Chapter 13
Dante
Sunlight woke me. Not the alarm, not the phone, not the particular silence that meant something had gone wrong in the night—just sunlight, warm and uncomplicated. It fell through the bedroom curtains in long golden bars that striped the sheets and turned Gemma's hair to dark silk across my chest.
I didn't move. Couldn’t.
She was still asleep. One hand curled beneath her chin, fingers loosely fisted, her breathing soft and even against my ribcage.
My t-shirt had ridden up sometime in the night—the gray cotton bunched at her waist, one bare leg thrown over mine, her foot tucked between my calves like she'd been trying to get closer even in unconsciousness.
I lay there and memorized her.
The sweep of her lashes against her cheeks—darker than I'd expected, longer, casting tiny shadows in the morning light.
The small curve at the corner of her mouth, a smile that existed even in sleep, like her body had finally learned that it was safe to be happy and didn't want to stop.
The freckles across the bridge of her nose. Every square inch of her.
She burrowed closer. A small, unconscious movement, her cheek pressing harder against my chest, her fist tightening around a fold of the sheet. Even asleep, she reached for me. Even in the formless dark of dreams, her body knew where safety was and moved toward it.
Something bloomed in my chest. Something I'd been protecting for so long I'd forgotten it was there—a tenderness so acute it bordered on pain.
I pressed my lips against the crown of her head. Breathed her in. Lavender and vanilla from last night's bath, and beneath it the warm, particular scent that was just Gemma. The scent of my shirt on her skin. The scent of us, combined, no longer separable.
The ledger.
I let the thought surface.
It was all still there. The sword still hung over the family. The debts, the secrets, the slow tightening of a noose I couldn't yet see.
But the weight was different.
Not lighter, exactly. The facts hadn't changed. The threat hadn't diminished. Enzo was still out there, still circling, still accumulating leverage with the unhurried confidence of a man who'd been winning quietly for twenty years.
But I could breathe.
For the first time since I'd opened that ledger—since I'd sat in my father's chair in the back office at Caruso's and understood that the man I'd worshipped had been bleeding for two decades—I could take a full breath without feeling like my ribs were made of iron.
Because I'd told her. It hadn't sent her running. Hadn't turned her gaze from warm to calculating, hadn't triggered the careful retreat I'd been bracing for—the moment when she realized the Caruso name was a liability, not an asset, and started planning her exit.
No. She’d just kissed me.
My father never had this. Vito Caruso had carried his secrets alone for twenty years.
Had sat across from my mother at a thousand dinners and said nothing.
Had watched his empire erode from the inside and told no one—not his wife, not his consigliere, not the sons he was grooming to inherit the mess.
And it killed him.
Maybe not directly. Maybe the heart attack was just a heart attack, just the inevitable failure of an organ that had been working too hard for too long. But I knew what silence did to a body.
I would not be my father.
Gemma stirred. A soft sound—not a word, something smaller, a breath caught between sleeping and waking. Her fingers uncurled beneath her chin. Her lashes fluttered, caught the light, opened.
Brown eyes. Warm as honey, soft with sleep, focusing slowly on my face.
The smile that spread across her features undid me.
Not the composed smile she wore for the world. Not the careful curve she offered at dinners and galas, measured and pleasant and revealing nothing. This was artless. Unguarded. A sunrise happening in real time across her face.
She saw me. And she was glad.
"Morning, daddy." Her voice was rough with sleep. She pressed her face against my chest, hiding the smile against my skin like it was something precious she wasn't ready to share with the room yet.
"Morning, little one."
I kissed her forehead. Her nose. The corner of her mouth where the smile was trying to escape.
She giggled—that sound, God, that sound I'd discovered last night during the bath, the one that belonged to the girl she'd stopped being at twelve.
It hit me the same way it had then: like a fist around my heart, squeezing.
She pushed at my chest with both palms. Weak, laughing, her hair falling across her face in a dark curtain.
"Your stubble is attacking me—"
"My stubble is kissing you. There's a difference."
"There is not a—" She dissolved into laughter as I found the spot below her ear that I'd cataloged as sensitive, pressing my unshaven jaw against it with deliberate intent.
