They had burned Vittorio's dock and thought they'd sent a message. Vittorio replied like a man who remembered how to break things without hesitation.
The call came at dawn. No one woke up to it phones simply rang through the thin hours when sleep is strangest and decisions are heaviest. Sebastian answered first, voice low and flat. Then he said two words and the house woke as if someone had thrown a live wire across the room.
"Where?" Marcus barked before he was out of bed, boots already on. His face had that look now: practical, brittle, as if he kept anger folded into the seams of his suit. Forty did that to a man wrinkles around the eyes, hands that could do either kindness or damage. Tonight they would do damage.
Vittorio had struck twice in the same hour.
First: a Wilson crew on patrol an off-duty supply team moving through an alley near the port had been run through by a Racci hit squad. The alley was a smear of dark and oil-slick concrete. Men fell with half-formed curses. A radio lay under a body and went dead. Someone screamed; then the city swallowed the sound.
Second: a safehouse a small warehouse the Wilsons used to launder local trade had been hit with incendiaries. The boss of their logistics, a quiet man named Ferran, called in once, breathless and panicked, before the connection fried. The cameras the Wilsons trusted were already blackened. Papers, lists, cash gone in a single, precise wave of flames.
"We lost men," Sebastian said simply. He did not make it a confession. He reported like a field medic reporting vitals.
Isabella dressed in silence. She did not move like someone forging drama; she moved like someone getting ready for work. Leather jacket, the sword at her back, pistol in a shoulder holster. Blood from yesterday had dried under her nails. She cleaned it off with the same small, practiced motions she used to load a magazine.
Camilla waited in the hall, hair still loose, face pale but set. She had been up all night, listening to the house. Marcus gave her a look that made her straighten the two of them shared an economy of gestures they never turned into words. She didn't call him father in public; she never had. He didn't ask that she did. Their small rebellions rested in the same breath.
"Tell me what you know," Isabella said.
Sebastian gave the brief report. Names, calibers, the way the Raccis moved clean, not sloppy. Nothing amateur. Vittorio had fed them professionals. Matteo's signature, some of the men said, but Vittorio's hand was heavy in it. That was the point.
Marcus didn't waste the air with curses. "They wanted to humiliate us. They wanted to tell the city who ran the docks." He checked his weapon like he checked his temper; both were sharp.
They moved in two squads. Isabella took the smaller route sleek, with precision. Marcus took ten men and a truck. Sebastian rode with her. Camilla worked comms from the estate, redirecting men, pulling favors, every call a small, exact violence that put the right people in the right place.
The alley where the first ambush had happened smelled like petrol and cleaning solvent. A corpse still lay half in the gutter. A Wilson jacket flapped from a bent lamp post like a small flag of failure.
Isabella moved without theatricality. She stepped over a body, checked for a pulse as habit, then shook her head. She didn't pretend to grieve in the way propriety demanded; there was no time for choreography. There was only the work.
"Who saw them pull back?" she asked.
"One of the neighborhood kids," a young capo said. "They cut up the back lanes Van A. Out by the old textile plant. Two vans. No plate." He kept talking because it kept his hands busy.
Isabella listened, storing every scrap, every slack economy of speech. Information was the currency now. She bent to a fallen radio, squatted on the curb. Finger traced a scorch mark. "They hit our safehouse because they wanted to goad us," she said. "Because they think this will make us reckless."
Marcus grunted. "Then we don't give them what they want."
They moved fast. Isabella's men were lean and angry. They didn't shout. They opened the first door to the textile plant and found a Racci staging point: radios already smashed, a hurt man under an overturned table, still breathing and surprised to be alive. Marcus didn't look surprised.
"Who sent you?" he asked. "Let me guess the Raccis"
The man coughed, wiped blood from his lip. "It was Don Vittorio, he wanted to make you pay for ewhat you did"
Isabella crouched level with the man, close enough that her breath fogged his cheek in the cold air. Her voice did not change tone; she made it softer only so he could hear the truth and feel it sink right down.
"Tell your Don something," she said. "Tell him the Black Rose is not a thing to test. Tell him that every time he tries to play smart, he gives us something more dangerous to light, tell him to be careful cos when i bite, i bite hard and i tear, i live injuries that can cause death."
When they left, they left the man with a promise of a cleaner fate than his masters. They left a message; they always did. But messages are funny things some people read them as diplomacy, others as threats. Vittorio would choose which one he favored.
