Chapter 2 #2
I stepped forward and began.
I kept it tight. Efficient. I’d learned long ago that the value of my presentations was inversely proportional to their length—the shorter I spoke, the more my father listened, because brevity in this family was coded as confidence and confidence was coded as male, so I had to perform it twice as hard to receive half the credit.
Enzo Valenti. Formerly the most powerful crime boss on Chicago‘s North Side. Currently: his operation was wounded, he was liquidating, and he seemed dangerous in the specific way that desperate men with money and grudges are dangerous. I laid out the numbers—fourteen million dollars moved in nine days, the shell companies dissolved, the real estate sold below market. “He’s not rebuilding,” I said.
“He’s converting. Turning everything he has into a single play.
But that’s not all—the Caruso’s have contacted us.
They want to meet, too. I don’t know what their angle is.
Maybe intimidation? But I see three plays. ”
I walked through the three modelled outcomes.
Scenario one: the Scordatos ally with Valenti, fund his Chicago operation, gain an American foothold.
Financial projections showed moderate returns against significant risk—Valenti’s infrastructure was gutted, his soldiers were defecting, and his political cover had evaporated.
We’d be investing in a man with no army and no allies.
Scenario two: the Scordatos decline the alliance, Valenti approaches someone else—the Ndrangheta, possibly, or the Albanians.
He becomes someone else’s problem, but the Scordato family loses the opportunity for American expansion.
Scenario three—and here I paused, because this was the one that mattered, the one I’d spent the most time on—the Scordatos use Valenti’s approach as a door.
Not to him. To his enemies. To the Caruso family, who controlled the territory Valenti wanted and who possessed the legitimate business infrastructure that the Scordatos actually needed.
“Valenti is offering us a vendetta,” I said. “The Carusos could offer us a financial partnership. The question isn‘t whether Valenti’s money is real. It‘s whether his position is worth the cost of holding it.”
Gianni nodded throughout. The slow, rhythmic nod of a man who is performing agreement with ideas he’s encountering for the first time. He even made a sound at one point—a low “mmm”—as though a thought I’d articulated had confirmed something he’d been mulling over independently.
He hadn’t been mulling over anything. No doubt he’d been thinking about his boat.
I finished. Stepped back. Resumed my position.
The study was silent. The curtains moved slightly—a breeze from the courtyard, carrying the smell of jasmine and the distant sound of someone working in the garden below. My father’s espresso was still untouched.
Don Arturo removed his reading glasses. Folded them with the deliberate precision of a man who assigned weight to small gestures because he understood that power lived in the pauses, not the speeches. He set the glasses on the desk beside the espresso. Aligned them.
He said nothing for a long time.
Then he looked up—not at me. Past me. At Gianni, who was standing with his arms crossed in the attitude of a man awaiting well-deserved praise.
“Good work, Gianni.”
Three words. My father’s voice was warm. Not effusive—Arturo Scordato was not an effusive man—but warm in the way that meant he was pleased, that the work had met his standard, that his son had performed as expected.
His son.
My face didn’t change. It never did.
Gianni said, “Grazie, Papa.” He said the way you thank someone for passing the salt.
I stood very still and breathed and waited for the moment to pass, the way I always waited.
I’d been knocking on the door since I was nineteen. But the truth is, it was walled over. There was no door. There had never been a door.
Gianni left and the study contracted—smaller now, quieter, the dust motes suspended in the light from the curtain gap like witnesses waiting to testify.
I was already turning to follow when my father said, “Serafina. Stay.”
Two words. Not a request. My father didn’t make requests. It was a skill I’d inherited, though mine tended toward the passive-aggressive end of the spectrum.
I turned back.
He gestured to the chair across from his desk.
Not the standing position. Not the right-of-desk auxiliary role.
The chair. The leather one with the cracked arm—the left arm, split along the seam where decades of men had rested their elbows while receiving news that would change their lives.
I knew this chair. I had never been asked to sit in it.
I sat.
