Chapter 4
CONSTANTINE
Ihad expected some hesitation, but she was a good princess. She knew there was no getting away, and if she tried it would only end badly for her. Although I don't make a habit of shooting innocent women.
She'd walked out of the coffee shop ahead of me without being told, shoulders straight, jacket pulled against the December cold, not looking back.
That told me something. She was frightened — I could see it in the careful way she was holding herself together — but she wasn't going to let it show more than she could help.
That kind of composure was either trained or earned, and given what I knew about her father, probably both.
Lorenzo held the car door and she got in without hesitating. I walked around to the other side and settled in beside her.
"Privacy." I said it quietly but my men heard it. The partition rose without a word.
For a moment neither of us spoke. She was looking straight ahead, her hands folded in her lap with the deliberate stillness of someone who had learned to occupy as little space as possible. Outside, Chicago moved past the windows in the gray December light.
"Fucking Venosas." I shifted to look at her and arched my brow.
She closed her eyes briefly. "I said that out loud in the coffee shop."
"You did."
"I'm sorry." She turned to look at me then, and I could see the calculation behind her eyes — how much to give, how much to hold back. "It's a reflex. Any time your family name came up, my grandfather and father would say it. I was nervous and not thinking. It was rude and I'm not a rude person."
She looked down at her hands and I watched her jaw tighten slightly, the expression of someone annoyed at themselves for showing something they hadn't meant to show.
"Well, I can't fault you for that," I said.
"Your last name evokes a lot of anger in my family as well.
" I had to laugh, because there was something genuinely absurd about it when you looked at it directly — two people sitting in the back of a car, two generations removed from a feud neither of us had started, both of us carrying it like luggage we'd never been given the option to put down. "Why are you in the US?"
She crossed her arms and looked back out the window. "Where are you taking me?"
"To my home. There are things I need to discuss with you that can't be done out in the open."
"So you're going to torture me for showing up unannounced in your city." It wasn't quite a question.
"Discuss, not torture." I watched the corner of her mouth move. She was trying not to react and not entirely succeeding, which I found more interesting than I probably should have. "Although I understand why you'd assume the worst."
"Yeah, that's what all the mob bosses say."
"I'm not the boss." I leaned slightly closer to her, dropping my voice. "I have no idea what he will do to you." I sat back and let that land.
She turned to look at me with an expression that told me she knew exactly what I was doing and wasn't entirely opposed to being amused by it. "That's not funny."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't."
A pause. The city slid past. She was thinking, I could almost feel it — the rapid internal assessment of a woman who had survived long enough in a dangerous world to know that information was currency and she needed to figure out the exchange rate before she spent any.
"The families have hated each other for a long time," she said finally. Not a question.
"Since before either of us were born." I looked out my own window.
"Our great-grandfathers were friends. Close ones.
Avola was my family's consigliere — he managed the legitimate businesses, advised on dealings, kept things running.
He was supposed to come to Chicago when my great-grandfather took on the role of Don here. " I paused. "He wasn't invited."
She was very still beside me. Listening in the way people listened when they were hearing a version of a story they'd only ever heard from one side.
"My great-grandfather moved on without him.
Built something significant here. Avola stayed in Italy and decided that what had been built should have been his.
" I kept my voice neutral. These were old facts, old wounds, the kind that had calcified into something harder than anger over the generations.
"There was a bloodbath in the town. Men my great-grandfather had left behind — family, associates, people who had nothing to do with the politics of it.
Avola ordered it. Appointed himself Don afterward. "
"He was asserting dominance," she said quietly.
"He was." I glanced at her. "Is that the version you were told?"
"I was told your family abandoned his and took everything that should have been shared." She said it without defensiveness, just the flat recitation of received history. "I was told the Venosas were aggressors and thieves and that the blood between the families was on your hands."
"And now?"
She was quiet for a moment. Outside the rain had started again, running down the glass in thin tracks. "Now I'm sitting in the back of your car instead of my father's, so I think my relationship with the official version of events is already complicated."
I looked at her properly then, and she looked back at me without flinching, and I thought that whatever I'd expected from Cecilia Avola when I'd seen her photographs two days ago, it hadn't been this — this particular combination of wariness and dry precision, this woman who had crossed an ocean alone and built a life from nothing and was now sitting in enemy territory making quiet observations about the unreliability of inherited narratives.
