Chapter 17
Dante
Sal had been missing for four days.
Four days since I'd learned he was the one feeding intelligence to the Castellanos. Four days since I'd put every resource I had into hunting Lorenzo's consigliere through a city that suddenly felt too small to hide a man who knew all my methods.
Because he did know them. Sal had been at my wedding. Had studied my security protocols. Had smiled at Julietta while planning her execution.
The rage that thought triggered was becoming familiar. Constant. A low burn that sharpened my focus to a single point: find him, eliminate him, remove one more threat from Julietta's life.
I stood in my office at three in the morning, studying surveillance feeds that showed nothing useful. Marcos sat across from me, his laptop open, his expression the careful neutrality he adopted when delivering bad news.
"He's gone underground," Marcos said. "Liquidated two accounts yesterday. Small withdrawals—nothing that would trigger alerts, but enough to survive for months."
"He's not running," I said. "He's waiting."
"For what?"
"For me to make a mistake. Or for Lorenzo to give him new orders." I closed the surveillance window. The screens went dark. "Where would he go?"
Marcos pulled up a map, red dots marking Sal's known associates. "He has three safehouses we know about. Family in Buffalo. A mistress in Detroit who doesn't know what he does for a living."
"He won't go to any of those. Too obvious." I studied the map, thinking like a man who'd spent fifteen years as Lorenzo's right hand. "He'd go somewhere he thinks I don't know about. Somewhere off the books."
"We've been through his financials. His communications. His—"
"What about before Lorenzo?" I interrupted. "Before he became consigliere. Where did Sal come from?"
Marcos's fingers flew across the keyboard. "Started as muscle for the Vitale crew in Gary, Indiana. Small-time enforcement. Worked his way up."
"Gary." I felt something click into place. "Pull property records. Everything within fifty miles. Look for purchases under shell companies, family names, anything connected to the Vitale organization."
It took Marcos twenty minutes.
"There," he said, turning the laptop toward me. "Industrial property in Hammond, Indiana. Purchased in 2009 under Vitale Holdings. Officially a storage facility. No recent activity on record."
"That's where he is."
Marcos looked skeptical. "It's thin. Could be coincidence."
"It's not." I was already reaching for my phone, texting Vince. "Sal wouldn't go to family. Wouldn't go to his mistress. He'd go somewhere that ties to his past, before Lorenzo, before he became someone important enough to track. Somewhere he thinks I've never heard of."
My phone buzzed. Vince: Ready when you are.
"Assemble a team," I told Marcos. "Small. Six men. We leave in an hour."
"You're going yourself?"
"I'm going myself."
Marcos studied me for a long moment. "This is personal."
"He tried to murder my wife. Yes, it's fucking personal."
Hammond, Indiana was a wasteland of rust and abandonment. The kind of place where industrial dreams had died decades ago and left their corpses to rot in the Midwest cold.
The storage facility sat at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by chain-link fence and nothing else for miles. No lights. No movement. Just a low concrete building that looked like it hadn't been used in years.
Perfect cover.
We approached on foot, weapons drawn, moving through the predawn darkness with the practiced silence of men who'd done this a hundred times. Vince took point. I stayed center, my focus narrowed to the building ahead.
The fence had been cut recently—fresh metal glinting where bolt cutters had sheared through. Someone had been here. Someone was still here.
We cleared the exterior in minutes. Two entrances—front and back. No windows. Reinforced doors that wouldn't open without force.
I gestured. Vince and two men took the back. I took the front with three others.
On my signal, we breached.
The interior was exactly what I'd expected—open warehouse space, empty except for scattered debris and a single light source coming from a makeshift office in the back corner. Someone was home.
We moved through the space like water, surrounding the office before whoever was inside could react.
I kicked the door open.
Sal was sitting at a folding table, a pistol within reach, his face resigned. He'd known we were coming. Had probably heard us breach. But he hadn't run.
Because there was nowhere left to run.
"Dante." His voice was steady. Tired. "Took you long enough."
I stepped inside, my weapon trained on his chest. "Hands on the table."
He complied slowly, deliberately. The gun stayed where it was. "You here to talk or just execute me?"
"That depends on what you have to say."
Sal leaned back in his chair, and for a moment he looked every one of his fifty-three years. "Lorenzo paid me two million to feed information to the Castellanos. Wedding details. Security rotations. Everything they'd need to execute a clean hit on Julietta."
"Why?"
