Chapter Two
Mario
By the time I return home, Chicago is dark.
The house sits behind a stone wall and iron gates in a quiet stretch of the city where privacy matters more than displays of wealth.
It is old by American standards, built of limestone and dark brick, with tall windows, deep eaves, and enough distance from the street to make the property feel removed without feeling isolated.
I bought it for the land and location first.
The house was secondary.
There were newer places I could have chosen. Glass boxes with too much light and too little memory. Penthouse floors with views of the lake and no soil beneath them. Modern estates built by men who measure ambition by the size of their homes.
This place was different.
It has history.
Not history that belonged to me, but history nonetheless. A house with good bones, thick walls, excellent sightlines, and enough rooms that my sons could come and go without feeling as though they still lived beneath my roof, even though, for now, they do.
The gates open before the car reaches them.
Diego’s people are discreet, but I see them. One at the guardhouse. One near the side path. Cameras tucked into the corners of the wall, hidden in stonework, angled toward the driveway. Lights designed to look decorative.
A person could look at this house and see elegance.
I look at it and see the angles of attack.
The car stops beneath the covered entry. I step out, buttoning my suit jacket against the cold, and the front door opens before I reach it.
“Good evening, Mr. Conti,” Paolo says.
“Paolo.”
He takes my coat without asking. He has worked for my family long enough to know when I want conversation and when I only want efficiency.
Tonight, I want both less than usual.
Inside, the house is warm and quiet. Dark wood floors, high ceilings, cream walls. Old oil paintings I had brought from Naples mixed with newer pieces because the present matters just as much as the past.
A wide staircase rises from the foyer, its banister polished by hands that belonged to other families long before mine.
There are shoes near the side entrance that belong to Tomasso because he leaves them wherever he pleases, no matter how many times he is reminded.
A stack of books on the hall table that belong to Matteo because he reads three at once and claims he knows exactly where he is in each one.
A half-empty espresso cup near the library door that one of them will deny abandoning if I ask.
These things should irritate me.
Sometimes they do.
Tonight, they do not.
They will all be gone and put away by morning, regardless. I could hire more staff who would clean each speck of dust as it falls, but then my home would feel less like one.
That is how I grew up.
It is not how I choose to live now that the choice is mine.
Voices come from the back of the house.
I follow them past the formal sitting room no one uses, past the dining room large enough to seat twenty, and into the kitchen.
The kitchen is the least formal room in the house and, because of that, the one my sons prefer. Large island, dark stone counters, copper pans hung more for use than decoration. Windows looking out toward the garden, where the lights cast squares over the winter-bare trees.
Matteo sits at the island in a dark sweater, a laptop open in front of him and a book facedown beside it.
Tomasso stands near the refrigerator wearing black trousers, a shirt half-buttoned, and a Negroni in one hand.
They are identical only to people who do not know them.
Same height, same dark hair, same Conti eyes. Same sharp cheekbones and strong jaws inherited from my side of the family.
But Matteo carries stillness in his bones. He watches before he speaks, thinks before he moves, holds his cards until the other man forgets he is playing a game.
Tomasso moves as if the world should be pleased to see him coming.
He smiles faster, talks easier, and walks into a room like the doors were made to open for him.
Four minutes separate them.
Some days, it feels like four generations.
Tomasso looks up first. “Papà.”
Matteo glances at me over the rim of his laptop. “You’re late.”
“I was working.”
“You’re always working,” Tomasso says.
“I could say the same to you, but it would be a lie.”
Matteo’s mouth curves.
Tomasso presses a hand to his chest. “This is how I’m greeted in my own home?”
“Your home?” I ask. “And which bills will you be paying then?”
Tomasso grins. “I contribute charm.”
“Charm does not pay for electricity.”
“It should.”
“I’ll be sure to suggest it.”
Matteo closes his laptop halfway. “He also contributes laundry.”
Tomasso turns to him. “I do my own laundry.”
“You put clothes in the laundry room. That is not the same thing.”
“They come back clean.”
“Through no effort of yours.”
Tomasso points at him with the hand holding the glass. “This is why no one invites you anywhere.”
“I was invited somewhere tonight.”
That catches my attention.
Tomasso’s too.
He turns slowly, delighted. “Were you?”
Matteo’s expression remains calm, which means he is already regretting saying anything.
“Yes.”
“By whom?”
“No one you know.”
