Chapter 33 Enrico
ENRICO
When I reached Via del Leone, dawn had not yet cracked the horizon. Marco waited beside the car, the ember of his cigarette pulsing like a warning. “You sure about this?”
“What kind of fucking question is that? I wouldn’t be here if I thought otherwise.”
He didn’t argue. Right now wasn’t the time to piss me off. My whole body was wound tight, waiting for the opportunity to kill the son of a bitch who hurt my wife.
The warehouse ahead loomed — the place my father once used for quiet meetings, the kind where silence bought more. I hadn’t been here since I was a boy, back when I still believed men like him could be legends instead of cautionary tales.
The padlock on the side door was new, but the hinges weren’t. One twist of the crowbar and the metal gave. We slipped inside. Shafts of pale light speared through cracks in the ceiling, catching on dust motes that drifted.
Marco swept his flashlight across the space. “You ever come here with him?”
I nodded. “He made me watch him sign a deal with Gallo. Told me this was where dynasties were made.” I traced my hand along a worktable scarred with cigarette burns. “I didn’t understand then that dynasties also died here.”
The beam of the flashlight fell on a pile of charred paper in the center of the floor. I crouched, brushing off soot. A joint seal pressed in wax, half melted, as if the alliance had been burned even as it was born.
“They were partners once,” Marco murmured.
“Partners until pride turned them into gods.” I folded the half-burnt page and slipped it into my coat. “And gods always fall.”
A noise scraped through the silence — the sound of something metal dragging. Instinct kicked in; my gun was in my hand.
“Easy.”
A stray cat darted between broken crates, vanishing through a gap in the wall. The tension lingered anyway, coiling under my skin.
I walked deeper into the warehouse. Rusted tools, a ledger cabinet long kicked in, a wine bottle half-filled with dust. On one wall, faint markings bloomed beneath the grime: a family crest, my father’s, half-obliterated by red spray paint. Over it, a newer mark — the Gallo insignia.
“They’re taunting you,” Marco said.
“They’re taunting him.” My voice came out harder than intended. “His ghost. His empire. I buried that man years ago.”
I crouched again. Someone wanted me to find this. Wanted to make sure I understood that the feud wasn’t finished.
A memory broke through: my father’s voice, sharp and cold. “Control, Enrico, is a knife you hold by the blade. It always draws blood, but if you let go, you lose everything.”
I spent my life gripping that knife, pretending I didn’t feel the cuts.
Marco nudged a crate aside. Beneath it laid a sealed envelope. My name written across it in my father’s handwriting. The sight rooted me. My throat closed as I picked it up.
“Do you want—” Marco began.
“I’ll read it alone.”
He nodded, stepping back toward the doorway.
I tore the envelope open.
My son. The Gallos have come for what was theirs.
You’ll believe this is revenge. It isn’t.
It’s reclamation. I took from Giovanni more than money.
I took his blood, his loyalty, and his heir’s future.
If the sins of the father are ever to be repaid, it will be through you.
There is only one truth that matters: power cannot be shared.
I folded the paper, fingers trembling.
“Enrico?” Marco called.
I looked up.
“We should go.”
I nodded, sliding the letter into my jacket.
As we stepped back onto the street, dawn was bleeding across the horizon, painting the sky in bruised gold.
The city didn’t know it yet, but war had already begun.
I didn’t speak on the drive back. Marco knew better.
He drove like a man who’d memorized the city.
We cut through the old quarter, the sky bruising toward daylight.
At the gate, the cameras recognized the car, and let us through. The gravel whispered under the tires. Men who were mine but not my friends acknowledged us with the smallest tilt of their heads. Loyalty was a language of gestures. So was fear.
“Kitchen entrance.”
Marco parked by the service door where deliveries came and bodies sometimes left. We stepped inside and the baker’s assistant glanced up, startled. She crossed herself when she recognized me and then pretended she hadn’t. I didn’t correct her.
