Wicked Daddy (Chicago Dons #3)

Chapter 1

Marco

Lust. Everything starts with lust.

Not love, not strategy, not some grand design—lust.

A brunette in a red dress was laughing at something I’d said thirty seconds earlier that wasn’t funny, and I was leaning against the main bar at my nightclub, Nero, with the easy posture of a man who had nowhere better to be.

It was a lie. I always had somewhere better to be. I just never went there.

The club was packed. Two hundred bodies moving under low amber light, the DJ spinning deep house that vibrated through the black marble bar top and up through the soles of my shoes into my chest. The air was thick—cologne layered over expensive liquor layered over the particular human heat that happens when too many beautiful people occupy too little space.

They were the kind of people who pretended not to notice each other.

But they noticed. That was the entire point of Nero. You came to be seen noticing.

The brunette—she hadn’t told me her name yet—held her champagne in her left hand and rested her right on my forearm.

The touch was practiced. Light pressure, fingertips only, positioned on the inside of my wrist where the skin is thinner and the suggestion is louder.

I’d seen the move a thousand times. I’d taught it to myself at nineteen, watching women work rooms at charity galas while his father’s associates conducted business in the corners.

The difference between a touch that says I’m interested and one that says I’ve decided is about two inches and three degrees of pressure. Hers said she‘d decided.

I smiled at her. Warm, attentive, a little conspiratorial—the smile that makes a person feel like they’re the only one in the room. It was flawless. I knew because I’d been perfecting it since I was old enough to understand its power. Which was about 15.

But of course, she wasn’t the only person in the room. Not even close.

The two Valenti associates had been in the corner booth for fourteen minutes.

I’d clocked them the moment they walked in—mid-thirties, overdressed for a Tuesday, ordering bottle service they couldn’t afford on a soldier’s salary.

They weren’t here to start trouble. They were here to be seen being here, which meant Enzo wanted me to know he was still watching. Noted. Filed. Irrelevant for now.

Behind the bar, Gia—my head bartender, five years on staff, excellent with customers, terrible with inventory—was watering down the Clase Azul again.

I could tell by the pour speed. Real Clase Azul moves like honey.

What she was pouring moved like water because it was thirty percent water.

I’d deal with it tomorrow. Tonight I was charming, and charming men don’t audit their bartenders mid-flirtation.

The couple by the VIP rope were undercover vice.

I’d made them forty minutes ago. The woman’s shoes were wrong—department-store flats at a club where the cheapest heel at any given table cost four hundred dollars.

Her partner kept touching his left hip where his holster sat under his jacket, a nervous habit that no amount of plainclothes training could break.

They’d been nursing the same two drinks for an hour, their conversation a little too animated, their eyes a little too busy.

I hoped they were enjoying themselves. Nero’s liquor license was immaculate, my books were clean enough to eat off, and the only illegal thing happening on the premises tonight was Gia’s creative approach to premium tequila.

“So,” the brunette said, leaning closer. Her perfume was expensive and slightly too much. “What do you do? Besides own this place?”

“I make drinks. And bad decisions.”

She laughed. This one was real—or closer to real.

Her head tipped back, exposing the line of her throat, and for a half second I felt the pull of something genuine.

Attraction, maybe. Or muscle memory. I’d been performing this version of myself—the charming, easy, magnetic youngest Caruso—for so long that most nights I couldn’t locate where the performance ended and the man began.

There was Marco Caruso the nightclub owner, Marco Caruso the family‘s pretty face, Marco Caruso who dated actresses and influencers and forgot their names by morning. And then there was whatever was underneath all of that, which I hadn’t checked on in a while and frankly wasn‘t sure was still there.

“I’m Alexis,” she said.

“Marco.” I lifted my glass—San Pellegrino with a lime, because I never drank at Nero; the performance required clarity—and touched it to her champagne flute. “Nice to meet you, Alexis.”

I would forget her name by morning.

It wasn‘t cruelty. It was economy. I had a finite amount of space in my head and most of it was already occupied by things that would get people killed if I forgot them. A woman’s name from a Tuesday night at my own bar didn’t make the cut. It never would.

