be.”

The dismissal was clear. I gave a stiff nod, turned, and walked out of the study. The heavy oak door closed behind me.

I didn’t go home. I went to the gym in the basement of The Crucible. I wrapped my hands and I beat the heavy bag until my shoulders screamed and my knuckles bled through the tape. Thud. Thud. Thud. Each impact was his voice. Distraction. Weak. Break her heart.

I took the new jobs. The ones that skirted the edge of darkness. I volunteered for collections that were known to get ugly. I spent every night at the club, not just overseeing but immersing myself in its gritty, violent rhythm. I made myself a fixture. When Lissa called, I let it go to voicemail. When she texted, my replies were short, delayed by hours. Busy. At the club. Work.

I stopped picking her up. I cancelled our plans. I saw the confusion in her eyes turn to worry, then to a quiet, desperate hurt. Every flinch I saw on her face was a knife twist in my own gut, but I heard Salvatore’s voice. Make the distance.

I started being seen with other women. Not seriously. Just enough. A blonde at the bar, I’d buy a drink for, make small talk, and let her touch my arm. I made sure word got back. I was building the narrative of the rising enforcer who was too consumed by his new world to care about a girl from his past.

It was a meticulous, self-inflicted torture. I’d catch a glimpse of her across the family dinner table-a rare occurrence I now avoided like the plague-and see the light in her eyes dimming, being replaced by a wary confusion. She’d try to corner me, to ask what was wrong. I’d give her nothing but vague excuses and cold shoulders.

The hardest part was killing the warmth in my own eyes when I looked at her. I had to learn to look through her, to see her not as Lissa but as Salvatore Damingo’s daughter, a liability, a part of the job. I practiced in the mirror. The cold stare. The impassive set of the jaw.

I was building a wall, brick by painful brick, and burying the boy who loved her alive behind it. Every night, I’d lie awake, the phantom scent of her hair on my pillow, and repeat Salvatore’s words like a mantra. Break her heart cleanly now, so I don’t have to break her spirit later.

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