In the corridor beyond, my study door was half open. I pushed it with two fingers and waited until the hinges finished speaking. Empty.
I set the letter on the blotter and stood there.
“Gather the captains,” I said without looking at Marco. “They’ll have three questions: Are we buying time? Are we going to war? The answers are yes, and not the way they expect.”
“Name the traitor?” he asked.
“Not yet. We let him think the play worked. Men who taste blood get careless.”
He nodded once, almost approving. “And Mia?”
“Protected. She doesn’t leave the estate without me or Catrina. If she insists, she chooses the guard.”
He headed for the door. He paused with his hand on the frame. “You’re going to have to tell her something.”
“I will. Just not everything.”
The intercom on the desk clicked. “Signore?” the housekeepers asked. “Mia is waiting for you in the dining hall.”
I pictured Mia in one of my shirts, sleeves pushed up, chin tipped like a dare. The memory of her hand on my wrist two nights ago moved through me like heat that learned to wait.
“I’ll come.”
The room had too much light. Mia sat facing the garden, hair pulled into a simple knot, bare legs crossed, a coffee cup between both hands. Catrina perched at the other end of the table, a bruise yellowing at the edge of her jaw, fury smoothed into poise.
When Mia’s gaze locked on mine, she didn’t smile. She stood.
“How long will you keep telling me I’m safe? Because if that’s the plan, call it what it is: this place is just a glorified panic room.”
Catrina’s mouth tugged. “Good morning, brother.”
I waited until the maid finished setting down the pastries and left. Then I took the seat across from my wife. “The plan,” I said, “is to make the men who came for us think they succeeded.” I lifted my cup and set it down again untouched. “It’s working.”
“Congratulations,” Mia said, deadpan. “You’re terrifying.”
Catrina snorted. “To traitors.”
I stared at her. “How’s the jaw?”
She tilted it, showing me the fading mark. “I’ve had worse and you know it.”
She rose, kissed Mia’s temple, and slipped out.
“Now, tell me what’s really going on.”
I slid the letter across the table just enough that she could see the edge of my name. Not enough that she could read what a dead man thought he still deserved.
“Not now,” I said. “But soon.”
She held my eyes and nodded. Not acceptance.
“I heard you last night,” she said. “In the hall. Gallo.”
A small current passed through my spine. Of course she had. “Dante.”
“Is he the son?”
“Yes.”
“Did your father—” She cut herself off, jaw tightening, mercy fighting curiosity. “No. Not like this. You’ll tell me when you can.”
“I will,” I said, and told myself that a promise was not a lie if it arrived late.
She leaned back, one ankle looping over the other, the shirt pulling just enough to remind me. “What do you need from me,” she asked, “besides obedience?”
“I don’t need obedience. I need you.”
She stood, crossed to me, and set her hand on my shoulder. “You prefer control,” she said, thumb pressing once into the muscle as if she could knead the word out. “But I’ll take attention.”
Her fingers slid down my sleeve, a touch that warmed and warned at once. Then she was gone.
I waited until her footsteps faded and then picked up the phone.
“Flowers to the Gallo mausoleum on Via del Leone. Anonymously.”
“You want him to know you’re visiting the graves,” Marco asked.
“I want him to be impatient. Impatient men make mistakes. Also, I want our traitor to feel important. Feed him something almost true. ‘We’ll meet for a shipment at San Rocco at midnight.’ The men guarding San Rocco will be the ones I don’t mind firing.”
“We can do that, brother.”
“No, you are coming with me to our father’s old garage. Quiet. No convoy. Just you and me and one other I trust.”
“Luca?”
“Andre,” I said.
Marco grunted, approval again. “When?”
“Two in the morning.”
He hung up.
I set the phone down, opened the safe, and slid the letter inside. It laid there beside the ledger square and the sleeved cranes.
By dusk, the house settled. Mia passed me twice—once near the library with a book under her arm, once at the top of the stairs barefoot, hair down.
