Sinner Daddy (Chicago Dons #2)

Chapter 1

Santo

Pain. Everything starts with pain.

The first hit sent a jolt of white heat through my left side, but I didn't stop.

Couldn't stop.

Stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant sitting with the fact that in exactly fifty-seven minutes I was going to be in a room with the man who'd taken Dante's woman right out of her own apartment like she was something he could borrow.

I hit the bag again. Left hook, right cross, the chain rattling against the basement ceiling.

The gym was mine—a concrete box under the Oak Brook house with bad lighting and equipment I'd hauled in myself over the years.

No mirrors. I didn't need to watch myself bleed and curse.

The heavy bag was duct-taped where I'd split the leather twice, and the speed bag in the corner had been broken since March.

Nobody came down here. That was the point.

My left side screamed on the next rotation and I breathed through it, the way I'd been breathing through it for nine days.

Nine days since the raid on the Valenti warehouse in Albany Park.

Nine days since a bullet caught me just below the ribs on my left side—in and out, clean, the kind of wound that sounds minor until you try to throw a punch or roll over in bed or do anything that requires having a functioning torso.

The doctor Dante kept on retainer, Dr. Ferraro, had stitched me up in the back office at Caruso's while Rosa pretended not to notice the blood on her kitchen floor.

Fourteen stitches. No hospital. Hospitals meant questions, and questions meant paperwork, and paperwork meant the kind of attention a Caruso couldn't afford the week before a sit-down with every family in Chicago.

I peeled the tape back from my right hand with my teeth and rewrapped it tighter. My knuckles were a mess—scar tissue over scar tissue, white lines crossing brown, a topographic map of every bad decision I'd ever made.

The wound pulsed. I let it.

Pain was information. Pain meant the body was still working, still healing, still doing its job despite the fact that I kept asking it to do stupid things.

I'd had worse. The scar on my right shoulder—the old one, the one from the summer I was ten—still ached when the weather changed.

Family story said I fell off my bike. Family stories said a lot of things.

I drove my fist into the bag hard enough to feel it in my teeth.

Enzo Valenti. The Patient Man. I'd heard people call him that like it was something to admire—this ability to wait, to move slowly, to apply pressure in increments so small you didn't notice the walls closing until you couldn't breathe.

Patience was a nice word for what Enzo did.

What Enzo did was watch for the moment you loved something, and then he put his hands on it.

Gemma Moretti.

No—Gemma Caruso. Dante's girl. Small, quiet, the kind of woman who apologized when you bumped into her. She'd been in Dante's life for what, a few months? And already she was the softest thing about him. Already Enzo had clocked her as a pressure point and acted on it.

He'd taken her from her apartment. Broad daylight, two men, a black car.

Forty-six hours before we got her back, and in those forty-six hours I watched my brother become someone I didn't recognize.

Not the don. Not the strategist. Something raw and desperate and badly stitched together, like me after the raid, except his wound didn't show.

We got her back. I put two of Enzo's men in the ground doing it, and one of them put a bullet in my side first, which was fair. That was the math.

I hit the bag again. The chain groaned.

Dante. Married. Not just that. He was happily married. A rare feat in our world of arranged marriages.

He even smiled. Sometimes.

I was happy for him. I was. Somewhere underneath the fury and the wound and the sleeplessness that had become my baseline, I was genuinely, honestly glad that Dante had found whatever it was that made a man's face do that.

He deserved it. He'd spent thirty-four years being the responsible one, the careful one, the one who carried every secret our father ever buried.

If Gemma Moretti made him stupid with love, then good. Someone should.

But the sit-down.

Fifty-two minutes now. The five families would gather at Marchetti's on Taylor Street, neutral ground since before I was born, and Enzo Valenti would walk in with his silver temples and his steady hands and his dead wife's ring still on his finger, and he would ask for Bridgeport.

Bridgeport. The centre of everything we held.

Our operations, our people, the blocks where Caruso soldiers had raised their kids for three generations.

Enzo wasn't asking for a corridor or a concession.