The leather was warm from the sun that reached it through the gap in the curtains. The cracked arm was rough under my forearm. I folded my hands in my lap—a gesture I recognized as self-containment, the physical act of holding myself together before I knew what I was holding together for.
My father looked at me.
“I want you in Chicago,” he said.
I blinked. Once. The only tell I allowed.
“Not Gianni,” he continued, as though he’d heard the question forming. “You. You will go as the Scordato representative. Assess the Caruso family directly. Not the Valentis. Meet with them. Take the temperature of the situation before any commitments are made.”
He said this the way he said everything simply, as a settled fact.
He was wearing the reading glasses again, or had put them back on; I couldn’t remember.
He folded his hands on the desk in front of him, and I noticed how much his hands looked like mine.
Same long fingers. Same squared-off nails. Same stillness.
I processed, quickly.
I would be there as the Scordato representative. With my name. My face. Not ghost-writing for Gianni. Not producing analysis that someone else would present. Me, across a table from the Carusos, speaking with the authority of the family behind me.
It would be the first time.
Something shifted in my chest. Not dramatically—I don’t do dramatic, as a rule. But something.
“Why not Gianni, Papa?” I asked.
I had to ask.
My father looked at me over the desk. Those dark eyes—my eyes, our eyes, the Scordato eyes—met mine and I felt the weight of his attention. Like gravity had briefly increased in the space between us.
“Because I need it done properly,” he said.
He didn’t say: You’re brilliant and I’ve been watching and I know it’s been you all along.
He didn’t say: I’m sorry for every time I said Gianni’s name when I should have said yours.
He didn’t say: You are my best strategist, my sharpest mind, and the fact that I’ve let your brother take credit for your work is a failure I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting.
He said done properly. And he let me fill in the rest.
I wanted to be furious. I wanted to feel the righteous, clean-burning anger of a woman who has been given crumbs from a table she built with her own hands and is finally, correctly, insulted by the portion size. That would have been satisfying. That would have been simple.
Instead, I felt my throat tighten.
Because here’s the thing about my father, the thing that makes it worse: he was not a cruel man.
A cruel man could be dismissed. A cruel man could be categorized and filed under villain and the narrative would be clean.
Arturo Scordato loved me. In his way. Within his limitations.
Inside a world that told him daughters were to be protected and sons were to be trusted, he had done what he could—which was to rely on me completely while acknowledging me never.
Until now.
“I’ll leave tomorrow,” I said, and my voice was level, and my hands were still, and my face showed nothing.
I stood. Pushed the chair back. The cracked leather arm caught the light.
“Serafina.”
I turned at the door.
My father was looking at the document on his desk—my document, Gianni’s name, forty pages of work. He touched the cover page with one finger. Didn’t look up.
“Travel safe,” he said.
It wasn’t enough. It was never enough. But it was more than he’d given me before, and I took it carefully, with both hands, holding it close enough to feel its warmth while knowing it could be taken back without warning.
“Grazie, Papa.”
I walked out. Down the hallway. Past the stone walls and the window where the morning light was now full and golden and relentless. I made it to the staircase before I had to stop. Just for a moment. Just to press my back against the cool wall and close my eyes and breathe.
My eyes were dry. I made sure of that.
Then I went upstairs to pack.
My bedroom hadn’t changed since I was sixteen.
The bed was narrow—a single, wrought-iron frame, the kind of bed that suited a girl who read until two in the morning and didn’t take up much space.
The desk was buried under books I’d accumulated between the ages of twelve and twenty-two and never thrown away because throwing away a book felt like a minor act of violence.
Machiavelli shared shelf space with a water-stained copy of Anna Karenina and a paperback thriller I’d bought at the Palermo train station when I was seventeen and never finished because the protagonist made a strategic error on page forty that I found personally offensive.
The shutters were open to the courtyard below, where the bougainvillea had grown so aggressively over the years that it now blocked half the light, turning the room into a kind of purple-shadowed cave.
I’d asked the gardener to trim it twice. The bougainvillea had won.