The second strike on the safehouse proved the Raccis were testing more than appetite; they were probing for fault lines. The safehouse had been a quiet hub: ledgers, a man who handled route accounting, a woman who maintained coded lists. Now all that lay in ash, the night's work reduced to a smoky pile.
Camilla arrived later, choking on the smell, bringing reports from contacts: the city's docks were whispering, traffic on the waterfront was thin, investors asking questions. Investors. Money talked, and money's voice could be louder than pistols.
They gathered in the back of a butcher shop they used for meetings because butcher shops smelled of honest work and it was harder to hide violence inside honest trade. Marcus broke bread and handed pieces to the men; it was a ritual older than gunfire food before orders. He was human in that way. That was part of what made him dangerous: he fed men before he sent them to die.
Isabella laid out the pieces. "Vittorio wants to provoke a reaction that makes us overreach. He wants to get us wrong-footed in front of the city and in front of his friends. He wants us to make a mistake he can sell as proof that we're too young to run this."
A kid in the corner Renz, who'd lost two brothers last year spat in disgust. "He picked the wrong family."
Sebastian's hand found Isabella's sleeve, a small, private thing in a room full of noise. He had stitches at his arm now, bandage crude and white against the blood. Isabella didn't flinch. She let him touch her; she let him know she felt the same blood-ache he did. But she did not look at him with gratitude. Gratitude had a price. That was part of the war.
Marcus spoke up, blunt as always. "We hit them harder. Tonight. Not their men in the open that's a message already sent. Tonight we hit what they value: one of their cash runs, something they think untouchable. Let's take their resources and leave them a hole."
Isabella agreed. "And after that?" she asked.
"After that," Marcus said, lighting the cigar he'd been nursing, "we close whatever gaps let them breathe. No more leaks. No more blind convoys. We make the city fear stepping between us and what's ours."
They planned like that until the day narrowed into the mold of night. Calls were made, routes changed, small favors bought and oaths extracted. Everyone had a role, and every role had a price.
When they moved that night, it was with the quiet efficiency of predators. They took a Racci cash run in the south sector stacked vans, two guards, one driver who thought he was lucky until he smelled the gunmetal. They left the driver alive but empty-handed, left a message burned into the van hood: a single black-rose emblem scored into metal.
The word went through the waterfront by morning La Rosa Negra had taken Vittorio's money. The docks muttered. Investors coughed and glanced at balance sheets. The Raccis' pockets felt lighter, and Vittorio's anger was no longer an abstraction. It had a weight.
Isabella sat at the head of the table that night and watched men who had sneered at her the week prior try to find their faces. They looked smaller. That was practical satisfaction, like a wound healed just enough to stop bleeding.
She didn't celebrate. She didn't need to. Power's currency was quieter than joy. It looked like a man ordering another to keep breathing because he couldn't afford him dying. It looked like a girl no, like La Rosa Negra making an incision deep enough that no careless hand could forget the cut.
When the team came back, Marcus clapped one man on the shoulder so hard the guy laughed once, throat broken by adrenaline. "That'll keep their mouths shut for a while," Marcus said.
Sebastian took a breath, feeling the pain in his ribs like a reminder of what loyalty costs. He looked at Isabella, whose face was blank and forever closed-off for praise.
"You wanted to prove you weren't a story," Sebastian said quietly.
She nodded. "We proved it."
Outside, the city hummed as if nothing had happened. People paid for coffee, haggled over dock rates, argued about shipments in basements. That ordinary noise was the soft cloth that covered all the blood. It was necessary.
Vittorio would answer. He had to. Men who bled for nothing lose faith. He could not allow the waterfront to think him weak. He would lash back and try to do so in ways that would make the Wilsons appear cruel or incompetent to the world.
Isabella expected it. That was the worst of it: she had already walked through the map of the next few moves in her head, seen the lines that would trap men who rushed in.
"Keep the men close," she said. "Camilla, scrape the channels see who's talking to who. Marcus, prep the quiet team for tonight. Sebastian" she paused, because human things needed naming "hold them together. Don't let the men do something stupid."
He met her eyes. "I won't."
When they left the butcher's, the lights were low, and the city smelled faintly of rain and old coffee. The river hissed against the piers. Somewhere in Vittorio's house, a man poured whiskey and made plans.
War had arrived. It smelled like burnt rubber and coffee and iron. And under all of it was the black-rose mark, scored into the metal of a stolen van, the thing that would make the waterfront remember there was a girl who bled like everyone else and who cut like a blade.