Chapter Thirty-seven
Lorenzo
“What the fuck, Dante?”
My voice cuts across the room like a blade. I do not look at Paolo. I do not look at Alessio. I do not look at Nicolas.
I look at my uncle.
“This wasn’t the plan. What the fuck are you talking about?”
Dante doesn’t answer.
It’s Nicolas who steps forward, calm, measured, like he’s announcing the weather instead of detonating my life.
“Giovanni was not just part of Cosa Nostra,” he says. “He was ruling it.”
A humorless breath leaves my nose.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “I figured.”
Founder. Bloodline. Birthright. Throne.
How many more lies were buried with my father?
“So why the fuck am I hearing this ten years after he died?”
Alessio answers this time. “Your father was respected. Feared. But he never wanted you to carry what he carried. He made it clear that if anything happened to him, you were to be kept out.”
“So what stopped you?” I snap. “He was dead.”
A silence passes between the men at the table.
Then Alessio says quietly, “He prepared for that too.”
Something cold moves down my spine.
“He still had snipers contracted,” Alessio continues. “On our homes. Our families. Lifetime retainers. And for their sons after them.”
I blink once.
“You’re joking.”
“No,” Paolo says. “Your father made it very clear. If we ever forced you into the seat. . . we die.”
That is extreme.
Impressive.
“So what makes you think you’re safe now?” I ask, voice low, dangerous. “You’re literally doing the one thing he paid people to kill you for.”
Dante finally speaks.
“Because we are not forcing you.”
I turn on him. “You know I don’t want this.”
“You don’t,” he agrees calmly. “But your father always believed you would step into it when the time was right.”
I laugh, sharp and disbelieving. “He believed that so much he hired generational assassins to stop you?”
“Yes,” Dante says. “If we forced you.”
I stare at him.
“So what makes you think I’ll say yes?”
Because I won’t.
This life nearly destroyed Serena once. It nearly took my children before they were born.
I fought to keep them away from this world.
Dante’s gaze hardens. “Because this is the only way you make them untouchable.”
I grit my teeth. “I already protect them.”
“That’s why she was kidnapped?”
The words hit.
Hard.
“Because you’re so powerful?” he continues, voice colder than I’ve ever heard it. “Because they fear you?”
My fists clench on the table.
“You’re a nobody, Lorenzo.”
The room goes very still.
“You built a reputation,” Dante goes on. “Blackmail. Leverage. Smart business. You have the Russians backing you.” His jaw tightens slightly when he says it. He never liked that alliance. “But in this structure, you are not at the top. You are adjacent.”
“Careful,” I growl. “Or you’ll see how harmless I am.”
He ignores that completely.
“You are a nobody to the old blood,” he says. “That’s why they touched your woman. That’s why you’re constantly reacting instead of commanding.”
Every word lands because I know he’s not entirely wrong.
“Grow up,” he finishes. “And accept what you were born into.”
“I didn’t know I was born into it!” I snap.
“You do now,” he says. “And if you sit in that chair, no one touches your family without declaring war on all of us.”
That. . . lands differently.
I think of Kirill.
His daughters move under protection like royalty. Dangerous men exist around them, but no one dares cross that invisible line.
Because consequences would be nuclear.
Nicolas steps closer to me now.
“I was your father’s Consigliere,” he says quietly. “I stepped down after his death. Retired to Florence. Watched from afar. Waited.”
“For what?” I ask.
“For you,” he answers.
The weight of that sits heavy.
“I would serve again,” he says. “If you accept.”
Dante nods once. “I remain Underboss. Like I was for your father. The structure is already there.”
“This is not just legacy,” he continues. “This is a shield. A crown is a target, yes. But it is also armor.”
Silence presses in around me.
I never wanted a throne.
But I would burn the world before I let Serena and my children live as prey.
“Fuck.” That’s why Luciano wanted the alliance sealed so badly. He knew control doesn’t have to be direct to be effective. Through his daughter, through me, he would remain embedded in the structure. Even sidelined, he’d still be ruling from the shadows. Clever bastard.
It leaves me steady, not loud. Not shocked.
Just done fighting it.
I look around the table, at the men who watched me grow up without ever telling me who I really was in this room.
Then I nod once.
“Let’s just fucking get this over with.”
Something shifts in the room. Not tension. Not fear. Recognition.
Nicolas is the first to move, and when he does, every man at the table straightens slightly. Not out of protocol. Out of respect for what he represents.
