Chapter 1 #3
“Enzo Valenti,” I said, and both of them went still in their particular ways—Dante’s a deepening of the stillness he already carried, Santo’s an abrupt cessation of the drumming, his hand going flat on the table like he was pressing something down.
“Lost everything after the sit down. But he’s not running. ”
I laid it out. Clean. Chronological.
The liquidation: three shell companies, the penthouse, the restaurant portfolio.
Fourteen million in nine days, all moved through cutout accounts designed to evaporate on contact.
I watched Dante‘s eyes track the numbers on the page.
He read financial data the way Santo read a room full of potential threats—instantly, structurally, with an intuitive grasp of what the numbers meant beneath what they said.
The destination: Palermo. Specifically, the Scordato family.
I gave them the profile. Narcotics routes from North Africa through Sicily into mainland Europe.
Three hundred soldiers, conservatively. A reputation for the kind of violence that was institutional rather than personal—not rage, not passion, just the systematic application of force as a business practice.
I kept my voice even. I didn’t editorialize.
I let the facts do what facts do when they’re bad enough.
“If Enzo secures a Scordato alliance,” I said, “we‘re not looking at a wounded man trying to claw back territory. We’re looking at a wounded man with three hundred Sicilian soldiers, international distribution logistics, and a personal vendetta that he’s willing to spend every dollar he has left to fund. ”
Santo‘s jaw was working. The slow grind. I knew that rhythm—it meant he was doing math. Not financial math. The math of violence. How many men, positioned where, with what weapons, covering which approaches. His mind was a combat simulator running scenarios at a speed that would have been impressive if it weren’t also slightly terrifying.
Dante picked up the page. Read it again. This was the tell—Dante only read things twice when the first read had been correct and he was hoping the second would change something. It wouldn‘t.
The room was quiet. Rosa’s voice had stopped carrying from the kitchen. Even the building seemed to be listening.
Dante set the page down. Aligned it precisely with the edge of the table.
Santo hadn’t moved. His hand was still flat on the table.
His water was still untouched. His jaw had stopped its grinding, which meant he’d finished his death calculations and was now waiting to hear what came next so he could run them again with new variables.
“What are you proposing?” Dante asked.
I had a plan. I‘d been building it in my head since two in the morning, refining it the way I refined cocktail recipes—adjust, taste, adjust again, until every element balanced and the whole was greater than its parts.
“Don’t fight the Scordatos,” I said. “Court them.”
I let that land. Watched it register. Dante’s eyes didn’t change, but something behind them shifted—a light coming on in a back room.
“Enzo is shopping for an alliance,” I continued.
“He’s bringing money and a pitch—American distribution, a Chicago foothold, whatever he thinks the Scordatos want to hear.
But he’s selling from a position of weakness and they’ll know it.
He’s liquidating everything. He has no soldiers, no territory, no political cover.
He’s offering cash and a grudge. That’s not an alliance. That’s a liability.”
Santo’s eyebrow moved. Fractionally. For him, this was a standing ovation.
“We offer something better,” I said. “Established territory. Legitimate business infrastructure for laundering. Political connections in Chicago and on the East Coast through the Morettis. A family with a reputation for keeping our word—which is something Enzo Valenti has never been able to claim and the Scordatos will know it.”
I paused. This was the part that required care.
“We’re not getting into narcotics. That’s not the play and it doesn’t need to be.
The Scordatos already have distribution in Europe.
What they don‘t have is a clean American operation they can route investment through. We have real estate, construction, hospitality—legitimate businesses that can absorb and clean money at a scale Enzo’s burned-down operation never could.
We offer the Scordatos a financial partnership, not a drug pipeline.
We give them what they actually need, and in exchange, they give us what we need. ”
“Which is?” Dante. Still neutral. Still holding the door open.
“They shut Enzo out. Publicly. A man shopping for soldiers in Palermo who gets turned away—that’s not just a tactical loss, that’s a death sentence for his reputation.