At midnight, a courier I paid too much and trusted too little walked into a flower shop that stayed open for grief and asked for lilies.
White, unblemished, tall enough to be mistaken for apology.
On the card, an initial and nothing else.
It would take Dante twenty minutes to decide whether the letter belonged to the dead man or to me. Either answer would itch.
At one-thirty, I found Andre in the garage with a toolbox.
We left the estate through the east service road.
The old garage keypad at the door was the same model my father liked.
I keyed in the numbers he’d taught me before he taught me to shave.
The light blinked red—denied. Then green—accepted.
Someone spliced the logic years back to let a ghost in.
The cars were gone. The far bay still carried the print of the Jaguar’s tires. Near the wall, a darker patch on the concrete marked where oil had bled and bled and been forgiven because men forgive machines for sins they kill each other over.
On the workbench, a cloth-covered shape waited.
I lifted the edge. My father’s signet ring laid on a square of black felt, its face turned down like it didn’t want to be recognized.
I touched the ring with one finger, flipped it, and saw what I expected: the Di Fiore seal scratched with a pin until the lines bled into the metal.
Over the scratches, a thin smear of red—fresh enough to shine under our lights.
Beneath the ring, a note.
Bring your best. — D.
“Bold,” Andre said.
I slid the ring into my pocket, the metal heavier than the message. “He wants me in the ruins at Via del Leone, full-circle, poetic. He thinks I’ll bring an army because that’s what his father would have done.”
“You won’t.”
“No.” I turned the note over.
I left the garage with my father’s ring burning a circle into my thigh and the shape of the ambush already drawing itself behind my eyes. Street-level watchers. A sniper who didn’t deserve the title. A car he thought was invisible and wasn’t. Marco would want to flood the street with men.
We reached the estate at three-fifteen. Even the guards stood.
I crossed the foyer quiet. Mia stood at the balcony off the hall, barefoot, wrapped in a shawl.
She didn’t turn when I came up beside her.
She didn’t need to. Keeping so many things from her was killing me, but I didn’t want anyone to use her against me. Not again.
I kissed her shoulder and put my arms around her. “The night before my father died, he asked me if I was sorry for him. For all the horrible things he did to get where he was. I told him no.”
She looked at me then. “And now?”
“I feel sorry for the boy who thought he had to become him.” I slid the ring from my pocket and set it in her palm. “I’m done with it.”
She traced the marred face with her thumb. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said, and I meant I’m going to end this on my terms, not his and I’m not trading you for a crown that cuts.
She turned the ring over once more and then closed her fingers around it like a vow. “Then let me stand with you.”
I smiled. “You already do.”
She had a way of truly getting me to see another side of myself.
A side that no other person had ever brought forward.
The truth was: My father was a treacherous man and I’d be doing the world a favor not being anything like him.
The Di Fiore empire and legacy didn’t have to be successful on the backs of everyone else.
And if my father screwed us other families like us…
then the family legacy had been tarnished a long time ago.
“I’ve still got some things to take care of, my love. Go get some rest.”
She did just that and I went to my study, waiting on news from the debacle. Marco was handling that side of things. The longer this charade went on, the more dangerous it was for everyone involved.
Marco came in as dawn bruised the sky again. He studied the map on my desk. “You’re going alone?”
“With you and Andre,” I said. “And a house’s worth of eyes at a distance.”
“And what about your wife? Eventually she’s going to catch on that you are keeping things from her.”
I downed the rest of my scotch. “Let me worry about her. You just do your fucking job, okay?”
He started to leave, then turned back. “The traitor took the bait. He was at San Rocco at midnight. We don’t have much to go on just yet.”
“What’s his name?”
“Don’t even worry about that. You worry about Dante.”
I closed the door, folded the map, and put it in my pocket with the ring. One belonged to blood. One belonged to bone. Both belonged to me long enough to break them.