Chapter 1 #4
Past midnight. Nero was closed, the last stragglers ushered out by security an hour ago, and I was alone behind the bar in the dark.
Just me and the amber strip of light beneath the bar top, which painted my hands in gold and made the row of bottles look like a skyline in miniature.
The club was a different animal when it was empty—cavernous, still, the black marble surfaces reflecting nothing because there was nothing left to reflect.
No bodies, no bass, no laughter. Just the hum of the refrigeration units and the occasional tick of the building settling into itself.
I liked it better this way. The empty version. The one that belonged only to me.
I reached for the mezcal. Del Maguey Vida—smoky, a little rough, the kind of spirit that didn’t apologize for what it was.
Crucially, not watered down. Next to it, blood orange juice I’d pressed that afternoon in the back kitchen while Gia watched me like I‘d lost my mind. A bottle of Amaro Averna, dark as coffee, bitter and sweet. And a small dropper bottle of saline solution—two percent, precise, because salt didn’t just season a drink; it restructured it, suppressed bitterness, opened aromatics, made everything else more itself.
I built the cocktail the way I’d been building it for three weeks.
Two ounces mezcal. One ounce blood orange.
Half ounce Averna, floated, not stirred.
Two drops saline. Ice in the shaker—not cubes, not crushed, but cracked, because the dilution rate mattered and I was the kind of person who cared about dilution rates at midnight in an empty nightclub, which was either admirable or pathological depending on who you asked.
I shook. Fifteen seconds, hard, until the tin frosted and my fingers ached. Strained it into a coupe glass—a real one, crystal, from the set I kept behind the bar for no one’s use but my own.
Tasted.
Too sweet. The blood orange was pushing past the smoke, rounding the edges when I wanted them sharp. The Averna was getting lost.
I dumped it. Rinsed the glass. Started again.
This was the ritual. Not the cocktail—the act.
The repetition, the calibration, the incremental adjustments toward something that existed only in my head and had to be coaxed into the physical world through patience and attention.
I made things for the pleasure of making them right.
This cocktail would never go on the menu at Nero.
No one would ever order it. No one would ever know it existed.
There was only one thing I’d ever made that didn’t disappear after I got it right.
I didn’t let myself think about it often. Thinking about it led to calendars and frost warnings and soil reports and the old ache behind my ribs that came whenever I remembered what it felt like to put my hands into earth instead of another man’s business.
The cocktail was safer.
Perfect, then gone.
That was the point.
Most of what I did existed in that space—the invisible space between performance and product, between what people saw and what was actually happening.
I ran a profitable nightclub. I knew everyone in Chicago.
I smiled and charmed and made people comfortable and collected information they didn’t know they were giving me.
And none of it was visible in the way that Dante‘s authority was visible, or Santo’s violence. I worked in the margins. In the dark.
Second attempt. I pulled back the blood orange by a quarter ounce, added another drop of saline, and shook it six seconds longer to push the dilution and soften the mezcal’s bite without drowning it.
Strained. Tasted.
Better. Close. The smoke and the citrus were talking to each other now instead of competing. The Averna sat on top like a thought you couldn’t quite finish—present, haunting, refusing to resolve.
The Scordatos would send someone. Who?
My mind ran the scenarios while my hands worked.
An underboss, probably. Or a consigliere—someone with authority to negotiate but not to commit, which would give them room to assess us before deciding.
Maybe a lawyer. The Sicilian families loved lawyers, used them the way American families used soldiers—as a first line of defense, a show of civilization, a reminder that the people you were dealing with had education and patience and would prefer not to kill you.
I imagined an old-school emissary. Linen suit.
Controlled English with a Sicilian accent.
A handshake that communicated generations of power.
He’d want to meet at a steakhouse and talk about respect and tradition and the old ways, and I’d listen patiently and pour good wine and wait for the moment when the performance fell away and the real negotiation began.
I could handle that. I’d been performing my whole life. The difference was that now the performance had a purpose beyond survival.
Third attempt. I adjusted nothing. Made it exactly the same as the second. Shook, strained, held the coupe glass up to the amber light.
The liquid caught the glow and held it—dark amber at the edges, brighter at the center, the Averna floating on top like a bruise that hadn’t quite formed. It was beautiful. It was exactly right.
I tasted it one more time. Let it sit on my tongue. The smoke, the sweetness, the bitter finish that lingered like a question.
Perfect.
I tipped it into the sink. Watched it spiral down the drain, all that precision and patience disappearing in two seconds.
Lust. Everything started with lust.
Mine was the lust for perfection. The lust for one perfect moment, and then, the desire to lose it all.
Perfect, then gone. Like most of what I did.
But not this. This would go right.