Every family from here to Naples will know the Scordatos chose the Carusos over him.
He becomes untouchable. Not in the way he wants.
In the way that means nobody will return his calls. ”
Dante hated Enzo. The bastard had sexually assaulted Dante’s wife Gemma when she’d been very young. Any chance to hurt Enzo, he’d take.
The room held its breath. Or maybe that was me.
Dante’s expression didn’t change. Which was how I knew he liked it.
Santo leaned back. Crossed his arms over his chest—those arms, ink-covered and thick, the arms of a man who solved problems with his body because no one had ever asked him to solve them with his mind.
He looked at me with an expression I recognized viscerally because I’d been seeing it my entire life.
The particular evaluating stare of a brother who watched you grow up.
Who carried you on his shoulders at Fourth of July parades.
Who taught you to throw a punch when you were nine and then told you never to use it because that was his job.
Who still, somewhere behind the scarred knuckles and the permanent stubble and the reputation that made grown men cross the street—still occasionally saw the kid who cried at their mother’s funeral.
“And who runs this?” he asked.
The question landed like a test. Because it was one.
“I do.”
Two words. I kept my voice level. Didn‘t oversell. Didn’t qualify. Didn’t add if that’s okay or I was thinking maybe or any of the softening language I’d trained myself to use over the years to make my competence more palatable to men who expected me to be decorative.
I do.
Santo looked at me for a long time. The seconds stretched. Somewhere in the kitchen, a pot lid clattered. Rosa‘s voice rose and fell in rapid Italian. The espressos sat cooling in their cardboard cups between us, and I could smell them—dark, bitter.
Then Santo uncrossed his arms. Something in his face shifted. Not softened—Santo didn’t soften. But rearranged. Like he was looking at a picture he’d seen a thousand times and noticing a new detail for the first time.
“Don‘t fuck this up,” he said.
It was the closest thing to a blessing Santo Caruso would ever give. I knew that. He knew I knew it. The corner of his mouth twitched—not a smile, not quite, but the ghost of one. The kind of thing that would deny its own existence if you tried to name it.
Santo had softened since his Little, Cora had come into his life, but that softening didn’t seem to apply to me.
I looked at Dante.
He nodded. Once. A single, contained dip of the chin that carried more weight than a ten-minute speech from anyone else on earth.
Approved.
Something cracked open in my chest. Not dramatically—nothing shattered, no great emotional revelation. But something.
I stood up. Gathered the espresso cups into the cardboard tray—Dante’s empty, Santo’s still full and cold.
The youngest Caruso always cleared the table.
It was one of those unspoken family rules that had calcified into tradition, and I did it automatically, the way I did everything: with the easy, practiced grace of a man who wanted you to believe nothing mattered to him very much.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said, casual as a weather report.
Santo made a sound that might have been a laugh and might have been a warning. Hard to tell with him. I chose to hear a laugh.
I left through the kitchen with the espresso tray in one hand and the printed page folded inside my jacket, and for one strange, stupid second, I wanted to drive north.
Not to Nero. Not to the club, or my apartment, or any of the rooms where people knew what to expect when Marco Caruso walked in.
North.
Two hours out of the city, where the roads got narrow and the air changed and forty acres of stubborn Wisconsin soil held the only thing I’d ever built that no one in my family knew how to ask me about.
A farmhouse with bad plumbing. Rows of vines that should not have survived the first winter.
Sicilian cuttings grafted onto American rootstock because apparently I enjoyed impossible things.
No one knew about it. Not really.
Dante knew I owned the land because Dante knew everything that could become a liability.
Santo knew there was “some farm bullshit” because Santo considered anything without a gun safe or a punching bag suspicious.
But neither of them knew what it meant to me.
Neither of them had seen me there at dawn with mud on my shoes and pruning shears in my hand, silent in a way I never managed to be anywhere else.
I could have gone there.
I didn’t.
I went back to Nero, because Nero was easier. Nero knew what version of me to expect.