Chapter 15
Dante
Marco called at seven-fifteen.
I was already awake—had been since five, lying in the dark with Gemma's breath warm against my chest and the architecture of a war taking shape behind my eyes.
She slept deeply. Completely. The kind of sleep that came after the body had been wrung out by grief and sex and exhaustion.
Her hand was curled against my sternum, fingers loose, trusting even in unconsciousness.
The phone buzzed against the nightstand. I reached for it without moving the arm beneath her head.
"I need you at Nero." Marco's voice was clipped. Awake. The kind of awake that meant he hadn't slept. "Eleven. Bring Santo."
"What happened?"
"Nothing catastrophic. Just—come. And don't eat breakfast. Actually, do eat breakfast. You'll need a base."
He hung up.
I stared at the ceiling. Processed. Filed it under Marco being Marco and turned my attention back to the woman sleeping on my chest.
She didn't stir when I slid out from beneath her. I tucked the covers around her shoulders, pressed my lips to her temple, and left a note on the nightstand in handwriting I hoped was gentler than my father's: Back soon. Eat something. Guards outside. I love you.
Nero at eleven in the morning was a different animal than Nero at midnight.
The velvet ropes were gone. The lighting was up—flat, institutional, exposing every scuff on the dance floor and every fingerprint on the chrome fixtures.
Without the crowd, without the bass, without the careful alchemy of darkness and desire that Marco had engineered, the nightclub looked like what it was: a very expensive room with good bones and a faint smell of last night's spilled champagne.
Marco was behind the bar.
He wore a silk shirt the color of red wine—unbuttoned one too many, because this was Marco and vanity was a constitutional requirement.
His hair was styled. His face was fresh.
Only the shadows beneath his eyes betrayed the fact that he'd been awake since God knew when, and even those he wore like accessories.
Spread across the bar in front of him were dozens of small glasses.
Tasting glasses, the kind you'd see at a whiskey distillery or a perfumer's workshop.
Each one held a different liquid—amber, crimson, blush, gold, one that was almost violet.
They were arranged in neat rows, labeled with small handwritten cards in Marco's precise script.
Santo stood two feet inside the door with his arms crossed, looking at the display like it had insulted his mother.
"Before you say anything," Marco announced, both hands flat on the bar, "I need you both to taste these. My new mixologist is a genius or a lunatic, and I genuinely can't tell which."
Santo stared. "It's eleven in the morning."
"It's research. Sit."
So we sat—the don and his enforcer, perched on velvet barstools in an empty nightclub, while house music played at a volume that was more suggestion than sound.
The bass pulsed through the bar top like a second heartbeat.
Marco slid the first row of glasses toward us with the reverence of a sommelier presenting a flight.
"Start with the Velvet Sin." He pointed to a glass of deep amber. "Bourbon base, fig reduction, cardamom bitters. The finish is insane."
I picked it up. Sniffed it. Tasted it. It was, in fact, insane.
Santo took his like a shot, which earned him a look of physical pain from Marco.
"That is a seventy-dollar cocktail, you animal. You're supposed to—"
"Next." Santo set the glass down hard enough to make the neighboring samples tremble.
We worked through the row. The Confession was something dark and smoky with mezcal and cherry that coated the tongue.
A blush-colored thing called Penance tasted like grapefruit and regret.
The violet one—unnamed, still in development—was floral and strange and made Santo grimace in a way that was almost theatrical.
"Tastes like nonna's perfume," he muttered.
"Nonna had excellent taste."
"Our nonna was terrifying."
"Exactly." Marco grinned and slid over another glass. Pink this time. Something with rose water and gin that caught the flat overhead light and held it.
Three drinks in, the warmth had settled into my chest—not enough to blur anything, just enough to take the edge off the cold thing I'd been carrying since last night.
I set down my glass.
"Gemma told me what happened."
The music kept playing. The bass pulsed on, steady and indifferent. But everything else stopped.
Marco's hand froze mid-reach for a cocktail shaker. He didn't look up immediately—just held still, fingers hovering, the way a man holds still when he's recalibrating everything he thought was going to happen in the next five minutes.
