Chapter 1 #3
"Three days," he said. "But after that, I'm done waiting."
He turned to leave, but before he had a chance, a small hurricane entered the room. A small hurricane wearing an expensive Armani dress.
Donatella.
"Minchia, I could hear you three idiots arguing from the parking lot," she said. She'd been crying—her eyes were red and swollen, mascara smudged into dark shadows—but her voice was steady and sharp enough to cut glass. and dropped into our father's leather chair with a deliberate lack of ceremony.
“Good to see you too, sis.” Santo said with a wry grin. We all loved Dona, but Santo really loved her.
The chair swallowed her small frame. Donatella was twenty-two, the youngest of us, the only girl.
Technically she held the least power in our world—the old structures didn't have room for women in positions of authority, no matter how smart or capable they were.
But she'd never acted like that mattered.
She'd inherited our mother's looks and our father's stubbornness, and somewhere along the way she'd figured out how to wield both like weapons.
"Papa's body is at Russo's Funeral Home being prepared for tomorrow," she said, and her voice cracked just slightly on the word body.
"They're dressing him in that suit he hated, the charcoal one, because Aunt Teresa insisted it was more dignified than the navy blue.
They're putting makeup on his face so he doesn't look dead even though he is dead. And you're in here planning a war?"
"We weren't—" Santo started.
"Don't." She held up a hand, and he stopped.
That was the power Donatella had always wielded over us: the ability to make us feel ten years old again, caught doing something we knew we shouldn't.
"I don't want to hear about the Valentis.
I don't want to hear about strategy or evidence or who's responsible. Not tonight."
"Then what do you want?" Marco asked, his voice gentler than I'd heard it all evening.
"I want my brothers to act like brothers.
" Donatella's eyes were bright with unshed tears, but she didn't let them fall.
"The funeral is tomorrow. The whole city is going to be there, watching us like we're animals in a cage.
Watching to see if we fall apart. Watching to see if we're weak.
" She looked at each of us in turn—Santo, Marco, me.
"We can kill each other's enemies after we bury him. But right now, tonight, I need—"
Her voice broke. She pressed her hands to her face, and for a moment the fierce facade crumbled and she was just our little sister, twenty-two years old and grieving a father who'd been the center of her world.
I noticed things.
That was the curse of being the oldest, the one who'd been watching and assessing and managing for so long it had become reflex.
I noticed that her skin was too pale under the fluorescent lights.
I noticed the ragged edges of her nails where she'd been biting them—a habit she'd broken years ago, or thought she had.
I noticed the way her collarbones stood out too sharply above the neckline of her black dress.
She hadn't been eating.
Without thinking, without announcing what I was doing, I walked past her to the small kitchen adjacent to the office.
The staff had left food before closing—Rosa's leftovers, neatly packaged and labeled, because Rosa believed grief was no excuse for starvation.
I found a container of pasta, plated it, added a fork, and carried it back to the desk.
I set it in front of my sister.
"Eat."
The word came out harder than I'd intended—not a request, not a suggestion. An order. The way I'd give orders to soldiers, or to associates who needed reminding of who was in charge.
Donatella looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes. For a moment I thought she might argue, might tell me to go to hell, might throw the plate at my head. That would have been very Donatella.
Instead she rolled her eyes and picked up the fork.
"Bossy," she muttered, but she took a bite.
Something unknotted in my chest. Not much—the weight of the last three days was still there, would be there for a long time—but something. She was eating. She was here. We were all here, together, in this room that still smelled like our father.
Santo sat down heavily on the small couch by the window.
Marco pushed off from the door frame and claimed the armchair in the corner, the one Papa had always joked was reserved for visitors he didn't trust. The three of us arranged ourselves around our sister like a protective constellation, and for a moment no one spoke.
The silence felt different now. Less oppressive. More like the silence of a family keeping vigil, each of us lost in our own thoughts but anchored by proximity.
"He would hate this," Donatella said between bites of pasta. "All of us sitting around being sad. You know what he'd say."
"'Grief is for when the work is done,'" Marco quoted, and even Santo's mouth twitched in something approaching a smile.
"'Emotions are for the weak and the Irish,'" I added, and Donatella laughed—a small, wet sound that was half sob.
"He was such a bastard," she said. "I loved him so much."
"We all did," Santo said quietly. It was the closest he'd come to admitting his grief wasn't just rage in disguise.
I watched my siblings—my sister eating mechanically, my brothers slumped in exhaustion—and felt the truth of what Donatella had said settle into my bones.
Tomorrow we would perform strength for the city.
Tomorrow we would stand in that church and shake hands and smile and pretend the Caruso family was unshaken.
But tonight, in this room, we could just be what we were. A family with a hole in the middle of it, trying to figure out how to keep standing.
Donatella finished the pasta and set down the fork.
"Thank you," she said, looking at me. Just those two words, but I heard everything underneath them.
"Get some sleep," I told her. "All of you. It's going to be a long day tomorrow."
She nodded and stood, gathering herself with visible effort. Marco rose to walk her out. Santo lingered a moment longer, meeting my eyes across the room.
Whatever had passed between us earlier—the argument, the tension—had been set aside. Not forgotten, but shelved. We were brothers first. The rest could wait.
