Pietro (Feretti Syndicate #7)

Prologue

CHICAGO, THIRTEEN YEARS AGO

PIETRO

The warehouse door hangs wrong on its hinges, the first sign something is wrong.

I push through, my father's lecture still ringing in my ears. “Family comes first, Pietro. These responsibilities matter more than running around with that boy.”

The metal scrapes against concrete. The sound jolts through me, a warning my gut understands before my brain does. Pablo should have fixed that door by now. He's particular about things working right.

Silence greets me. No music from his portable radio, no sound of him counting product or cracking jokes at his own expense. Just the November wind rattling through gaps in the corrugated walls.

"Pablo?" My voice bounces off metal and concrete. "Where the fuck are you hiding?"

The smell hits me first. Copper and cordite, shit and fear. My fingers find the Glock’s grip at my waist, the cold steel a familiar weight as I round the corner into the main storage area.

The crates are torn to shit, pocked with bullet holes. White powder dusts the floor where cocaine packages burst open, mixing with dark stains spreading across the concrete. Blood.

My mind supplies the word, and my stomach heaves. Bodies sprawl between the wreckage. Three, four, five men, their faces slack, eyes wide with a surprise that will never fade.

And in the center of it all, Pablo.

My legs move without thought, carrying me across the warehouse floor. Glass crunches under my shoes. The ones I wore to make Giuseppe happy at his goddamn dinner. I drop to my knees beside my best friend, my brother in everything but blood.

"No, no, no..." The words tumble out as my hands find his chest, pressing against wounds that no longer bleed. His burgundy shirt has gone black with it, the fabric sticky and cold. "Pablo, come on. Open your eyes."

His face is wrong. Too pale. Lips blue. That goddamn smirk he always wore? Gone. I touch his cheek and jerk back. His skin carries the chill of November concrete, not the warmth of life.

"Fuck!" I check his neck for a pulse that isn't there, knowing it's useless but unable to stop. His hands tell the story. Defensive wounds across his palms, knuckles split from fighting. He didn't go easy. Pablo never did anything easy.

I lift his head into my lap. His eyes stare at nothing, and I close them with shaking fingers. Twenty-three years old. Same as me. We were supposed to run this city together.

"I'm sorry, fratello. I'm so fucking sorry. I should have been here. Fuck Giuseppe. Fuck his dinner. I should have been here."

But I didn't. I sat there for three hours, eating my mother's osso buco while Giuseppe and my brothers discussed territory expansion and political connections. Listened to him lecture about duty and legacy while Pablo faced the Mexicans alone.

My phone buzzes. Giuseppe's name lights up the screen, and rage claws up my throat, hot and acidic. My hands ache to destroy something. Anything.

Instead, I answer.

"Is the shipment secure?" Giuseppe's voice carries that tone of assumed success, like the world bends to Sartori will through sheer force of expecting it.

I look at Pablo's still face, at the defensive wounds that say he held them off long enough to protect most of the product. At the dead Mexicans who won't be reporting back about our shipping schedules.

"It's handled."

"Good. I knew I could count on you to be a proper soldier. Family first, Pietro. Always family first."

The line goes dead. I set the phone aside. I stare at Pablo. The only one who made the chains feel lighter. And I let him die alone.

Something inside my chest cracks, a sound sharp and final as a gunshot. It doesn't break. It shatters.

Into dust.

I pull Pablo's body closer, his blood seeping through my shirt to mark my skin.

"I'll be what he wants. The soldier. The killer.

The good son." My voice sounds dead already, empty as the warehouse around us.

"But we both know the truth, don't we? I died here tonight too. Just too stupid to stop breathing."

Present Day

The leather chair creaks as I lean back, staring at quarterly reports that blur together into meaningless numbers. My office radiates power. Windows overlooking the city I now control, Italian marble floors, artwork that museums would kill for.

All of it built on blood.

My hand moves without thought, pressing against my ribs through the fabric of my shirt. The tattoo throbs like a fresh wound, though it's been years since the needle carved his name and that date into my skin. November 15th. The day I stopped being Pietro and became this thing wearing his face.

Some days I trace the letters, trying to remember what his laugh sounded like. Other days I dig my fingers in hard enough to bruise, hoping the physical pain might drown out everything else.

"Would you be proud?" I ask the empty office, the question I pose to every decision. "Would you understand why I had to burn them all?"

The men who killed him died screaming. Their families scattered. Their territories absorbed. I became everything Giuseppe wanted—ruthless, efficient, feared. The perfect Don when Riccardo ate a bullet and died. The perfect Don when Bruno is at the fucking hospital unaware if he ever wakes up.

But here's what I know, what I've known since that night in the warehouse: Pablo would hate what I've become. He'd look at the blood on my hands, the emptiness behind my eyes, the women I fuck and discard because feeling nothing is better than feeling everything.

He'd ask me what the point of surviving was if I'm not actually living.

And I'd have no answer. Because the truth is simple and unchangeable as gravity.

I should have died in that warehouse thirteen years ago. Every breath since has been stolen time, borrowed from a better man who deserved them more.

The city lights glitter beyond my windows, Chicago spread out like a kingdom I never wanted. Somewhere out there, Giulia tends her garden and lights candles for her son. My brothers move through their own orbits, held together by blood and duty and the kind of loyalty that got Pablo killed.

I pour three fingers of whiskey, raise the glass to my reflection in the darkened window.

A ghost toasting ghosts.

"Here's to borrowed time, fratello.”