Santo's fist closed around the pink glass. His knuckles went white. I watched the scar tissue across his knuckles stretch and pale.
“I need you to know what he did.”
So, I told them. The real version. Enzo's grey eyes across the room. The careful weaponization of Gemma's childhood. The way she was discarded.
The silence that followed was broken only by the ambient bass. A steady throb that counted the seconds like a pulse monitor in a hospital room, measuring the vital signs of something that might not survive the hour.
Santo's face was a study in controlled detonation.
I watched the cycle—confusion first, because Santo always needed a moment to accept that someone could be this monstrous and this polished at the same time.
Then disbelief, his brow furrowing, his jaw working the way it did when his body wanted to hit something and his brain was still catching up.
Then the rage settled in. Not the explosive kind.
The quiet kind. The kind that was worse.
Marco hadn't moved. That dangerous stillness—the one that reminded you he was a Caruso too, that beneath the silk shirts and the cocktail experiments lived something cold and calculating and absolutely capable of destruction.
His eyes were fixed on a point somewhere behind the bar, but I knew he wasn't seeing bottles.
He was seeing angles. Moves and countermoves.
The branching decision tree of everything that could happen next.
"He wants you to give him your wife," Santo said flatly. "Like a fucking—"
He didn't finish. Couldn't find a word ugly enough.
"I'm not doing it." My voice cut through the silence like a blade laid on a table.
"I don't care what it costs. I don't care if he releases the evidence.
I don't care if the feds come down on us tomorrow.
Gemma is not a bargaining chip. She is not a transaction.
She's my wife, and I'd rather lose every business, every property, every dollar this family has ever earned than hand her over to a man who raped her when she was a child. "
The word landed like a grenade.
I'd said it deliberately. Had chosen it with the same precision I brought to every statement that mattered, because the truth deserved its real name.
Not affair. Not history. Not the silk-wrapped euphemisms Enzo used to dress up what he'd done to a sixteen-year-old girl who'd just wanted someone to see her.
Rape. That's what it was.
Santo picked up the pink cocktail. Drained it in one long swallow. Set the glass down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his scarred knuckles flexing, his jaw still grinding. The grimace that crossed his face might have been the rose water.
"Good," he said quietly. Something shifted in his eyes—not warmth, exactly. Santo didn't do warmth. But respect. The real kind. The kind you couldn't buy or perform. "I'd have lost respect for you if you'd even considered giving her to him."
Marco reached beneath the bar.
Not for a cocktail shaker. Not for one of his careful experiments. He produced a bottle I recognized immediately—the label faded, the glass dark with age. Our father's whiskey.
He poured three glasses. Neat. No ice. The amber liquid caught the flat lighting and turned it into something warmer.
"So we go to war," Marco said. His voice had lost every trace of the man who'd been debating cocktail names ten minutes ago. What remained was the brother. The Caruso. The youngest son who'd spent his whole life being underestimated and was about to show everyone exactly how wrong they'd been.
"We go to war."
I lifted the glass. Santo lifted his. Marco lifted his.
We drank.
The whiskey burned—smooth, then sharp, then warm.
The house music pulsed on. The cocktail glasses stood in their neat rows, abandoned now, irrelevant. The morning sunlight cut flat lines through the windows and fell across three brothers who had just decided to burn everything down for love.
Santo cracked his knuckles. Marco closed his laptop. I finished my whiskey and set the glass on the bar beside a cocktail called The Confession.
Time to go to confession for real.
Same restaurant. Same table. Same white tablecloths and muted lighting and the particular hush of wealth insulating itself from consequence. But I was not the same man who'd sat here three days ago, and the difference was simple: last time I'd come to listen. This time I'd come to speak.
No wire. No earpiece. No Marco murmuring contingency plans into my skull. This conversation didn't need witnesses. It needed a wall—solid, immovable, the kind a man broke his hands against when he discovered the door he'd expected to walk through was sealed shut.
Santo was outside. I hadn't told him not to come.
Hadn't needed to. He'd been leaning against his car when I pulled up, arms crossed, leather jacket, the particular expression that said I will sit here for seven hours if that's what it takes, and God help anyone who tries to move me.
I'd nodded. He'd nodded back. That was enough.