Chapter 10
COSIMO
The dim light from the lamp on my desk was the only thing cutting through the darkness of my office. My head throbbed. The kind of pain that settled behind the eyes and refused to let go.
Dad was supposed to retire deep into his sixties. He was supposed to hand me the reins over a glass of bourbon in his office and promise he’d be a phone call away. Something like this was never part of the plan.
I hadn’t slept more than an hour at a time since the explosion. My memories of what’d happened were loose fragments kicking around my skull, refusing to order themselves in any way that made sense.
The pop of a champagne bottle. Dad placing the bonsai tree on the windowsill. Alessio’s blood covering my shaking hands.
I looked down. They still shook.
I clenched my fists to stop it.
Enough. Someday I’d have time to piece the memories together, but not now.
There wasn’t any time to grieve. I had to find my father’s killers. To reestablish order. To ensure the Ferraros would survive this the way we’d survived all the other threats we’d faced.
The door to my office opened, and Alessio walked in. His face was all bruised, and his arm was in a sling. He’d been closer to the bomb hidden in the bonsai tree than Romolo and I when it’d gone off. For a few terrifying moments, I thought we’d lost him.
“Anything?” I asked.
He took a seat across from me. “There was nothing in Lisa’s downtown condo. The concierge said she and Uncle Mario haven’t been there in weeks. She hasn’t used her credit cards, and her phone is off.”
The bonsai tree was brought in by Aunt Lisa. Rom and I had already gone over to her place in Hoboken and found it cleared out. That meant my aunt had known exactly what she was bringing in.
But the device was too sophisticated for them to have put together. Someone had to have been pulling their strings. The question was who?
Santoro. That was the name Alvarez had given me just before I left Colombia after finally closing our deal. That was the name of the other family that had been negotiating with him. They’d tried to make him walk away from us by offering the kind of terms no sane person would.
In the end, I’d convinced Alvarez the Santoros were an unknown quantity and not worth the risk.
Mere hours later, my father was dead.
Coincidence? I didn’t fucking think so.
“Let’s run down every single person who visited their house in the past three months. Speak to cleaners, gardeners, pool boys, everyone. I want to know if they saw anything.”
Alessio nodded and rubbed his eyes with his good hand. “Why would Aunt Lisa do this?”
“I don’t know. The chief accountant of their packaging business said they were one payroll away from bankruptcy. They were having problems.”
“Yeah. Dad knew about it. He asked Mom to look into it at some point.”
I clicked my pen. “The timing makes me think these fucking Santoros are involved. They must have some kind of vendetta against us. Let’s put out some feelers. See if they’ve popped up anywhere else in the state.”
“You couldn’t get anything more from Alvarez about them?”
I shook my head. “He told me he only met with two guys who were representing them. I already ran their names through the system and got nothing.”
“Dad knew who that family was,” Alessio said. “He was about to tell us about them just before the bomb went off. Something must have happened between the families a long time ago.”
“Yeah. But what?” Too many unknowns. Too many fucking variables.
I rubbed my temples, trying to massage my headache away. A don couldn’t afford unknowns. Hell, a new don could afford them even less. The capos were sitting in my living room waiting for me to issue orders. But without more information, vengeance had to wait.
My phone screen flashed with our family lawyer’s name.
I picked up. “Richard.” I’d been waiting for his call.
I wouldn’t officially be named don until the swearing-in ceremony, which would be scheduled sixty days after Dad’s death—one day for each year he lived.
To ensure proper governance during the transition period, an interim don had to be appointed.
But given that I was Dad’s named successor, the interim title would fall to me.
I was already running the illicit parts of our business.
Richard just had to appoint me as the CEO of Ferraro Holdings, the legal entity that represented just under half of our total business.
“I’ve just gotten access to the will. Unfortunately, there’s a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
Alessio gave me a questioning look, and I put the call on speaker.
“There’s a page missing,” Richard said. “The last page, the one that clarifies the line of succession. The page that would allow me to make you the don in the interim.”
My blood ran cold. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. It’s just gone. Maybe your father took it out himself and wasn’t able to replace it before he was… Well, before the bomb. I can see here in the logs that he was here a few times in the last month.”
My hand tightened around the phone. “Is there anyone else in the visitor logs?”
“Me. And your mother was here yesterday.”
What. The. Fuck.
I swallowed down my urge to scream into the phone.
Of course. Of fucking course. My father hadn’t even been buried, and Vita was already looking for some way to use the situation to her advantage.
Just when I thought I knew how low she could stoop, she somehow stooped even lower.
Only yesterday, Rom had told me about how she’d whored him out when he was only eighteen in order to get kompromat on a police chief’s wife.
We were supposed to protect the family, not exploit our own blood.
But Mother didn’t care. There were no lines she wouldn’t cross in her pursuit of power.
“So what does all of this mean?” I ground out.
“It means your father left no enforceable proof of succession,” Richard said. “So for now, you stay underboss and retain control of the criminal side by default. But Ferraro Holdings is another matter. Your mother is chairwoman of the board, and the board voted to make her CEO this morning.”
Alessio’s eyes widened.
“What?” I snapped. “How am I only hearing about this now?”
“You haven’t been involved with Ferraro Holdings. I only learned about it after the fact.”
“Then call for another vote.”
“You don’t have the authority to do that yet. If you inherit control, you’ll be able to undo it. But until then, your hands are tied.”
So the family was carved up into two halves. For the next sixty days, one would be run by my mother, and one run by me.
“What about after the mourning period ends?”
“Well, that depends on what happens at the swearing-in ceremony,” Richard said. “Without that final page, the question of who’s don will fall to a vote. It will be up to the capos.”
“This is bullshit, and we both know it. She can’t—”
The door to my office opened.
I looked up just in time to see my mother walk in.