Mafia Daddy (Chicago Dons #1)

Chapter 1

Dante

Death.

Everything starts with death.

The back office at Caruso's smelled like my father. Cigar smoke embedded in the leather chair. The faint trace of his cologne—Acqua di Parma—that he'd worn since before I was born.

Of course it still smelled like him. It had only been three days.

Three days since his heart stopped at this very desk. Three days since life had changed forever. Three days since the end and a brand new beginning.

No one had thought to air out the room. Or maybe they had thought about it and decided not to. Maybe they were waiting for me to give the order.

I was the don now. Every order was mine to give.

The restaurant had closed early tonight—"family matters," Sal had told the regulars with that careful blankness he'd perfected over forty years.

The dining room sat empty beyond the office door, chairs upturned on tables, the amber wall sconces dimmed to a faint glow.

I could hear the ice machine cycling in the kitchen.

The tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway.

Nothing else. The silence pressed against my ears like something physical.

I'd been going through his papers for three hours.

Bank statements, property deeds, contracts with suppliers.

The legitimate architecture of our empire, the foundation everything else was built on.

Vito Caruso had been meticulous. Every transaction documented, every relationship mapped, every dollar accounted for.

He'd taught me that—taught all of us, really, but me most of all.

"A man who doesn't know his own business doesn't deserve to keep it," he'd said, more times than I could count.

My hands kept stopping on the wrong things.

His reading glasses, folded on top of a stack of invoices.

He'd started needing them five years ago and hated it—hated any sign of weakness, any evidence that his body was betraying him.

He'd ordered the frames from Milan, thin gold wire, so subtle you barely noticed them.

A vanity, disguised as practicality. That was my father all over.

The half-finished glass of Barolo on the corner of the desk.

No one had cleared it away. The wine had evaporated down to maybe an inch, leaving a dark ring on the crystal.

He'd been drinking this when it happened.

Had he felt it coming? Had there been a moment of panic, of understanding, before his heart simply stopped?

The photograph of my mother, tucked into the leather blotter where he could see it without anyone else noticing.

Maria Caruso, dead when I was fifteen. In the picture she was maybe thirty, dark hair swept up, pearl earrings catching the light, smiling at something just past the camera's edge.

She'd died in this office too—not literally, but the news had come here, the phone call from the hospital, and I'd watched my father's face go gray as old ash.

He'd never fully come back from that. None of us had.

I set the photograph down carefully and pressed my palms flat against the desk.

Sixty-three years old. Robust, the doctors had said afterward, as if that made it more surprising rather than less.

He'd played tennis twice a week. He'd eaten Rosa's cooking, sure, but he'd also walked everywhere, kept his weight in check, hadn't touched a cigarette in twenty years.

"Sudden cardiac arrest," they'd told me, with that clinical detachment medical professionals learn to wear like armor.

"A widow-maker. The blockage was complete.

There was nothing anyone could have done. "

I didn't believe in coincidences.

But I also didn't have evidence of anything else. Just a dead father, a city watching to see if I could fill his shoes, and the cold mathematics of power: when a don dies, someone benefits. The only question was who.

I pulled another file from the drawer. Real estate holdings on the South Side.

Properties we'd owned for decades, the legitimate face of less legitimate money.

I knew about these. I knew about most of it—Vito had been grooming me since I was eighteen, walking me through the family's interests piece by piece.

But there's a difference between being shown the engine and being handed the keys.

The clock ticked.

Somewhere distant, a car alarm went off and stopped again.

I thought about the funeral to come. St. Ignatius, the church where my parents had been married, where my brothers and I had been baptized.

Half of Chicago would be there—politicians, businessmen, other family heads.

Paying respects, yes. But also watching.

Assessing. Calculating whether the Caruso empire was still strong or whether the old man's death had created an opportunity.

I would have to stand in the front pew with my siblings and perform grief while simultaneously projecting strength.

I would have to shake hands with men who might have ordered my father's death—if it had been ordered at all—and smile and thank them for coming.

I would have to be what my father had trained me to be: controlled, deliberate, every word measured.

The thing no one tells you about inheriting power is how much it weighs before you've done anything with it.

I picked up the photograph again. My mother's face, frozen in that long-ago happiness.

Vito had kept her here, close, all these years.

He'd never remarried, never even dated as far as I knew.

That kind of grief—the kind that calcifies into a permanent condition—had always seemed like weakness to me.

Attachment made you vulnerable. Love made you stupid.

I'd watched it nearly destroy him after she died, watched him drink too much and trust the wrong people and almost lose everything we'd built.

I'd sworn I wouldn't make the same mistake.

And yet here I was, three days after his heart stopped, pressing my thumb against the edge of a photograph as if I could feel her warmth through the paper.

Here I was, angry at myself for being angry at him—for all the conversations we hadn't finished, all the silences that had grown up between us like weeds.

Three years of distance. Three years of me questioning his decisions, of him retreating into stubborn pride, of both of us too proud to be the first to bend.

Now I'd never have the chance to repair it.

Death. Everything starts with death.

Every empire, every vendetta, every transfer of power. The old order dies and something new grows from the bones. My mother's death when I was fifteen. My father's death three days ago. The deaths still to come, because in this life there are always more deaths to come.

I closed the file. Set it aside. Reached for the next one.

The office door slammed open hard enough to rattle the photograph frames on the wall. Santo stood in the doorway like a storm looking for somewhere to land, and I knew before he spoke that this conversation was going to require every ounce of control I had.

He was still wearing the same clothes he'd had on at the hospital three days ago.

The dark shirt, wrinkled now, untucked. The jeans he'd pulled on when we got the call at two in the morning.

I could smell the whiskey from across the room—good whiskey, from the weight of it, probably something from his own private stash—but his eyes were clear.

He wasn't drunk. Santo could drink half a bottle of Jameson and still put a bullet through a playing card at fifty feet.

What he was, was vibrating. That barely contained energy that made him so good at what he did and so dangerous to be around.

I'd seen it a hundred times before. The way his shoulders squared, the way his hands couldn't stay still, the way his jaw worked like he was chewing through something too tough to swallow.

"We need to talk about the Valentis," he said, and crossed to the desk in three strides.

He planted both hands on the surface, leaning in, and I got the full force of his presence—the size of him, the coiled violence barely held in check.

Santo had two inches on me and maybe thirty pounds of muscle, and he'd never learned to make himself smaller.

I didn't lean back. Didn't react at all. This was a skill I'd learned from watching our father handle exactly these kinds of moments: you let the other person spend their energy while you stayed still. The one who reacted first was the one who lost.

"I've been asking around," Santo continued, when I didn't respond.

"Enzo had dinner with Papa two weeks ago.

Private meeting, no one else present. Just the two of them in that back room at Il Sole, talking for three hours.

And now Papa's dead from a heart attack he shouldn't have had.

" His voice cracked on the last word, just slightly, and I saw it—the grief underneath the rage, the loss he was trying to bury under action.

Il Sole was the de facto headquarters of the Valentinos. Flashy, new, expensive. Everything that Caruso’s wasn’t.

"You think Enzo killed him."

"I think it's a hell of a coincidence." Santo pushed off the desk and started pacing, his usual inability to stay still amplified by whatever was churning inside him.

"There are drugs, Dante. I've been reading about it.

Compounds that trigger cardiac arrest, shit that doesn't show up in standard autopsies.

You inject someone and twelve hours later they drop dead from what looks like natural causes.

The Valentis have a doctor on their payroll—remember?

The one who trained at Johns Hopkins before he lost his license for selling prescriptions out the back door. "