Chapter 11
Dante
The back room at Caruso's smelled like Sunday even on a Wednesday.
Garlic and slow-simmered tomato, red wine soaked into wood grain, the ghost of fifty years' worth of conversations held in voices too low for the walls to carry.
I pushed through the unmarked door and found exactly what I expected: Santo hunched over a plate of gnocchi like he was trying to stare it into submission, and Marco nursing an espresso with the expression of a man sitting on a secret he couldn't wait to detonate.
"You're late," Santo said without looking up. A gnocchi disappeared. He chewed with the focus of a man who treated eating the way he treated everything else—aggressively.
"I'm on time. You're early."
"No, no, no, I was hungry."
I slid into the booth across from them, the leather worn smooth by decades of Caruso asses. Sal appeared at my elbow before I'd fully settled—sixty-three years old and still moving like a man half his age, white towel draped over one shoulder, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose.
"The usual, Don Caruso?"
"The usual, Sal."
He vanished. The usual was the veal. It was always the veal. My father had ordered the veal. His father before him. Some traditions weren't worth disrupting.
My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket.
I should have ignored it. Should have kept my attention where it belonged—on my brothers, on the business we needed to discuss, on the weight of the ledger that had been sitting in my chest like a stone for weeks.
Instead, my hand was in my pocket before the second buzz faded, pulling out the phone with the kind of urgency usually reserved for threats.
Not a threat.
A photo. Gemma had found a gallery catalog somewhere—probably the bookshop on Michigan Avenue she'd been haunting since I'd told her to stop apologizing for spending money—and she'd photographed a page.
Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew.
A group of men around a table, caught in a shaft of light so sharp it could cut, half their faces swallowed by shadow.
Christ's hand extended from the dark like an accusation.
Or an invitation. Depending on how you looked at it.
Beneath the photo, a message: Thought of you. Brooding men at a table doing shady business in gorgeous lighting. Sound familiar?
Then a string of hearts. Red ones. Six of them, because Gemma had decided that six was her number. I hadn't asked why because some things were better left as mysteries.
I smiled.
Not the controlled expression I wore in meetings. Not the measured acknowledgment I offered associates and allies. A real, full, stupid smile that I felt in my chest and couldn't have stopped if I'd tried.
I looked up.
Both of them were staring at me.
Santo had paused mid-chew, a gnocchi impaled on his fork like a casualty. Marco's espresso cup hovered near his lips, his dark eyes bright with the particular gleam that preceded the worst of his commentary.
The silence stretched for exactly two seconds.
"Madonna," Santo muttered. He shook his head, slow and mournful, like a man witnessing a natural disaster. "He’s smiling. The big,bad, mafioso! He's got it bad."
"Our brother." Marco set down his espresso with theatrical precision.
"The fearsome Don Caruso. Terror of the South Side.
The man who made Richie Gambetti cry at his own son's christening.
" His grin was wicked—the kind of grin that had been launching ships and ruining reputations since he was old enough to weaponize it.
"Grinning at his phone like a teenager."
I pocketed the phone. Composed my face. Straightened my cuffs with the deliberate care of a man who was absolutely not blushing, because Dante Caruso did not blush.
"We're not discussing my wife."
"We're absolutely discussing your wife." Santo pointed his fork at me.
A piece of gnocchi clung to the tine like it had chosen sides.
"You've been useless for weeks. Walking around with that dopey look on your face, distracted in meetings, actually happy for once in your miserable life.
" He jabbed the fork in my direction for emphasis. "It's disgusting. I love it."
"I'm not distracted in meetings."
"You told Frankie Rossini his proposal sounded 'lovely.'" Marco's voice dripped with barely suppressed delight. "Lovely. You said lovely. In a sit-down. About a protection restructure."
The memory surfaced. I'd been thinking about the way Gemma had laughed that morning—really laughed, head thrown back, the sound loose and bright and nothing like the careful performance she'd maintained for weeks.