After my siblings left—Santo to walk off his rage, Marco to finalize arrangements with the funeral home, Donatella to get the sleep I'd insisted on—I returned to my father's papers. The silence in the office felt less oppressive now, more like a companion than an enemy.
I was tired, but I wanted to go through the files so I could understand what I'd inherited.
All of it.
The legitimate businesses—the restaurant, the construction company, the laundry services that cleaned money as efficiently as they cleaned linens.
The less legitimate operations—the gambling, the protection agreements, the quiet arrangements with city officials who looked the other way.
The alliances and debts and favors owed, stretching back decades.
Most of it was what I expected. Papa had been grooming me for this since I was eighteen, walking me through the family's interests piece by piece, testing my memory, my judgment, my ability to see connections other people missed.
I knew about the real estate holdings on the South Side.
I knew about the arrangement with the Moretti family, the marriage that would bind our organizations together.
I knew about the cold war with the Valentis, the careful balance of power that had held for twenty years.
But there's a difference between being shown the engine and being handed the keys. A difference between understanding how something works and being the one responsible for keeping it running.
I pulled open the bottom drawer of my father's desk, looking for the files on the Moretti alliance. What I found instead made me stop.
A false bottom. Poorly concealed—just a thin panel of wood that didn't quite match the rest of the drawer, a slight gap where the seams didn't align. The kind of amateur hiding spot you'd expect from someone who never thought anyone else would look.
My father, who had taught me to trust no one, who had insisted on redundant security for every sensitive document, had hidden something in a desk drawer like a teenager hiding a diary from his parents.
I pried up the panel. Underneath was a single leather-bound ledger, smaller than the others, its pages yellowed with age.
The entries were coded. Numbers and initials, dates and amounts, none of it immediately readable.
But the code wasn't sophisticated—a simple substitution cipher, the kind you'd learn from a spy novel.
Vito had been a brilliant strategist in many ways, but technology and cryptography had never been his strengths.
I cracked it in twenty minutes.
And then I sat staring at what I'd found, trying to make sense of something that didn't make sense at all.
Regular payments. Substantial ones—fifty thousand dollars a month, transferred to an account marked only with the initials "MV." The first entry was dated October 15, 2003. The last entry was dated six weeks ago.
October 2003. Right after the Caruso-Valenti war ended. Right after the peace agreement that Vito had brokered, the one that had supposedly ended hostilities and established the territorial boundaries that still held today.
Twenty years. More than twenty years of monthly payments, adding up to—I did the math quickly—over twelve million dollars. Paid to someone, or something, identified only as MV.
The last entry was circled in my father's handwriting. Next to it, a note: "Final payment. It's done."
Final payment. Six weeks later, he was dead.
I leaned back in his chair and pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to think.
Who was MV? A person? An organization? The initials could be anything.
Marco Valenti—but there was no Marco Valenti in Enzo's organization, not that I knew of.
Massimo Valenti had been Enzo's father, but he'd died in 2015.
Moretti Vincenzo was Gemma's grandfather, but he'd been dead even longer.
What had my father been paying for? Protection? Silence? Some arrangement from the 2003 war that had never been made public?
And why had he stopped?
I thought about the meeting Santo had mentioned—Vito and Enzo, alone in the back room at Il Sole, three hours of private conversation. What had they discussed? Had Vito told Enzo the payments were ending? Had Enzo disagreed with that decision?
"Final payment. It's done."
What if the payments had been keeping my father alive—and stopping them had been a death sentence?
I closed the ledger and sat with the weight of what I'd found. My father had been hiding something. Something big enough to fund for twenty years, secret enough to conceal even from his sons. Something that connected to the Valentis, or the Morettis, or both.
And now he was dead, and I was the only one who knew.
I thought about my mother, then. Maria Caruso, smiling in that photograph on the desk.
Dead when I was fifteen from a cancer that had come on fast and taken her faster.
I remembered how my father had grieved—the drinking, the bad decisions, the way he'd nearly lost everything because he couldn't think straight through the pain.
That was what love did. That was what attachment cost. You gave someone a piece of yourself, and when they were gone, that piece went with them. It made you weak. It made you stupid. It made you vulnerable in ways your enemies could exploit.
I had sworn, watching my father fall apart, that I would never let myself be that vulnerable. I would never love something so much that losing it could destroy me. The family, yes—I would die for my siblings, kill for them without hesitation. But that was different. That was duty. That was blood.
That’s why my marriage would be different.
My bride was Gemma Moretti, and our marriage would cement an alliance—it would be a business arrangement.
Nothing more.
I would be a good husband in the ways that mattered: protective, providing, present. But I wouldn't give her the part of myself that could be used against me. I couldn't afford to.
Whatever secret my father had been keeping, whatever had gotten him killed, I would uncover it. I would find the truth, and I would deal with whoever was responsible.
But I would do it with my head, not my heart. Calculation, not emotion. Strategy, not grief.
That was how you survived in this life.
That was how you stayed alive long enough to bury your enemies instead of having them bury you.
I tucked the hidden ledger into my jacket and left the office, switching off the lights as I went.
Tomorrow was the funeral. Tomorrow the whole city would watch the Caruso brothers perform their grief. Tomorrow I would stand over my father's grave and say goodbye to a man I thought I knew, but clearly didn't.
And when I was done, I’d switch my emotions off and act like the monster I was.