CHAPTER ONE
Nico
The spreadsheet on my phone glows back at me like a middle finger.
Liam's email came through at 4:47 this morning. Because apparently the man doesn't sleep. I've been staring at the shipping manifests for the past twenty minutes while pretending to eat breakfast.
Something doesn't add up. The weight discrepancies on the construction materials from our Jersey supplier are minor. Three percent variance, maybe four. Anyone else would call it rounding error.
I don't believe in rounding errors.
"Nico." Vittoria's voice cuts through my calculations. "You're going to burn a hole through that phone."
I don't look up. "I'm working."
"Earth to Nico." A piece of bread bounces off my shoulder.
That gets my attention. I raise my head slowly, fixing my sister with a look that's made grown men confess to things they didn't even do. "Did you just throw food at me?"
Vittoria grins, completely unbothered. Her dark hair is piled in that messy bun she wears when she's been up all night coding, and there's a smugness in her eyes that tells me she knows exactly how much it irritates me. "You weren't responding to verbal stimuli. I had to escalate."
"Next time, try a bullet. It'll be more effective."
"Nico," Nora says mildly from across the table, not looking up from her coffee. "Play nice."
I shift my gaze to Pietro's wife. Still strange to think of her that way, the Irish mob princess who somehow became family.
I spent the first three months half-expecting her to slit Pietro's throat in his sleep.
She didn't. Obviously. Instead, she married him, and now she sits at our breakfast table like she was born to it.
My brother looks different these days. The sharp edges are still there. He's still the Don. But there's something that wasn't there six months ago, when he was running headfirst into bullets like he was trying to find the one with his name on it.
Nora did that. Gave him a reason to come home.
I don't understand it. Don't trust it, either. Love makes people sloppy. Predictable. It creates vulnerabilities where there shouldn't be any.
But Pietro's alive, and he's leading better than he did when he first took the role, so I keep my opinions to myself.
"Nico."
I look up at Pietro's voice.
"I need you to handle something."
"The Jersey shipments are off," I say immediately. "Three percent variance, but it's consistent across?—"
"Not that." Pietro waves a hand. "I'll look at it later. This is different."
I wait. My fingers stop their tapping against the table.
"Giulia's taking time off."
The words don't compute. I run them through my brain again, searching for the hidden meaning, the subtext.
Nothing.
"What?"
