Chapter 2
CONSTANTINE
My father was supposed to die in a hail of gunfire.
I'd always known that, the way you know certain things in this life without anyone ever saying them directly.
It was in the way he carried himself, the way his men looked at him, the way he walked into a room and the air changed.
Dante Venosa was not a man who was supposed to waste away in a bed, coughing up pieces of his lungs while the disease ate him from the inside out.
He was supposed to go the way his father went, and his father before that — fighting, defending, refusing to yield an inch of ground until there was no ground left.
Instead I stood in the hallway outside his room every morning and listened to him breathe and counted the spaces between each exhale.
I'd been managing the family's operations for eight months now.
Quietly at first, then less quietly as my father's good days became fewer.
The men had adjusted without being asked to — they were loyal to the Venosa name above all else, and they understood the transfer happening before them, even if none of us spoke of it directly.
It was easier that way. Easier to pretend we were just covering for a man who was temporarily indisposed rather than watching him leave us by degrees.
The truth was I wanted it. I'd always wanted it.
I'd been raised for it, trained for it, and I was good at it in ways that had surprised even me.
The territory was more profitable than it had been in years, our relationships with the other four families were solid, and I'd handled two significant threats in the past eight months without a single civilian casualty.
I was ready.
I just hadn't wanted it like this.
There was something profoundly wrong about inheriting power from a living man.
About sitting behind a desk that still smelled like my father's cigars and making decisions he should have been making for another twenty years.
Every time I settled into that chair I felt like a man trying on clothes that almost fit — close enough to function, wrong enough to feel it constantly.
"Constantine, get in here." His voice bellowed from behind the closed door, and I heard the cough that followed it, deep and rattling in his chest. I closed my eyes briefly before I moved.
Taking a deep breath, I pasted a smile on my face as I walked into his room. "Father." I kissed each of his cheeks. His color was ashen, and if it was possible, he looked like he'd lost weight overnight. The room smelled of medicine and something underneath it I didn't want to name.
"There's my boy." He leaned back on his pillow and I took a seat on the end of the bed by his feet, the way I'd been sitting since I was small enough that my legs didn't reach the floor. "Are you getting brought up to speed on everything?"
"Yes. Emilio has been giving me a meticulous rundown of every business and deal you've got.
This afternoon we're going to start going over the families and what we're requiring of them during this time.
" I tucked one leg under me and turned to look out the window.
It was easier than looking at the once strong man wasting away before my eyes.
The same view I'd looked at my whole life, the Chicago skyline gray and vast in the winter morning. "Everything is in order."
"Make sure you rely on the other four. We help one another." His eyes were growing heavy, the way they did after even small exertions now. "They will help you with the transition."
"I know."
"You have to get married, son."
I laughed despite myself. He mentioned this roughly once a day, as if I could forget. "I'm a little busy right now, Pop."
"Don't get so busy running the famiglia to forget about having one of your own.
" He sighed, and I waited for him to say more, but his breathing had evened out into the shallow rhythm of sleep.
I stayed on the end of the bed for a moment longer than necessary, watching the rise and fall of his chest, doing the thing I did every time now — making sure there would be a next one.
There always was. So far.
"Constantine." Emilio appeared in the doorway, his voice quiet, his eyes going immediately to my father with the expression he always wore when he looked at him now.
Grief wearing the mask of composure. These two men had been boys together, had come up through the ranks side by side, had built something significant out of nothing and defended it for forty years.
Emilio had known forever that his place was beside my father.
He took it hard that this was the one journey he couldn't accompany him on.
I stood carefully, so as not to disturb the bed, and followed him into the hall.
"What is it?"
He handed me a piece of paper without speaking. I read it once, then again.
Don Avola wants his daughter back. A reward awaits anyone who provides information that leads to her return.
I kept reading. She'd been spotted leaving in a car with a friend.
The friend had since died of mysterious causes.
Cecilia Avola was listed as a missing person, but everyone who could read between lines knew what that meant.
She wasn't missing. She was hiding. And her father wasn't worried. He was angry.
"This is from a month ago. Why are we just hearing of this now?"
"It just came across my desk. Allegro Esposito from Boston has been keeping an eye on it for us." He took the paper from me and I walked to my father's office — my office, I was still working on that — and took my seat behind the desk. "There's more."
"Tell me."
"She's in Chicago."
I looked up from the desk. "She's what?"
