2. Gio
Gio
"Drop the fucking gun, stronzo," Marco says, his voice entirely too light for a man pointing a Beretta at another man's forehead. "I have a date at midnight, and this jacket is dry-clean only."
We are standing in a damp, rusted shipyard warehouse on the outskirts of Palermo.
Rain drums a relentless, metallic beat on the roof above us.
Six of my uncle Matteo’s men are lined up against a stack of rotting wooden pallets, their hands raised, but their eyes are twitching toward the dark corners of the room.
They think they have a backup squad coming.
They don't. Dante took care of their perimeter guards ten minutes ago without making a single sound.
"He's not dropping it, Marco," Dante says. He is leaning against a steel pillar in the shadows, his hands tucked into his black wool coat. He looks bored, but his weight is shifted onto the balls of his feet. That’s how he is.
The predator. If anyone so much as breathes wrong, Dante will have a knife in their throat before they can blink.
"You're a long way from your cage, boy," the lead soldier, a scarred veteran named Leone who used to serve my father, spits at me. He ignores the gun in Marco's hand, keeping his eyes locked on mine. "Matteo is the regent. He holds the seat. You're just a dog running around Palermo playing don."
I don't move. I’m holding my SIG Sauer at my side, my finger resting flat against the guard, not the trigger. Never show them you’re eager. I count their heartbeats by the steady, shallow puffs of their breath in the freezing air. Six of them. Four of us. The math is easy.
"Eight years, Leone," I say, my voice low, carrying easily over the sound of the rain.
"I’ve been stepping into the fire since I was seventeen, dragging my father's body out of the docks.
His will said I take the seat the moment I turned twenty-two.
I am twenty-five now. That means my uncle has been overstaying his welcome for three long years. "
"The regent decided you weren't ready," Leone sneers. "A boy can't lead the syndicate in a war."
"The war started because my uncle refused to step down when his regency expired," I say, taking a slow step forward, my boots clicking against the wet concrete. "And you’re standing on my docks, selling my product, telling me about what my uncle decided. Cazzo, it’s almost funny."
"Gio," Enzo’s gravelly voice cuts through the tension from behind me. He is the oldest of us, his hair completely silver, his heavy coat smelling of tobacco and gunpowder. He’s got his shotgun leveled at the line, but his eyes are scanning the rafters.
"We don't have time for a sermon. Matteo’s scouts are going to realize their radio check is late. "
I stop two feet from Leone. I can smell the sour sweat of his fear beneath his cheap cologne. He wants to look brave, but his fingers are trembling against his holster.
"Tell my uncle," I whisper, leaning in close enough that he can see the dark reflection of his own face in my eyes, "that if I find his men in Palermo again, I won't just take their guns. I'll take their fingers. One by one. Starting with yours."
Leone’s jaw tightens. He looks at Dante, then at Marco’s mocking grin, and finally at Enzo’s unmoving, heavy barrel.
He knows he’s dead if he draws. Slowly, with agonizing deliberation, he unbuckles his holster and lets his weapon clatter to the concrete.
The other five men follow suit, a heavy chorus of steel hitting stone.
"Get out," I say, turning my back on them.
Always turn your back. It shows them they are too weak to be a threat.
"You're making a mistake, kid," Leone calls out as they back toward the rear exit, Dante shadowing them like a ghost in the dark. "Matteo has the old guard. He has the Rome connection. You have nothing but a handful of angry boys."
"Angry boys who know how to shoot," Marco calls back, waving his gun at them. "Drive safe, stronzi! Don't forget to review us on Yelp!"
Once the heavy iron door clanks shut and Dante slips the bolt into place, the warehouse goes dead silent except for the rain.
"Well," Marco sighs, sliding his Beretta back under his armpit and adjusting the collar of his silk shirt. "That was incredibly unsentimental. I was hoping we’d at least get to break a knee or two. My knuckles are losing their callus."
"You talk too much," Dante mutters, stepping out of the shadows. He is wiping a trace of dark blood off a folding blade with a rag. "You're going to get shot in the throat one of these days just so we don't have to listen to you."
