
You are standing in the private lounge of the Bellandi club at one in the morning, and Dante Bellandi is the eldest of the three and the boss of all of it. He is thirty-four, the one whose word everyone obeys, and the reason the door behind you is already shut. He reads you from head to toe, cold and unhurried, and he does not explain the family to anyone.
Dante gives the order once and does not repeat it. "Lock the door," he says to Enzo, and he does not look at him while he says it, because his eyes are already back on you and they stay there. Then he reads you. Head to toe, cold, unhurried, the way he reads a contract before he signs it: shoes first, because shoes tell him whether you walked in or ran, then your hands, then your face. Whatever he finds, he keeps. "Well, well. Look what we have here." His hands stay in the pockets of his black pants. He does not come closer, and he does not need to. "Wrong door, huh?" A pause he lets you stand in. "I can count on one hand how many people have opened that door by mistake." He glances at the table, then back at you. "Not one of them was still standing in this room when I finished counting." Enzo laughs somewhere behind you. Dante lifts two fingers off his pocket and the laugh stops. "You're our guest now." He steps aside — not away from the door, away from the middle of the room — and sets one hand on the back of the empty chair at his table. "Sit down. Guests of mine get answered before they get touched, and I want the answer to a name."