She squirmed. Kicked at the sheets. Her foot connected with my shin and I grunted, and she laughed harder, and somehow we ended up tangled together in a knot of limbs and sheets and warmth, her face in my neck, my arms around her waist, both of us breathing hard from nothing more strenuous than joy.
This. This was what I'd been missing.
Not the sex—though the sex had been extraordinary. Not even the love, though the love was a revelation I was still processing, still turning over in my hands like a stone pulled from deep water.
This.
The laughing. The lightness. The absurd, mundane, beautiful ordinariness of a morning in bed with someone who made the world feel survivable.
I hadn't known I needed it. Hadn't known I was starving for it.
Had spent thirty-four years building walls and strategies and contingency plans, preparing for every threat, anticipating every angle—and never once considered that what I actually needed was a woman who called me daddy and giggled when I tickled her neck.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand.
I ignored it. Pulled her closer. Pressed my mouth against her hair.
It buzzed again.
And again.
The sound was small—a vibration against wood, barely audible over the morning quiet—but it cut through the warmth like a blade.
I felt the shift in my own body before I consciously registered it.
The looseness in my shoulders tightening.
The easy rhythm of my breathing going controlled.
The don sliding back into place over the man like armor he'd never fully learned to take off.
Gemma felt it too. She went still against me, her hand flattening on my chest.
"You should get that, Don Caruso," she said quietly, teasing me gently. “Could be an offer you can’t refuse.”
I grinned and reached for the phone.
It was an unknown number. Three lines of text that rearranged the architecture of my day.
We should meet. Privately. There are matters concerning your father's estate that require discussion. —E.V.
Enzo Valenti. Reaching out directly. Not through intermediaries, not through the carefully choreographed dance of emissaries and neutral parties that had governed mafia diplomacy for a century.
A direct message to my personal phone from a burner number, phrased with the surgical politeness of a man who knew exactly how unsettling each word would land.
Matters concerning your father's estate.
He knew. Knew that we'd found the ledger, traced the payments, uncovered the debt that Vito had buried for twenty years. He'd been waiting for this—waiting for us to discover the scope of our vulnerability before making his move. The patient man.
"Daddy?"
Gemma's voice. Quiet. Careful. I looked up and found her watching me with those eyes that missed nothing—brown and warm and already shifting from sleepy contentment to alert concern, reading the change in my posture the way she read every room she entered.
Cataloging the tension in my jaw, the stillness that had replaced the easy warmth of thirty seconds ago.
"Business," I said.
She nodded. Didn't push. The quiet acceptance of a woman who understood the rhythm of this life. I hated it. Hated that she'd been trained to read dangerous men and accommodate their silences. Hated that the skill was useful now, with me.
I kissed her forehead. "I need to make some calls."
"I'll make coffee," she said. Simple. Steady. An offering of normalcy in a morning that had just gone sideways.
I called Marco first.
He answered on the second ring—already awake, already alert, because Marco slept like a cat: lightly, with one ear open, ready to move. I read him the message. Heard the silence that followed—not empty, but full. The sound of a sharp mind processing.
"Burner phone," he said. "Give me an hour."
It took him forty minutes. By the time I arrived at Caruso's, he was in the back office with his laptop and a double espresso, the number traced through three carriers to a prepaid device purchased with cash at a convenience store in Humboldt Park.
No name. No trail. The kind of careful anonymity that was itself a message: I am choosing to be invisible.
I am choosing to let you know I'm choosing.
"Deliberate," Marco said, confirming what I already knew.
"He could have called from his personal line.
He could have gone through channels. Instead he bought a disposable phone, typed a message that reads like a polite dinner invitation, and signed it with his initials like a calling card.
" He closed the laptop. "He's performing. "
"He's always performing," I said.
Santo arrived fifteen minutes later, still pulling on his jacket, his face carrying the particular thundercloud expression that meant he'd been dragged away from the gym.
He read the message on my phone. His jaw did the thing it always did when violence was being considered—a slow grind, molar against molar, the sound just barely audible.