He removes a thin leather sleeve from inside his jacket. The leather is worn pale in places, like it has been opened thousands of times. He slides out a small square of thick paper, aged, edges cracked.
He sets it in front of me like he’s returning something that was never lost, just waiting.
“This was in your father’s pocket the night he took the seat,” Nicolas says.
Dante places a metal lighter beside it. Paolo removes his ring and sets it on the table. Alessio does the same.
Not offerings. Witness marks. A silent acknowledgment that this transfer is real, that it was never a matter of if, only when. That it was always meant to happen.
Nicolas steps closer. His voice is quiet, but every word lands.
“Your father kept you out of this life by force,” he says. “But he never removed your claim to it.”
He takes my hand and presses a small steel pin into the side of my finger.
The pain is sharp, clean.
A bead of blood rises.
He guides my hand over the old paper. My blood stains it, dark and unmistakable.
Around the table, no one looks away. No one shifts or pretends not to see. This isn’t a performance meant to impress anyone. It’s confirmation.
“Blood does not ask permission,” Nicolas says. “It remembers where it belongs.”
Dante flicks the lighter open and touches flame to the corner of the paper. It catches slowly, curling black at the edges.
He doesn’t give it to me. I take it. The flame trembles for a second as my fingers close around it, the heat brushing my palm before turning sharp, biting deeper with every heartbeat.
The burn spreads slowly, deliberate, but I don’t pull away.
Around the table, no one moves. No one rushes me.
No one tells me what to say. Because this moment doesn’t belong to them.
This isn’t their oath. It’s my acceptance.
“I carry this family,” I say, voice low but steady.
The flame grows.
“I stand between it and anything that comes for it.”
Ash flakes down onto the table.
“I do not step back.”
The fire bites into my skin now. Real. Painful.
“And I do not fall alone.”
Then I close my fist. The flame dies instantly, smothered between my fingers. Ash crumbles from my hand and spills across the table, drifting into the empty space where Luciano sat. For a moment, no one moves. Silence settles over the room. Not uncertainty. Completion.
Paolo steps forward first. No hesitation. He grips my hand, firm, eyes locked. “Capo.”
Alessio is next. Same respect. Same certainty.
Dante stands in front of me for a moment longer than the others. There’s pride there. Relief. Something like apology.
Then he nods. “Capo.”
Not nephew.
Not Lorenzo.
Capo.
Finally, Nicolas places his hand over his chest.
“I served your father,” he says. “I have been waiting to serve you.”
And in the stillness that follows, I understand something without anyone saying it.
This room hasn’t just accepted me.
They’ve been waiting for me to walk into it my whole life.
And now that I have. . .
The throne doesn’t feel taken.
It feels returned.
I don’t remember half the streets I just drove through.
The music is loud enough to vibrate the doors, “NUEVAYoL” by Bad Bunny (Alex Tolino Afro House Remix) looping, but I couldn’t tell you a single word if my life depended on it.
The city passes in streaks of red and white, headlights cutting through the dark while my mind runs in circles I can’t get out of.
I’ve been driving nowhere.
Like a man trying to outrun a truth that’s already sitting in the passenger seat.
An hour ago, my life made sense. Brutal, complicated, soaked in violence, but it had structure. There was a target. A strategy. A clean endgame.
Now it feels like someone rewrote my role without asking me.
I spent months dismantling Luciano. Carefully. Patiently. I built trust with Paolo while Dante worked Alessio. We planted seeds, applied pressure, pulled strings. I know how this world moves. I’ve been operating alongside the Bratva for ten years. I understand leverage, territory, influence.
But this. . .
This was never in the blueprint.
The plan was simple. Remove Luciano. Put Dante in the seat. Step back into the shadows where I function best. Go home. Be with Serena. Raise my children somewhere that didn’t require a body count to stay standing.
Instead, I find out my father wasn’t just respected.
He ruled.
Capo.
And apparently, a cold, strategic bastard to the very end. Paying generational contracts to snipers with instructions to eliminate council families if they ever forced me into leadership.
I let out a slow breath through my nose.
Extreme.
But disturbingly. . . effective.
The man really built a dead man’s switch around his own son.
I finally pull up in front of Serena’s house and cut the engine. Silence crashes into me, thick and immediate. My hands stay on the steering wheel while my thoughts keep circling the same question.
How the hell do I tell her?
How do I explain that we went from surviving the chaos to sitting at the center of it?
But I have to tell her.