She'd been reading to me from an art criticism essay that was so pretentious it circled back around to comedy, and her impression of the author had been devastating.
I may have been slightly unfocused in the Rossini meeting.
"Frankie didn't notice."
"Frankie didn't notice because Frankie's an idiot—got gnocchi-for-brains," Santo said. "The rest of us noticed."
Marco leaned forward, elbows on the table, chin resting on his laced fingers. The pose of a man about to deliver a killing blow with perfect form.
"Tell me, Dante—does she know you used to practice kissing on your pillow? Because I feel like she should know."
Santo choked on his wine.
"I was twelve."
"You were fourteen. I was seven. I remember because you made me swear not to tell, and I've been waiting twenty years for the right moment." Marco spread his hands, magnanimous. "This is the moment."
"I will have you killed."
"You won't. I'm the pretty one. The family needs me."
Santo was coughing into his napkin, his shoulders shaking. The sound that escaped him might have been a laugh. It was hard to tell—Santo's laughter and his anger came from the same volcanic place, and both were equally rare.
"Enough." I said it with the authority of a man who ran a criminal empire, and it landed with all the force of a wet napkin. "My personal life is not entertainment."
"Your personal life is the only fucking entertainment we've got," Marco countered. "Santo stabs people and I run a nightclub. You're the one providing the romantic subplot." He sipped his espresso. "We're invested."
I looked between them. My brothers. The men I'd die for, kill for, endure this merciless interrogation for. Santo with his scarred knuckles and his hidden tenderness. Marco with his sharp smile and his sharper mind and the long game he was always playing that none of us fully understood.
They were happy for me. That was the truth beneath the teasing—a truth they'd smother before admitting out loud. Santo, who didn't trust anyone, was glad I'd found someone to trust. Marco, who performed ease for the world, was genuinely pleased that I'd stopped performing entirely.
Something loosened in my chest. A knot I hadn't known was there.
"She's—" I started, then stopped. What was the word? There wasn't one. Not in English, not in Italian, not in any language I spoke. "She's more than I expected."
The table went quiet.
Not awkward quiet. The other kind. The kind that happened when something real broke through the noise, and the people around you were decent enough to let it breathe.
Santo looked at his plate. Marco looked at me. Neither of them said a word.
Then Santo grunted, stabbed another gnocchi, and muttered, "About time, fratello."
And that was enough.
“Now,” Marco said. “Business.” His smile died like someone had flipped a switch.
The folder hit the tablecloth with a sound that was too heavy for paper—weighted with something none of us wanted to carry but all of us would.
The leather was worn soft at the edges. Handled too many times, opened and closed and opened again, the kind of compulsive review that happened when the information inside refused to make sense no matter how many times you read it.
Marco's annotations covered nearly every page—his handwriting neat and precise where our father's had been cramped and secretive, as if even the pen knew to be careful.
"I've traced the payments back to their source.
" Marco's voice had shifted into something I rarely heard from him.
Harder. Stripped of the easy warmth that made people trust him, that made them forget he was a Caruso too.
"It started in October 2003. Three months after the war ended, right after the peace was brokered. Papa was paying Massimo Valenti."
He opened the folder. Spread the documents across the white tablecloth between our plates, between the bread basket and the wine glasses, turning our Wednesday lunch into a crime scene.
"Not tribute," he continued. "Not business. Reparations."
The word sat between us like a live grenade.
"Transaction records from six separate accounts.
" Marco's finger traced the trail across printed bank statements, his annotations mapping the path the money had taken—through shell companies, through the restaurant's operating accounts, through a construction firm that existed on paper and nowhere else.
"Coded entries in the main ledger match withdrawals from these accounts to the penny.
The first payment was fifty thousand. By 2010, they'd tripled.
By 2018, Papa was moving two hundred thousand a year. "
Santo hadn't touched his gnocchi since the folder appeared. His hands were flat on the table, fingers spread, the scarred knuckles white against the linen. I watched the muscle in his jaw work—that steady tick of fury he'd inherited from our father, or maybe from the life itself.