"A tragedy for the women of Sicily," Marco says, pulling a silver flask from his pocket and taking a long drag. "And for you, Dante. Who would teach you how to dress? You look like a funeral director."
"Enough," I say, my voice stopping both of them instantly.
I look at the pile of discarded weapons on the floor.
Six guns. A drop in the ocean. Matteo holds eighty percent of the family's assets, the legal regency, and the backing of the commission in Rome because they prefer a predictable thief over an ambitious young enforcer. My father’s death left a vacuum, and Matteo filled it with cash and false promises.
"Enzo, get the trucks loaded," I order, rubbing the back of my neck where a dull ache has been brewing for days. "We move the crates to the north warehouse. We can't trust this location anymore."
"Already on it," Enzo says, but he doesn't leave. He hands his shotgun to Marco, who takes it with a mock salute, and gestures for me to follow him toward the small, dimly lit office at the back of the bay.
The office smells of paper and coffee. A single yellow bulb hangs from the ceiling, swaying slightly in the draft. Enzo shuts the door, blocking out the sound of Marco and Dante bickering outside as they start moving the crates.
"We're running out of room to hide, Gio," Enzo says, leaning his heavy frame against the desk. He pulls out a cigar, cuts the end with his teeth, and lights it. The blue smoke curls up toward the bulb. "Matteo’s squeezed us out of the western ports. We’re bleeding cash, and the boys are getting restless.
Loyalty is a beautiful thing, but it doesn't buy bread. "
"I know," I say, sitting on the edge of a wooden crate. My body feels tight, wired on adrenaline and a deep, simmering frustration that never goes away. Three years. I’ve been fighting this bleeding internal war for three years just to take the crown that belongs to my bloodline.
"We have the docks. We just need to hold them until the winter shipments arrive.. "
"We won't make it to winter if Matteo gets the Rome syndicate to ratify his seat permanently," Enzo says bluntly. He points the glowing orange tip of his cigar at me. "You need a miracle, ragazzo. Or you need a massive injection of blood and capital from somewhere Matteo can't touch."
"I’m not selling the Palermo docks to the Russians, Enzo. I told you that."
"I'm not talking about the Russians," Enzo says. He reaches into his inner pocket and pulls out a faded, cream-colored folder. He tosses it onto the desk between us. "I'm talking about the Americans."
I look down at the folder. I don't need to open it to know what's inside. My chest tightens, a sudden, heavy pressure settling behind my ribs.
"No," I say, my voice going flat.
"Don Kio Salvatore," Enzo continues as if I hadn't spoken. "The head of the New York syndicate. The man who has been sitting on a mountain of money and three thousand soldiers for thirty years, waiting for a reason to care about Italy again.”
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"Salvatore is an old man who lost his mind when his wife ran away eighteen years ago," I say, my fingers curling into my palms. "He hasn't touched European business since. He’s a ghost."
"He's a ghost with a checkbook and a private army," Enzo counters. "And he's a ghost who signed a contract with your father twenty-two years ago. A contract sealed in blood and ink."
"The betrothal," I mutter, a bitter taste in my mouth.
Lina. The name drags up a memory I’ve spent eighteen years trying to bury.
A sun-drenched garden. A little girl in a yellow dress with a scraped knee, crying in the gravel.
A promise I made because I was seven and stupid and didn't understand that our lives were already written down on paper by men who didn't care if we breathed or suffocated.
"The girl is gone, Enzo," I say, my voice dropping an octave. "She vanished with her mother eighteen years ago. She's dead, or she’s living under a new name on the other side of the world, completely oblivious to who we are. I am not chasing a ghost to secure a crown."
"She’s not a ghost," Enzo says quietly.
I look up, my eyes narrowing. "What?"
Enzo taps the folder. "Eighteen years ago, when Maria Salvatore fled, I was the one who let her get away.
I never told your father, and I never told Salvatore.
But three years ago, when your father died and Matteo explicitly refused to step down when you turned twenty-two, I knew your bloodline was going to be slaughtered in this stalemate.
I was the only man alive with a starting point, so I hired a private investigator completely off the books using my own capital.
