Chapter 3 #3
I wanted to break something with my hands.
Instead, I stayed where I was. Watched Enzo's attention drift away from Gemma as Tomasso reclaimed his focus with some comment about business. Watched the color slowly return to her face. Watched her take a breath, then another, the way someone does when they're counting down from terror.
She didn't know I was watching. Didn't know anyone had seen.
But I had. And I wouldn't forget.
Enzo Valenti was looking at my future wife like she belonged to him.
I needed to know why.
Eventually, Enzo made his way to me. The crowd parted for him without being asked.
I watched him approach. Kept my face neutral, my body relaxed, my hands loose at my sides. The don does not fidget. The don does not betray nerves. My father had drilled that into me since before I was old enough to understand what it meant.
"Dante." Enzo stopped a precisely calibrated distance from me—close enough to seem intimate, far enough to avoid threat. His handshake was firm, his eye contact steady, his smile carrying exactly the right weight of sympathy. "My deepest condolences. Your father was a great man."
The words were perfect. So was the delivery. If I hadn't seen the way he'd looked at Gemma thirty seconds ago, I might have believed he meant them.
"Thank you for coming, Enzo." I matched his grip, his tone, his performance. Two predators circling each other in formal dress. "I know my father valued your family's respect."
The lie tasted like copper on my tongue.
I thought about the ledger locked in my desk at home.
Those monthly payments stretching back twenty years.
MV. The initials that might stand for Massimo Valenti—Enzo's father, dead since 2015, but alive and well when the payments started.
What had my father been buying from the Valentis for two decades? What had made him stop?
Final payment. It's done.
Six weeks later, heart attack.
I couldn't prove anything. Not yet. But standing here, shaking this man's hand, feeling the cold calculation behind his sympathetic mask—I knew. The way you know a storm is coming before the first drop falls. The way you know someone is lying even when every word they say is technically true.
Enzo Valenti had something to do with my father's death.
I just needed to figure out what.
"Chicago won't be the same without him," Enzo continued, releasing my hand. His pale eyes studied my face with the detached interest of a scientist examining a specimen. "I hope the transition has been smooth. These things can be . . . complicated."
"The family is united." I let the implication land: don't test us. "We appreciate everyone's support during this difficult time."
"Of course." His smile didn't waver. "Though I understand congratulations are in order as well. The Moretti girl. I forget her name."
His gaze drifted across the room. I didn't need to follow it to know he was looking at Gemma.
"The alliance will be beneficial for everyone," I said. Bland. Careful. Giving him nothing.
"Indeed." Enzo's voice dropped into something more intimate, more conspiratorial. Like we were old friends sharing secrets. "I know the family quite well, you know. Tomasso and I go back decades. Business, social events, the usual entanglements. I've watched the children grow."
The children. He meant her. The way he said it made my jaw tighten.
"And Gemma—" He paused, savoring something I couldn't see. "I've watched her grow up. Such a sweet girl. So quiet. So..." Another pause, deliberate as a knife stroke. "Eager to please."
My skin crawled.
There it was. The thing he was dangling, the bait he wanted me to take. He was telling me something—about him, about her, about whatever history existed between them. The kind of history that made a woman go white at the sight of him across a crowded room.
I thought about the way she'd refused to meet his eyes. The tremor in her hands. The careful blankness she'd pulled over her face like armor.
Eager to please.
The words were innocuous on the surface. Complimentary, even. But the way he said them—the satisfaction beneath the syllables, the possessive curl of his mouth—told a different story.
He was claiming something. Reminding me that he'd been there first, seen her first, had her in some way I didn't yet understand.
I wanted to ask what he meant. Wanted to grab him by his expensive lapels and shake the truth out of him. Wanted to do violence that this room full of witnesses would never let me forget.
Instead, I smiled.
"She seems like a lovely young woman," I said. "My father spoke highly of the Moretti family's honor."
It was a nothing response. A door closed politely in his face.
I watched Enzo's expression flicker—the briefest tightening around his eyes, the smallest compression of his lips. He'd expected me to bite. To demand clarification, to show curiosity or jealousy or whatever emotion he was trying to provoke.
I gave him nothing.
"Honor." He repeated the word like he was tasting it. "Yes. The Morettis do value their honor. Though some things . . ." He let the sentence trail off, unfinished. A hook left dangling in the water.
I didn't take it.
"Thank you again for coming." I kept my voice warm, my posture open, my face arranged in the expression of a gracious host. "I'm sure we'll have time to speak more in the coming weeks. The families have much to discuss."
"Indeed we do." Enzo's mask slid back into place, smooth as oil. "I look forward to it, Dante. I think you'll find that there's much about your father's business you don't yet know."