"Because she's a threat." Sal's expression was grim. "Not to you. To him. Lorenzo never intended that marriage to Miguel to happen. Never intended her to survive it. She was always meant to be collateral—a spark to start a war between the Suarez family and whoever he could frame for her death."
"I know that part. What I don't know is why you helped him."
"Two million reasons." Sal's smile was bitter. "And because I've served Lorenzo for fifteen years. You don't say no to a man like that and live to regret it."
"You could have come to me."
"And say what? That my boss ordered me to help murder his own daughter?" Sal shook his head. "You'd have killed me for knowing. At least this way, I got paid."
I felt the cold clarity that always came before violence. "Who else knows?"
"About the hit? Just me and Lorenzo. About Elena—" He stopped.
I went very still. "What about Elena?"
Sal's expression shifted. Realization. He'd said too much. "Nothing. Forget I—"
I moved fast, closing the distance, pressing my gun to his temple. "What about Elena Marchetti?"
"Jesus, Dante—"
"Answer the fucking question."
"She was—" He swallowed hard. "She was Lorenzo's wife. Julietta's mother. He had her killed fifteen years ago. Staged it as heart failure. I wasn't involved, but I knew about it. Everyone in Lorenzo's inner circle knew."
The words hung in the air like smoke.
"Why?" My voice was barely above a whisper.
"She wanted out. Wanted to take Julietta and disappear. Lorenzo couldn't allow that—couldn't let anyone think he was weak enough to lose control of his own family." Sal's eyes met mine. "So he eliminated the problem. Just like he's been trying to eliminate Julietta."
"Does anyone else know this?"
"About Elena? The old guard. The ones who were there fifteen years ago. But most of them are dead now. It's ancient history."
Not to Julietta. Not to the woman who'd never known her mother. Not to my wife, who I'd been protecting from this truth because I thought she wasn't ready to carry it.
I'd been wrong.
"Please," Sal said quietly. "I have a daughter. She's nineteen. She doesn't know what I do. Doesn't know any of this. If you kill me, can you at least—"
"No."
I pulled the trigger.
The sound was deafening in the small space. Sal's body slumped forward, blood spreading across the cheap folding table, his eyes still open, still surprised that I'd actually done it.
One less threat to Julietta.
One less man who knew the truth about Elena.
One step closer to keeping her safe.
Vince appeared in the doorway. "Clean?"
"Clean." I stepped over Sal's body. "Burn it. Make sure there's nothing left to find."
By the time I returned to the compound, dawn was breaking over Chicago. The city looked almost peaceful from this height—all glass and steel and the promise of another day where people went about their lives not knowing what monsters moved beneath the surface.
Julietta was still asleep when I checked our bedroom. I stood in the doorway, watching her breathe, her auburn hair spread across the pillow like fire.
I should tell her about Elena.
The thought had been circling since Sal's confession. She deserved to know. Deserved to understand the full scope of Lorenzo's cruelty. Deserved to make her own choices about what to do with that information.
But every time I thought about saying the words—Your father murdered your mother—I saw the way it would break her. The way it would shatter the fragile trust we'd built. The way she'd look at me and realize I'd known from the beginning and said nothing.
I'd been protecting her. That's what I told myself. Protecting her from a truth that would destroy her.
But standing there, watching her sleep, I knew the real reason I hadn't told her.
Because telling her would mean losing her.
She'd see me as complicit. As another man who'd decided what she could handle, what she deserved to know, what truth she was strong enough to carry. She'd see me as no different from Lorenzo—another powerful man treating her like property instead of a person.
And she'd be right.
I turned away from the bedroom and walked to my office. The files on Elena Marchetti were still where I'd left them—locked in my safe, hidden from everyone. Evidence of a murder that could bring down Lorenzo's entire organization if it ever went public.
Evidence that proved I'd known all along and chosen to keep it from her.
I should destroy them. Burn everything and let the past stay buried.
But I couldn't.
Because somewhere in the last few months, I'd stopped being able to lie to myself about what Julietta deserved. She deserved the truth. All of it. Even the parts that would hurt.
I just needed the right moment. The right words. The right way to tell her that I'd been protecting her by lying to her, and hope she'd understand that every choice I'd made had been driven by love.
Even the wrong ones.
Especially the wrong ones.
I closed the safe and locked it.
Tomorrow. I'd tell her tomorrow.
Tonight, I'd let her sleep in peace, not knowing that the man she'd married had been carrying her mother's murder like a secret weight, waiting for the perfect moment that would never come.
Because there was no perfect moment for destroying someone's world.
There was only the truth.
And the courage to speak it.
I just needed one more day to find both.