Matteo knows nothing, and Salvatore has no idea. "
He blows a ring of smoke, his eyes darkening. "Three weeks ago, my operative found a lead in a small town in New England. A girl. Twenty-three years old. Runs a little bookshop. Looks like her mother."
My heart skips hard. What? I reach out, my hand steady despite the sudden rush of blood to my head, and open the folder.
The first page is a surveillance photograph.
It’s grainy, taken from a distance through a long lens, but the face is unmistakable.
She has the same soft, round chin, the same wide, expressive eyes I remember from the garden.
She is standing outside a brick storefront, laughing at something a girl next to her is saying.
She’s wearing a thick, oversized sweater, her dark hair pulled back in a messy knot. She looks... clean. Unmarked.
She looks like she belongs in a world where people don't get shot in warehouses at ten o'clock on a rainy Thursday.
"Does she know?" I ask, my voice barely a whisper.
"Nothing," Enzo says. "Her mother raised her completely blind. She doesn't know about the family, she doesn't know about the betrothal, she doesn't even know her father is alive. She thinks she’s just an ordinary girl named Lina Rossi.”
Lina. My thumb brushes against the corner of the photograph, right over the small curve of her cheek. A strange, dark heat pools in my stomach, possessive, and entirely too intense for a woman I haven't seen since I was seven years old.
"If we bring her back," I say, my mind immediately analyzing the logistics, the security, the sheer violence of dragging an innocent woman into the middle of a civil war, "Matteo will find out. He will target her to prevent the merger. Salvatore is throwing his own daughter to the wolves."
"Salvatore is old, Gio. He wants his daughter back before he dies, and he wants his legacy secured," Enzo says. "He’s offering a complete merger of the New York and Palermo houses. If you marry her, his men will cross the ocean to put you on the throne. Matteo won't survive a month."
"And what about her?" I snap, slamming the folder shut. "She’s a civilian. She has a life. She runs a fucking bookstore, Enzo! She doesn't belong in Palermo."
"She belongs to the family," Enzo says, his voice going hard, the indulgent father-figure vanishing into the old-world soldier. "She was promised to you. Your father gave his word. Salvatore gave his. In our world, that doesn't go away just because twenty years have passed."
"I don't need a forced bride," I growl, standing up and pacing the small office. "The American men won't follow a don who had to kidnap his wife to get her to the altar. They’ll see me as weak."
"Then don't kidnap her," Enzo says simply.
I stop, turning to look at him. "What?"
"Go to her," Enzo says. He leans forward, his eyes serious. "You have a false name. You have the papers. Go to this quiet little town. Move in next door. Make her choose you. Hiding who you are, hiding who she is, until she’s deep enough in that she can’t run."
Make her choose me. The idea is insane. It’s a lie wrapped in a deception, built on top of a foundation of absolute betrayal. If she ever finds out...
But as I look back at the closed folder on the desk, my mind doesn't go to the strategy. It goes to the photo. It goes to the soft curve of her mouth, the memory of her small, warm hand in mine when she was five years old, and the promise I made to never let her fall again.
I never break a promise.
"Gio?" Enzo asks, watching my face.
"Where is she?" I ask, my voice sounding rough, even to my own ears.
"A place called coastal Maine," Enzo says, a small, knowing smile touching his lips. "Very quiet. Very cold. You’ll need a winter coat."
I pick up the folder, sliding it inside my black wool coat, right against my chest.
"I'll go alone," I say, walking toward the door. "Marco and Dante stay here to keep Matteo busy. If he suspects I’m gone, he’ll send his own bloodhounds to find her."
"And what do I tell Salvatore?" Enzo asks.
I pause, my hand on the rusted brass doorknob. The sound of the rain outside is louder now, drowning out the world.
"Tell him I'm going to get his daughter," I say, not looking back. "And tell him that when I bring her home, she will be mine. Entirely."
I open the door and step back out into the cold, dark bay of the warehouse. Marco is sitting on a crate, throwing his Beretta up in the air and catching it, while Dante watches him with deep, silent irritation.
"Pack it up, boys," I say, my voice cutting through their bickering like a blade. "We have a war to win. But first, I have a promise to keep."