"She came here from Italy and has been living in a small apartment on the east side.
" He opened his file folder and set out photographs and papers documenting her comings and goings for the past month.
I looked at them without touching them. A woman walking to work.
A woman at a market. A woman with her head down, moving through the city like someone who had learned to take up as little space as possible.
"She's found a job at a coffee shop. They must be paying her under the table because she'd have no work visa.
She goes to work and to the market. There are no friends, she doesn't go out.
" He paused. "It's like she's hiding in plain sight. "
A rival family's daughter had been living in my city for a month and I hadn't known about it. I filed that particular failure away to deal with later, because right now there was a more immediate problem.
I picked up one of the photographs. A close-up, clearly taken from a distance.
She was stunning in the uncomplicated way that made you look twice and then keep looking — long dark hair almost to her waist, a posture that spoke of a particular kind of upbringing even in a coffee shop apron.
There was something careful in her expression. Watchful.
I knew that look.
I'd seen it on my sister's face for years before Eleanor finally ran.
She'd been arranged to marry one of my father's most trusted lieutenants, a man who had been around our table since before I could remember.
Someone we'd all assumed was loyal, honorable, worthy of the Venosa name.
Eleanor had known differently. She'd told me once, quietly, that the way he looked at her made her feel like something he was waiting to own, and I'd dismissed it because I hadn't wanted it to be true.
I didn't dismiss it the night she came to me at two in the morning with her bag already packed.
I walked her to the tunnels myself. The old passages beneath the house that my great-grandfather had built into the foundation, that every Venosa child grew up knowing about and was sworn never to speak of outside the family.
I stood at the entrance and watched her disappear into the dark without looking back, and I didn't sleep for three days afterward wondering if I'd done the right thing.
She'd ended up at the Drake Marriage Auction. Bought by Walker Drake himself, which was either fortune or fate depending on how you looked at it. She was alive and beyond reach, which was the best outcome I could have hoped for and still somehow felt like loss.
My father had dealt with the lieutenant when the man couldn't stop running his mouth about Eleanor's disappearance. The matter was closed. But the particular weight of watching a woman flee a life that should have protected her — that never fully left you.
I looked back down at the photograph of Cecilia Avola.
"Too bad she's an Avola," I said, more to myself than to Emilio.
"True." He settled back in his chair. "But you do have the upper hand here, Constantine.
" I tore my eyes from the photograph. "She's in trouble.
The friend who helped her escape is dead — not that I think she knows that — but what do you think will happen when old man Avola finds her?
" He let that sit for a moment. "She's betrothed to Hector Lombardi. "
The name landed like a stone in still water.
I set the photograph down.
Hector Lombardi was my mother's oldest brother, and the reason my mother flinched at sudden movements and never spoke about her childhood if she could avoid it.
He was sixty-three years old and had buried two wives under circumstances that everyone discussed and nobody investigated.
He was a man who understood power as something to be exercised against those who couldn't fight back, and he had spent his entire life finding new ways to prove it.
"Find her," I said. My voice came out harder than I intended.
Emilio nodded and stood.
"Where's my dad off to like he has a rocket up his ass?
" Lorenzo walked in and dropped into the chair his father had just vacated, with the particular ease of a man who had never in his life considered whether he was welcome somewhere.
He was my oldest friend and my right hand, and he operated on the assumption that wherever I was, he was welcome, which was generally true.
"We have a situation in the city." I leaned back and looked at him. He was already reading something in my expression, the way he'd learned to over twenty years.
"What kind? When do we roll out?"
"Not yet." I looked back down at the photograph on my desk. The careful eyes of a woman who had done something very brave and very dangerous and was holding her breath waiting to find out if it had worked.
"Who is she?"
"Cecilia Avola."
Lorenzo was quiet for a moment, which from him meant something. "Sergio Avola's daughter? The one who was supposed to marry Lombardi?"
"The same."
He let out a slow breath. "And she's here."
"She's been here a month." I stood and walked to the window.
The city spread out below, gray and cold, indifferent to the small woman on the east side who had crossed an ocean to escape one powerful man and landed, without knowing it, in the territory of another.
"Nobody is handing her back to her father.
And nobody is handing her to Hector." I turned to look at Lorenzo.
"I need you to put together a team. Quietly.
I want to know everything about what's moving from the Avola side before we make contact. "
"And when we make contact?"
I looked back at the photograph.
"We make sure she knows she's not alone."