You can fix this, you can fix this, you can fix this! Victor chants inside his mind as he hits and kicks a punching bag with weights strapped around his ankles and wrists.
You can fix this, you can fix this, you can fix this! He makes that vow to himself as he showers and gets dressed. It would be like that game of hers he refused to play nine years ago. Operation Good as New. But this time, it would work. He’d restore them to how they were in Japan. Before….
Before he ruined everything with ten unnecessary years of punishment.
He looks at the guy in the mirror. The one who has dark circles under his eyes from another piss poor night of sleep…and missing the woman he pushed away so many times.
You have to fix this, he tells that guy before making his way downstairs. The alternative, letting her go? He can’t even bear to think about that.
Luckily, Han was able to arrange a meeting with Luca Ferraro for today. And this meeting will be the first step to getting Dawn back. Victor ruthlessly focuses on that as he charges down the stairs to the dining room where their in-home chef has set up the usual breakfast buffet for Victor, Han, Phantom, and any staff and Silent Triad members who happened to be on the premises. However, it was an unspoken rule that only the three dragonheads were allowed to avail themselves of the buffet before 9 AM.
Phantom is already at the table when Victor arrives, eating one of those massive breakfasts favored by Americans.
“Hey, cuz, what’s up?” Phantom says through a pancake-stuffed mouth after Victor joins him with his own relatively light breakfast. Just a bowl of congee and some milk tea.
Not for the first time since Han arranged the meeting with Luca, Victor wonders if Phantom is up for the job of acting as his translator at this crucial event.
Of course, Victor would prefer his chosen brother. But, unfortunately, Han still hasn’t returned from Hawaii.
Han agreed to come back to Rhode Island after the fallout with Kuang. But then, just a few days later, he called Victor and Phantom on a group FaceTime to say that he was “working a plan” which he couldn’t talk about over the phone and needed more time in the Aloha State.
That call took place over two months ago, back in the spring. Now it was nearly halfway through the summer.
Has it really been over six weeks since Victor saw Dawn in any way, shape, or form? This is the longest he’s gone in fifteen years without knowing exactly where she was at any given hour of the day or having access to her whenever he wanted—though he’d gone out of his way to avoid using that easy access over the last ten years.
What a fool he’d been.
A hollow, lost feeling sweeps through him. A little boy crying in a tiny room. But he’s not that little boy anymore, he reminds himself.
He can fix this. I will fix this.
“Are you ready for the meeting?” he asks Phantom instead of returning his cousin’s greeting.
Phantom once again doesn’t bother to finish chewing before answering.
“As ready as I can be, considering that we’re walking into this shit on Ferraro’s turf with zero intel. For all you know, these Italian bitches will gun us down as soon as we walk in.” He spears another bite of pancake, this time adding a slice of bacon and some scrambled eggs on top of it. Perhaps he is challenging himself to see just how much food he could stuff into his mouth before becoming completely incomprehensible?
“No weapons allowed,” Victor reminds him. Not to reassure his cousin, but because he knows Phantom will try to sneak something in any way if he isn’t given a direct order.
His cousin throws him a severely grumpy look before asking, “What happened to letting this chick go on May 26th?”
Victor answers Phantom as he plans to answer Dawn. “She left before fulfilling her part of our agreement. So now her let go date is very much up in the air.”
“You know you sound like a psycho, right?” Phantom asks.
Yes, Victor does know that.
But after six weeks without Dawn, he can’t bring himself to care.
Less than an hour after breakfast, Phantom and Victor arrive at Luca’s warehouse on the Jersey side of the Hudson River. It’s a large red brick building with casement windows and a sign painted on the front that declares it the home of Ferraro Disaster Management.
“Okay, spread ’em,” says a guy standing outside the warehouse’s open roll-down door. He’s got an accent nearly as tough as Phantom’s.
Just as Han’s liaison promised, Victor, Phantom, and their men are all weapon checked at the door. But still, Phantom brought along a backup plan.
Since there were no restrictions put on who could come to the meeting between their two gangs, Phantom ordered ten Silent Triad to accompany them. Bruisers with martial arts backgrounds. Just as Phantom and Victor used to be before DNA evidence became harder to surmount and they began delegating their dirty work.
“That way, if they try to light us up, at least we’ve got a fighting chance,” Phantom explained when they walked out of their mansion to find two other Audi’s idling behind the one Phantom would be driving to the designated meeting place.
Victor is grateful for his cousin’s paranoia. At least one of them is thinking straight. He certainly isn’t.
She’s never going to forgive you for this.
Darrell’s gleeful and triumphant words swarm around Victor’s head as he holds out his arms as instructed.
Phantom’s extra men make the weapons check take longer than expected. But eventually, they all are allowed inside. However, everyone but Phantom is told to wait outside the door of Luca Ferraro’s upstairs office.
His cousin slices Victor a dark look after that edict and tells Victor in Chinese Sign Language, “If this bitch kills us, my reincarnation is going to hunt your reincarnation down, just to say, I fucking told you so.”
That colorful threat issued, they enter the room.
Neither of them have seen Luca since that one time when he accidentally decided to set foot in a 24K nightclub. But he looks much the same to Victor.
He’s still what Phantom often derisively refers to as “pretty”—especially when giving Han a hard time. Other than a few fine lines around his crystal blue eyes, Luca Ferraro could’ve been mistaken for a man in his 20s.
But he now carries a gravitas that Victor didn’t remember him having the last time they spied him from afar. Luca Ferraro waits for them alone in his office, standing behind his desk without any fear whatsoever in his eyes. Most likely, because he’s now the don of one of the most powerful mafia families on the eastern seaboard.
But his power doesn’t matter. He’s harboring Dawn, and Victor wants her back. Operation Good As New. That’s all that matters. Fix this. Fix this. Fix this.
Victor and his cousin don’t bother to take a seat. Without any preamble, Victor slides his phone across to Ferraro. It’s opened to a notes app with a typed-out list.
“This is what we’re prepared to offer you in exchange for handing over Dawn Kingston-Zhang,” Phantom explains to Ferraro. “It includes a few territories in New Jersey you might recognize.
Ferraro picks up the phone. And his eyes light up when he gets past the coded offerings of laundry services and future weapon deals to the neighborhood territories the Silent Triad took off his family back in the early 10’s after they partnered with the 24K.