“You don’t know anyone I don’t know,” he says smugly. “And that is not an answer.”
“It is the only one you’re getting.”
Tomasso looks at me. “Papà, did you hear that? Matteo has secrets.”
“I heard.”
“Are we proud or concerned?”
“Both,” I say, enjoying them.
Matteo gives me a dry look. “I’m not going.”
Tomasso groans. “Of course you’re not.”
“I have work to finish.”
“You always have work to finish.”
“And yet it gets finished. A mystery.”
Tomasso shakes his head and sets his glass on the counter. “You are wasting your face.”
Matteo opens his laptop again. “Better than wasting my evening.”
I smile.
“Where are you going?” I ask Tomasso.
He reaches for the cufflinks beside his glass. “Dinner.”
“With?”
“A woman.”
“I assumed that.”
“Then why ask?”
“Because there are billions of women, Casanova, and I’m curious which one has inspired cufflinks.”
Tomasso looks down at them. “What’s wrong with cufflinks?”
“Those are very nice cufflinks,” I point out.
Matteo glances up from his screen. “He changed shirts twice.”
Tomasso turns on him. “You are supposed to be the quiet one.”
“I am quiet,” Matteo says. “Not blind.”
Tomasso looks back at me. “They were the first ones I found.”
“They were in a box in the back of your drawer,” Matteo says.
“I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I might start.”
I pick up the glass he left on the counter and look at him over the rim of it. “Her name?”
For the first time, his grin shifts into something less practiced.
“Claire,” he says.
Matteo’s eyebrows lift slightly.
Interesting.
Not only a woman, then.
A woman who matters enough to make my son hesitate before saying her name.
“Tell me about this Claire,” I say and take a sip.
“You taught me never to give away unnecessary information.”
“That doesn’t apply with me.”
“She works in art restoration,” Matteo says. “She has a small apartment in Lincoln Park, two cats, and a brother in Denver she dislikes.”
Tomasso stares at him. “Do you have no respect for privacy?”
“I have excellent respect for my own privacy.”
“Papà,” Tomasso says, turning to me. “Do something about him.”
“I am enjoying him.”
Matteo smiles faintly and reaches for his glass of water.
Tomasso mutters something in Italian that would have earned him a sharp correction at twelve and earns him nothing now except my raised eyebrow.
He sees it and smiles wider. “What? I said it respectfully.”
Matteo responds, and that sets them off bickering like children instead of the men they are.
Instead of finding irritation in it, I simply let the familiar arguments roll over me.
Though they bicker, they are close. In Italy, they had moved out of the family home and into an apartment of their own. Their own schedules, their own women, their own lives. Yes, they came to see me often, and I was never left out of their lives, but it’s not the same as having them under my roof.
They did not need to return to my table at night or cross paths with me in the kitchen or leave books and shoes and half-finished coffee where I could find them.
Here, they do.
For now, anyway.
I know better than to hold too tightly to things that cannot stay.
Still, I will take what I am given as long as I can.
I won’t be the same as my father and rule my family with fear and a hard hand. I rule my empire with an iron fist, but I would consider it a personal failure if my children looked at me with fear in their eyes.
Tomasso points at him. “Enough from the house monk.”
“I’m not a monk.”
“You are staying in on a Friday night with a book about postwar economic policy.”
Matteo looks down at the book. “It’s interesting.”
Tomasso gestures to him as if the case has argued itself.
I switch to espresso, pour it into a small cup, and watch them over the rim.
This, too, is a kind of wealth.
Not the house or the accounts, the companies, the men who answer when I call.
This.
My sons in my kitchen, insulting each other because they are comfortable enough to do so. Matteo pretending not to be amused. Tomasso pretending not to want approval.
Both of them grown, but still very much my sons.
Anna would have laughed.
The thought comes before I can stop it.
For a moment, the kitchen is not this kitchen. The light is not this light. My sons are younger. Too young. Matteo with a book and Tomasso with scraped knuckles and excuses. Anna standing near a window with her hair falling out of the pins because she had no patience for doing it properly.
Then blood.
Then silence.
I set the cup down a little harder than I intended to.
Both of my sons notice.
Their voices fade.
That is how her name lives in this house.
In pauses and looks. In the careful absence of questions.
I do not let myself think of her for long. I have learned what happens when memory is given too much space to roam. It does not remain memory. It becomes a room with a locked door, and once inside, a man can lose himself and never come out.
The one who did what had to be done.