The threat was there, buried under layers of civility, but I heard it clearly. He was telling me he had leverage. Information. Ammunition.
He was also telling me he wasn't afraid of the new don.
That was a mistake.
"Take care, Enzo." I held his gaze for one beat longer than necessary. Let him see nothing in my eyes—no fear, no anger, no hint of the fury coiling in my chest. "My father taught me to value all my relationships. Some more than others."
His smile flickered. Just for a moment.
The Morettis approached in formation. Tomasso leading, his wife a half-step behind, and Gemma bringing up the rear like she was trying to make herself invisible. It didn't work. I could have found her in a crowd of thousands.
Tomasso reached me first. His handshake was a test—grip firm, eye contact direct, the measuring stare of a man assessing whether the son was worth what the father had promised.
"Don Caruso." He used the title deliberately. Acknowledging the transfer of power. "Our families share your grief. Vito was a man of vision. We were honored to call him an ally."
"The honor was mutual." I returned his grip, matched his tone. "The Moretti name has always meant something. I look forward to strengthening our families' bond."
A nod. A released hand. The transaction complete.
His wife murmured something appropriate that I barely registered because Gemma was stepping forward and suddenly I couldn't breathe.
She was close. Close enough that I could smell her perfume—something soft, barely there, like night-blooming jasmine after rain.
Close enough that I could see the individual strands of dark hair that had escaped her careful updo, wisping against her temples.
Close enough that I could count the freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose.
Five. There were five.
"Don Caruso." Her voice was low, melodic, controlled with the kind of precision that came from years of practice.
She extended her hand, palm down, the formal gesture of a mafia daughter greeting a don.
"I'm so sorry for your loss. I know words are inadequate, but please know that my family's thoughts are with yours. "
I took her hand.
Her fingers were cool in my grip. Delicate bones, soft skin, short nails unpainted. The small garnet ring pressed against my palm. I held her hand for exactly the appropriate length of time.
Except I didn't let go.
I was staring. I knew I was staring. She met my eyes for a measured beat—the correct duration for formal condolences—then dropped her gaze. Modest. Proper. Everything a well-bred mafia bride should be.
But in that moment of eye contact, I'd seen something.
Fear. Exhaustion. A desperate, guarded hope she was trying to crush before it could disappoint her.
My throat closed around words that wouldn't come.
Up close, she was even more devastating than she'd been across the room.
The tiny freckle beside her left eye. The way her lower lip was slightly fuller than the upper, the faintest unevenness that made her mouth human instead of perfect.
The almost imperceptible tremor at the corner of her jaw, betraying the effort her composure required.
She was holding herself together. Barely. The cracks were there if you knew how to look—the shadows under her eyes that makeup couldn't quite hide, the tension in her shoulders, the way her breathing was just slightly too controlled.
She'd been doing this for a long time. Holding it together. Pretending everything was fine. Being exactly what everyone expected while the real her stayed locked away somewhere safe, somewhere no one could reach.
I knew because I did the same thing every day.
But I had Santo to fight with and Marco to confide in and Donatella to remind me I was human. I had family, flawed and complicated but there, always there, ready to catch me if I fell.
Who did she have?
The thought settled into my bones like something that had always been there, just waiting to be noticed.
This woman needs to be taken care of.
She's a little.
The thought surfaced from somewhere deep, a part of my brain I usually kept locked away. The part that noticed things I wasn't supposed to notice. The part that recognized needs that had no acceptable name.
It should have been absurd. I barely knew her. We'd exchanged exactly one sentence.
But I felt it like a certainty, like gravity, like something that had been true before I ever walked into this room.
Fuck.
Talk, Dante, talk!
She needed a Daddy.
Christ. I was losing my mind.
"Thank you." The words came out rougher than intended, scraped from a throat that had forgotten how to work. "I appreciate you coming."
It was inadequate. Barely polite. The kind of response you gave a stranger you couldn't be bothered to acknowledge properly.
I watched confusion flicker across her face.
A slight furrow between her brows, there and gone.
She probably thought I was a cold bastard who couldn't be bothered with pleasantries.
Or worse—she thought the rumors were true, that the new Caruso don was as ruthless as they said, that she was walking into a prison instead of a marriage.
The mask slid back into place. Smooth and perfect, revealing nothing.
"Of course," she said. Formal. Distant. Matching my tone exactly. "If there's anything our family can do during this difficult time, please don't hesitate to ask."
She withdrew her hand from mine.
I hadn't realized I was still holding it.
The Morettis moved away, back into the crowd, and I stood in the center of my father's funeral reception with my heart hammering against my ribs and a woman's perfume lingering in my lungs.
She had no idea what she'd just done to me.
Business. It was all just business.