He was asking for the heart, and he was framing it as fairness, as rebalancing, as what's owed—because he'd spent twenty years collecting a debt our father never told us about, and now he wanted interest.

I knew what Dante would do. Dante would be measured. Dante would be strategic. Dante would find the angle that gave away the least while appearing generous, because that was what a don did—he played the long game, he preserved options, he kept the peace that kept people alive.

What would I do?

I would put Enzo's face through the table at Marchetti's and let God sort out the politics.

Which was why Dante was boss and I was the blade.

I drove one last combination into the bag—left, left, right, the wound screaming, my vision whiting at the edges—and stepped back, chest heaving, sweat running into my eyes. My side throbbed. I'd pulled a stitch. Probably.

Didn't matter. In forty-nine minutes I'd be sitting at Dante's left, where I always sat, close enough to reach a weapon or a throat. I'd keep my mouth shut and my eyes open and I'd watch Enzo Valenti smile his careful smile and play his careful game.

And I'd remember. Every word, every gesture, every lie. I'd file it all away in the place where I kept things that would eventually require answering.

Pain for Dante. Pain for me. Pain for Gemma, who didn't ask for any of this.

Soon enough, Enzo would understand pain too. Not today. Today was politics. But soon.

I unwrapped my hands, flexed my fingers, and went upstairs to shower. The blood on the tape was mine. It wouldn't always be.

Iwas forty minutes early. I was always forty minutes early.

Marchetti's smelled like cigars and marinara.

The private dining room was upstairs, past the main restaurant where a couple of old men were already eating lunch at eleven in the morning like it was their constitutional right.

One of them nodded at me. I didn't know him.

I nodded back anyway, because this was Taylor Street and you respected the rituals when you didn't know whose grandfather you were greeting.

The stairs creaked on the fourth and seventh steps. I remembered from years ago, the first time Vito brought me here. I was sixteen, too young for a sit-down, but our father wanted Dante to observe and Dante wanted me close. That was always the arrangement. Dante watched. I stood ready.

I tried to remember what Marco had been doing. Chatting up some girl, probably.

The private dining room hadn't changed. Long oval table, dark wood, scratched to hell and polished to a shine that couldn't quite hide the damage.

Eight chairs, heavy enough to be weapons in a pinch.

Cream walls, a painting of the Amalfi Coast that was either very good or very bad—I'd never figured out which.

Two windows, both painted shut. A sideboard with glasses and a decanter of something amber that was probably older than me.

Two exits. The main door I'd come through, and the service door to the kitchen.

I crossed the room and tested the kitchen door's handle, the way I tested it every single time.

The lock caught, held for half a second, then gave.

Still broken. It had been broken for three years.

I'd mentioned it to the manager twice. Neutral ground was only neutral if the exits were secure, and this one could be shouldered open by anyone with a purpose and a functioning arm.

I made a note. Then I made my way around the room.

Sight lines from the head chair: clear view of both doors, back to the wall.

That's where the mediator would sit—whatever underboss the families had agreed on to run the table this time.

Sight lines from the east side: main door visible, kitchen door in peripheral vision.

Manageable. The west side was worse—the window threw a glare in the afternoon that could blind you for half a second, and half a second was a lifetime if someone came through a door wrong.

I pulled Dante's chair to the east side, two seats from the head.

Back to the wall. Both doors visible. I set mine to his left, slightly closer to the kitchen entrance, angled so I could stand and move without the table catching my hips.

The wound in my side had its own opinion about sudden movements—a sharp, specific complaint that arrived about half a second after the motion, like a bill delivered late.

My phone buzzed. Dante.

Running 15. Gemma.

That was it. One word for the reason. I knew what Gemma meant in this context.

It meant she'd noticed he hadn't eaten. It meant she'd put something in front of him and stood there with those big brown eyes until he sat down and picked up a fork.

It meant my brother—the most disciplined man I'd ever known, the man who once skipped sleep for four days during a federal investigation without breaking rhythm—had been derailed by a woman who probably made him scrambled eggs and toast.