Chapter 5
Marco
The espresso machine at Caruso’s was still broken.
Eleven days of the most powerful crime family in Chicago sending someone to the corner bodega for cardboard-tray espressos because not one of us could manage to call a fucking repairman.
I set the tray on the table in the back room and took my usual chair.
This morning, the room particularly smelled like marinara.
I could practically hear the cauldrons of the sauce bubbling away in the kitchen.
Dante was already seated, the Wall Street Journal folded beside his elbow with a precision that suggested he’d read it and decided to keep it visible as a prop.
Santo was across from him, slouched in his chair with aggressive relaxation.
His arms were crossed. His henley was black.
His expression said he’d rather be anywhere else. Classic Santo.
“The espresso machine,” I said, sitting down.
“Rosa called someone,” Dante said.
“Rosa called someone six days ago. The someone hasn’t come.”
“Then call another someone.” Dante picked up his cup. Sipped. Set it down with the micro-frown of a man drinking bodega espresso when he deserved better. “Brief us.”
I briefed them.
Four days of due diligence with Serafina Scordato, and the picture was clear: the woman worked like a surgeon—methodically, without wasted motion, every incision placed exactly where it needed to go.
She’d requested access to eighteen months of financial statements across all legitimate Caruso holdings.
She’d cross-referenced our construction permits against county records, our restaurant supply chains against wholesale pricing, our real estate holdings against assessed values and tax filings.
She found things I’d buried three layers deep and asked about them in the same neutral tone she used to ask where the bathroom was.
“She’s thorough,” I said. “Disciplined. Prepared. Doesn’t waste time.”
Dante nodded. The don’s nod—the one that said continue without moving any other part of his face.
“She’s working through the Moretti shipping data now. The port access agreements, the customs relationships, the logistics framework. She wants to understand how the East Coast pipeline functions before she assesses whether Scordato capital can move through it.”
“And?” Dante asked. “What‘s she like to work with?”
A reasonable question. A professional question.
I started professional.
“Disciplined,” I said again. “She doesn’t ask questions she already knows the answers to.
She reads everything twice. She takes notes in Italian and switches to English when she wants precision, which tells you something about how her mind categorizes information—Italian for instinct, English for analysis. ”
Good. Clean. Strategic.
A pause.
“She holds her espresso cup with her fingertips,” I said. “Not her palm. Her fingertips. Like she doesn‘t want to startle it.”
Less clean.
“Tuesday she caught a discrepancy in the Moretti shipping data — a tonnage figure that didn’t match the customs declaration by about four percent.
I’d reviewed that page twice. She found it without looking up.
Just this quiet ‘this figure is wrong,’ and then she corrected it in the margin and kept reading.
” I paused. “She didn‘t even make it a thing. Didn’t announce it. Just fixed it and moved on.”
That had hit me somewhere behind the sternum. I didn’t say that part.
“She reads rooms,” I continued. “Instantly, comprehensively, without conscious effort. She walks into a space and I can see the calculation happen, the assessment of every person, every angle, every possible trajectory. It takes her about four seconds. She doesn’t look like she’s doing it.
She looks like she’s adjusting her sleeve or checking her phone, but she’s mapping the entire room. ”
Dante was watching me. Neutral. Still.
“Her voice drops when she switches to Italian. Mid-conversation, mid-sentence sometimes—the English will be precise, measured, and then she’ll hit a word that doesn’t translate and she drops into Italian, and the register shifts.
Goes lower. Warmer. It does something to the air in whatever room she’s in. Like the temperature changes.”
I was aware, distantly, that I was no longer briefing. I was crushing.
“She’s funny. Not in a way most people would notice.
Dry. Precise. She delivers every line completely flat, so the sharpness lands before you realize you’ve been cut.
Yesterday she asked me if Nero’s quarterly revenue included the markup on watered-down vodka or if that was a separate line item.
