Chapter One
Carlo
“Weddings bring people together,” booms Joe Alessi, looking pleased as hell with himself. And why shouldn’t he? It’s his home away from home we’re all gathered in this weekend, his Kingdom by the Sea, an honest-to-God paradise, a cluster of architectural dreams lined up along the beachfront.
The Alessi Hamptons getaway is a locked-down compound, especially this weekend, butcompoundsuggests a drab surrounding, restrained and dull. That’s not what this place is like, not at all. It’s well-protected, certainly. There are lookouts and fences and gates and checkpoints on the roads, and for this particular wedding, where the Bosses of all the most important New York Families are present, security has been stepped up.
But it’s not a prison. Nothing like a prison. All those security precautions are kept carefully away from view. The guards around the estate are quiet and professional, and each Family has taken their own security precautions as well, just as subtle.
The wedding feast is taking place in the central mansion, dubbed Villa Alessi. The whole compound is a debauched ostentation sticking out among the more laid-back, beach-appropriate mansions of well-to-do Hampton visitors. And at its heart is Villa Alessi, decorated like Versace ate Louis XVI, followed by a dessert of the Roman Empire at its gaudiest, then puked it all back up and added a touch of gold leaf and imported Italian marble.
And on top of allthat, it’s decorated for a wedding.
It’s a fucking palace, and it almost hurts my eyes to look around at the gleaming chandeliers, the gilded mirrors, the golden velvet drapes across windows. Alessi’s voice echoes off the walls, even crowded as they are with Renaissance art and tapestries, among the flower arrangements and the streamers and the silk banners proclaiming the names of the bride and groom. This room is unmistakably Alessi’s throne room, and the rest of the Families are visiting courts paying homage to the Emperor of the Hamptons.
“Jesus,” I muttered when I walked in with my father, who gave me the usual death glare and growled at me to mind my fucking manners.
I always mind my fucking manners. You’d think he’d know that by now, but nothing I do ever pleases the old man; no court win is big enough, no plea deal impressive enough. Not even the excess of the ballroom we’re in tonight is enough to impress Lorenzo “Larry” Bianchi, the managing partner and Dictator-for-Life of Bianchi and Associates. I lasted through the buffet wedding feast sitting there next to him; now I’ve escaped to the well-stocked bar, where I’ve been downing more top-shelf tequila than I should while the speeches drone on and on.
The last place on earth I want to be right now is stuck out in the Hamptons at a goddamn wedding. I have a case load like you wouldn’t believe, and dear old Papa breathing over my shoulder like a dragon to make sure the firm keeps up its winning reputation. The only two things my father cares about in this whole wide world: winning and reputation.
The only bright spot in this weekend is the fact that Nick Fontana is also attending. But I’m starting to wonder if I’ll even get any time with him.
After the crowd responds to the toast from Alessi, another tinkling of a knife against crystal makes the crowd fall silent although around the edges, where I am, there’s still muted conversation among those of us who can’t bear to be quiet, even to hear the groom’s speech as he begins to give his own wedding toast.
“On behalf of my, uh, my wife and me,” he begins, that dumb fucker, and then he halts. I know what he’s waiting for. I don’t want to give it to him. But the sooner he’s done, the sooner I can escape this room, go back up and check my emails. I swivel around on the bar stool, lean my elbows back on the railing, legs spread, eyebrows cocked toSarcasticlevel.
He gives a self-satisfied smile.
Ray Gatti is under the unfortunate impression that he is irresistible. That I am here tonight grieving his loss from the world of single men. That there could have been something between us which I’ll always regret not taking up.
None of these things are at all true.
After a second, he clears his throat too loudly into the microphone, and continues. “Uh. Sophia and me, we’d like to thank you all for coming out here, and thanks of course to Don Alessi, who let us use this amazing place of his.”
It wasn’t Alessi who suggested it. It was Luca D’Amato, the Morelli Don, and the wedding waswaydown his list of priorities in coming here. He’s been looking for a place to hold a meeting between the New York Families, somewhere no blood has been spilled, somewhere neutral. Joe Alessi and his Family are as neutral as they come.
After the Vicario Family disintegrated, their men scattering to the other Families, and the Fuscone starter colony died off, the Clemenzas and the Giulianos settled comfortably into an alliance on one side. The Rossis and the Morellis are on the other.
The Alessis have always made their way through the underworld by playing Switzerland, but neutrality won’t be an option soon. Not when the Irish really get started on their war against the Families. Their first target might be the Morellis, but every other Family is at risk as well.
But Alessi was right in what he said during his toast. Weddings really do bring people together—even rival Mob Families. Who would ever have thought enemies could kiss and make up? And this isn’t just a Band-Aid over the gaping wound left by the last few years of assassinations, executions and murders. No, they’re really suturing themselves together this time: Gatti, a Giuliano Family member and the godson of Don Louis Clemenza, is marrying the granddaughter of Al Vollero, one of the Morelli Capos.
It’s a real Romeo and Juliet tale, or it would be if I didn’t know it was purely a political match.
Gatti has been chasing me for a year now, since I first ran into him at a bar and let him down gently as soon as an offer left his lips. But he’s not the kind of man who understands a gentleNo, nor a firm one, as I found out. Combined with his own terror of being outed within a notoriously homophobic Family, it makes him dangerous—but also easy to provoke. If he’d been more polite about me turning him down, I might have forgiven the psychological issues. But he wasn’t, so I can’t. Ergo, I can’t help goading him from time to time. He doesn’t understand that I’d never pull him out of that closet, because I don’t work that way. His problem is, he thinks everyone’s like him, and he’d out anyone, without hesitation, if he thought he’d gain something from it.
So while his eyes are still on me, I slide a hand down my inner thigh. He stops his speech again and gives an audible gulp.
I’m not sure if Sophia Vicente, his bored-looking bride, is aware of her beau’s preferences—or if she just doesn’t care. Twenty-one years old, she was meticulously stunning when she walked down the aisle in a plunge-neck gown held together by hope alone. No one could take their eyes off her, Gatti included. Beauty is beauty, and it’s hard to look away from so much of it poured into a tight white wedding dress.
Luca D’Amato, the Morelli Don gave his blessing to this union only after speaking personally with Sophia about it—alone, away from her uncle, to give her every chance to back out. He and his husband had her over for a quiet dinner one night after Al Vollero had come to him to ask his permission for the match. Don Morelli’s no fool, and there was no way he believed it was a love match. But whatever Sophia said to him that night was persuasive enough that he let the wedding go ahead. In fact, I was one of the first to know about it, since he asked me to draw up the prenuptial agreement myself, setting out Sophia’s clear-eyed and hard-headed demands.
Luca D’Amato understands that it’s important to do what’s best not only for the Family, but for New York as a whole. Sophia Vicente, from what little I know of her, has the same approach. The only personal thing she ever said to me was that Gatti didn’t want me at the wedding, but that she’d get me on the list if I liked. I told her I’d be happier to sit this one out, but in the end my name was scrawled onto the invitation as an afterthought, an “& Carlo” after my father’s name, and I’m still not sure exactly how it came about.
Anyway, like I said, the wedding is not the point of this weekend. There’s a meeting later tonight to which I have not been invited, though my father has, and I know in my gut it’s the whole point of this Hamptons vacay.
My phone buzzes against my thigh and I fish it out of my pocket.