"My family still hates yours for more personal reasons," I said. "Beyond the history."
"Your mother." She said it carefully. "She's a Lombardi."
I looked at her sharply.
"I paid attention," she said simply. "I listened when they thought I wasn't."
I filed that away. "Then you understand."
"I understand enough." She turned back to the window.
"I want you to know that I didn't choose Lombardi.
I want you to know that I would rather have died on the road between my father's house and that airport than become his third wife.
I need you to understand that before whatever conversation we're about to have. "
The car slowed. Through the rain-blurred glass the gates of the house were coming into view, the long drive beyond them, the house at the end of it.
"I understand more than you think," I said.
Arriving at the house, I watched her see it for the first time.
The rain had softened the light, giving the stone facade a quality that was almost atmospheric — three stories of English architectural ambition transplanted to Chicago soil by a great-grandmother who had loved a dangerous man enough to follow him across the world and asked only that he build her something that reminded her of home.
He had vowed to honor that dream. It was the first Venosa vow I knew of, and in some ways the most human one.
Cecilia turned to look at me, her mouth open, the careful composure momentarily set aside. "No wonder my family hates yours." She shook her head slowly, turning back to the house. "They will think all of this should have been theirs."
"Some of them probably still do."
She got out of the car without waiting for Lorenzo to open her door, which he noted with an expression I chose not to acknowledge.
She stood in the rain looking up at the house for a moment longer than necessary, the water darkening her hair, and then she turned and walked toward the entrance like a woman who had decided something.
I followed her inside.
She moved through the entrance hall the way people moved through places that surprised them — slowly, taking it in, her eyes traveling up the staircase and across the high ceilings and along the dark wood paneling with an expression that wasn't quite envy and wasn't quite admiration. Something more complicated than either.
"Wow," she said quietly, almost to herself.
"Constantine, who is that?" My mother appeared from the direction of the kitchen, drying her hands on a cloth, and stopped when she saw Cecilia. Her eyes moved from the young woman to me with the particular efficiency of a woman who had spent forty years reading rooms.
"Cecilia Avola." I ran a hand through my hair, which was damp from the rain.
My mother went very still. "Excuse me?"
"Cecilia Avola. There's reason to believe she ran away from Italy and there's trouble brewing." I held my mother's gaze. "She needed somewhere safe."
"Don't tell your father." She pointed at me, her voice dropping.
"Not unless absolutely necessary."
She held my eyes for a moment longer — the look of a woman weighing the situation and arriving at her own conclusions at considerable speed — and then she turned to Cecilia with a smile that was genuine rather than performed.
My mother had never held anyone's family against them.
She had too much experience with being held responsible for her own.
"Cecilia, I'd like to introduce my mother, Lucia Venosa."
Cecilia stepped forward and there was nothing tentative about it.
"Mrs. Venosa, it's a pleasure to meet you.
Your home is magnificent." Her voice was warm and her posture was perfect and she looked my mother directly in the eye, and I watched my mother decide something in the space of about three seconds.
"It's very nice to meet you, my dear." She took Cecilia's hand in both of hers briefly, then looked at me. "I'll have lunch brought to your office." She smiled and left the room with the purposeful quiet of a woman who had decided to give people space to talk.
Cecilia watched her go, then turned to look at me. Something had shifted in her expression — a fraction less guarded, a fraction more present.
"She's not what I expected," she said.
"No," I agreed. "She rarely is."
I gestured toward the hallway. "Follow me."
She sat across from my desk with her hands folded and her back straight and looked like a woman who was holding herself together through sheer force of character.
Whatever she was feeling — and I suspected it was considerable — she wasn't going to let it run loose in a room she didn't yet feel safe in.
I respected that more than I could have explained.
Emilio arrived minutes later, slightly breathless, file in hand, and set it in front of me with the expression he wore when the information wasn't good. "Last minute intel," he said. "I'm sorry for the delay."
"Thank you, Emilio." I looked at Cecilia. Her eyes were on the file with the focused dread of someone who suspected what was inside it and was bracing.
"Ms. Avola," I said. "You're in a lot of trouble."