Said it without blinking. I almost choked on my coffee. ”
I was smiling. I could feel it on my face—not the performance smile, not the Nero smile, but the real one, the one I didn’t deploy because it revealed things the other smile was specifically designed to conceal.
“And she smells like —“
I stopped.
The silence in the back room was the loudest thing I’d ever heard.
Santo was staring at me like I’d smacked him in the mouth.
Dante was looking at the Wall Street Journal. Deliberately. With the focused attention of a man who had suddenly found the bond yield analysis absolutely riveting.
“Marco,” Santo said.
“What?”
“You’ve been talking about this woman for five minutes and you haven‘t said a single thing about whether she’s going to recommend the alliance.”
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
I’d been about to tell my brothers what she smelled like.
In a business meeting.
In the back room of the family restaurant.
While discussing a multi-continental criminal alliance.
Dante’s expression didn’t change. He now possessed information about me that I hadn’t intended to provide, and he would store it with the same meticulous care he stored everything, and at some future point, when it was strategically relevant, he would use it.
Not against me. Never against me. But he would use it.
Santo drained his cold espresso. Set the cup down with a ceramic click that sounded like a period at the end of a sentence.
“Brtoher,” he said, “you’re fucked.”
Flat.
Declarative.
Correct.
I gathered the cups. Stacked them in the cardboard tray. The youngest Caruso clearing the table. Always.
“She’ll recommend the alliance,” I said, because someone had to say something professional, and both my brothers had apparently decided that mocking me was the afternoon’s priority. “The numbers support it. She’s too smart to let personal—she’s too smart to miss the opportunity.”
“Personal what?” Santo said. “Personal what, Marco?”
“I’m leaving now.”
“Smart call,” Dante said, without looking up from the newspaper.
I took the tray and walked out through the kitchen, past Rosa, who was on the phone with someone—possibly the espresso repairman, possibly her sister in Calabria—and out the back door into the alley where my car was parked.
The drive to Nero took twenty-two minutes. I gripped the steering wheel at ten and two and tried to remember the last time a woman had occupied this much of my head.
I couldn’t.
I was, as Santo so eloquently put it, fucked.
The city moved past the windows — grid lines, right angles, a city that was decided. I drove through it and thought about a woman who read rooms like a language and held coffee cups like living things and smelled like something clean I couldn’t name and didn’t want to stop trying to identify.
Fucked. Completely. Without appeal.
It was past midnight. Nero was winding down below—the last set ending, the lights coming up by degrees, the crowd thinning to the stubborn few who treated closing time as a personal affront.
I sat in my third-floor office with the Scordato financial documents spread across both monitors and told myself I was working.
The documents were impeccable. This was worth noting because impeccable documents are rare in my world.
The Scordato files were meticulous. Clean formatting.
Consistent notation. Cross-referenced internally, with footnotes that cited source data and methodology.
They’d been prepared by someone who understood that transparency, when offered strategically, was more persuasive than secrecy.
Someone who knew that the fastest way to earn trust was to hand over something real and let the other side verify it.
Serafina had prepared these. Obviously. Her brother’s name appeared nowhere in the metadata, which told me everything about who actually ran the Scordato operation.
I scrolled through a shipping manifest. Read the same line four times. Retained nothing.
My phone sat facedown on the desk. I’d turned it over an hour ago when the screen lit up for the third time—the same name, the same woman, three variations of the same text: Had a great time at dinner, we should do it again, followed by Hey, are you around this week? , followed by a photo I didn’t open.
Two weeks ago I’d taken her to a restaurant in the West Loop.
A woman. Attractive—obviously attractive, or I wouldn’t have taken her.
She had dark hair. Or blonde. She worked in—finance?
Media? She’d laughed at my jokes, touched my arm, done everything correctly.
The whole evening had been correct. A correct dinner with a correct woman that produced the correct outcome, which was her leaving in the morning and me forgetting the specifics before my espresso was cold.
I could not remember her face.
I could picture the exact way Serafina’s index finger moved when she turned a page.