My phone vibrated in my jacket pocket.

I ignored it. Alexis was telling me about her work in interior design—or architecture, or something adjacent that required her to say “space” and “flow” a lot—and I maintained eye contact and nodded at the right intervals and let my mind run its quiet parallel track underneath.

The Valenti soldiers were on their second bottle.

Gia was making a mojito that was going to taste like minted tap water.

The vice cops were getting ready to leave.

The phone vibrated again. Two shorts and a long.

My chest tightened. Just slightly—a compression behind my sternum that had nothing to do with the bass.

Two shorts and a long. I’d assigned that pattern to one contact, and that contact didn’t reach out for small talk. He reached out when something had shifted, when the ground under my feet had moved in a direction I needed to know about immediately.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Alexis. The smile I gave her was warm and reluctant, the specific tilt of the head that communicates I wish I didn’t have to go even when you’ve never wished for anything less. “I have to take this. Supplier emergency. The glamorous reality of nightclub ownership.”

She pouted beautifully. She was good at this. Under different circumstances—in a different life, one where my last name didn’t come with a body count—I might have stayed.

I touched her hand. Brief. Warm. A promise of something I had no intention of delivering.

Then I turned and moved through the crowd toward the back hallway, the one with the unmarked door and the staircase that led to the office no one on the main floor knew existed.

Bodies parted for me without my asking. They always did.

Staff nodded as I passed—Mr. Caruso, Mr. Caruso—and I returned each one with the easy acknowledgment of a man who had all the time in the world.

I didn’t. The phone was burning against my ribs like a second heartbeat, and whatever was waiting for me upstairs was going to change something.

I could feel it in my gut, in the part of me that had been watching and waiting and building something in the dark for years while my brothers fought the wars they could see.

The wars you can’t see are the ones that kill you.

I took the stairs two at a time.

The office above Nero was soundproofed well enough that the bass from downstairs reduced itself to a low hum I felt in my sternum rather than heard. Like a second pulse. Like the building had a heartbeat.

I locked the door. Habit. Even here, even at one in the morning in a room no one on the floor below knew existed, I locked the door. The space was deliberately sparse—walnut desk, two monitors, a leather chair that cost more than it looked like it should, and a shelf of books I had actually read.

Machiavelli. Sun Tzu. Three volumes on behavioral economics.

A dog-eared copy of The Great Gatsby that I kept because it was the best novel ever written about performing a version of yourself until the performance eats you alive.

Downstairs, behind the bar, there was a curated display of books chosen for aesthetic—leather spines, gold lettering, the kind of shelf that said cultured without requiring anyone to crack a cover.

That shelf was for the public. This one was for me.

I pulled out my phone.

The message was from Niko. No last name, no real first name either—just the handle I‘d assigned to the most useful contact I’d cultivated in three years of quiet, patient work.

Niko was embedded deep enough in Enzo Valenti’s diminished operation to see the financial plumbing.

Not the decisions—Enzo was too smart for that.

But the money. And money, unlike men, doesn’t lie.

The message was a photograph of a wire transfer confirmation and a single line of text:

Sicily. Palermo. Scordato family. He’s shopping.

I sat down. The leather chair creaked. The hum from downstairs pulsed once, twice, like a heartbeat skipping.

Palermo. The word sat in my chest with a weight it shouldn‘t have had—just a city, just a name on a map. But in my world, Palermo wasn’t a city. It was a signal. It meant old blood, old money, the kind of Sicilian power that made the Chicago families look like franchise operations.

I pulled up the second monitor. The screen was already open to the spreadsheet I’d been building for six weeks—Enzo Valenti’s financial movements, tracked through a combination of Niko’s intelligence, public records, and a forensic accountant in the Cayman Islands who owed me a favor she’d never finish repaying.

Since the sit-down that stripped his alliances—Dante’s surgical masterpiece, the political equivalent of cutting a man’s tendons and letting him try to stand—Enzo had been liquidating.

Methodically. Quietly. With the discipline of a man who had decided something and was executing it without sentiment.

Three Delaware shell companies dissolved. I’d flagged them in yellow.