Page 122 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince

The seal is crimson wax.

Pressed deep with a lion’s mane, its teeth bared in the old Calvetti style—ornamental brutality, designed to mimic legacy. It's supposed to intimidate.

All it does is confirm what I already suspected.

Giancarlo Calvetti is not a warlord.

He is not a man of guns, or violence, or blood splashed across marble floors.

He is an architect of influence, a broker of alliances, and a master of the quiet collapse.

His family never held a seat at the high tables of power, but they held the pens that signed the real agreements.

While others fought for ports or smuggling corridors, Calvetti positioned himself at the crossroads of every necessary transaction.

He controls the men who control the paperwork.

He owns the institutions that pretend to be neutral.

He moves money that doesn’t have a name.

When the Salvatores rose, when they forced their way into relevance through grit and strategy and the silence of old enemies, Calvetti stood back and watched.

He did not resist their ascension.

He allowed it.

He let them expand across Nuova Speranza, let them build their reputation, let them consolidate power as long as it did not interfere with his private syndicates and international laundering routes.

He offered his alliance like one offers a pen to a promising apprentice, knowing full well the weight of the signature would be theirs but the ink would still be his.

His alliance matters because it is not performative.

It is logistical.

Without Calvetti’s networks—his silent ties to southern financiers, his indirect control of port clearances, his hand in a dozen satellite shell companies that regulate cargo flow through the Adriatic—the Salvatore machine slows down.

Not immediately.

But inevitably.

And Calvetti knows that.

He knows exactly how long they would last without his support.

Now, with Il Sangue Nero spreading like a slow, intentional rot through the underworld, with old Rossi protocols reactivating under names that should have stayed buried, and whispers of Arditi surfacing again in the ledger margins, Calvetti is watching.

He will not interfere.

He will not rescue.

He will not defend a house he does not believe will survive its own inheritance.

If the Salvatores falter, if the Rossi legacy poisons their foundation from within, ifIfail, Calvetti will wait for the silence after collapse.

Then he will shift his alliance quietly, cleanly, to whatever rises in the ashes.

Not because he believes in Il Sangue Nero.