Chapter 1
Dante
Death.
Everything starts with death.
The back office at Caruso's smelled like my father. Cigar smoke embedded in the leather chair. The faint trace of his cologne—Acqua di Parma—that he'd worn since before I was born.
Of course it still smelled like him. It had only been three days.
Three days since his heart stopped at this very desk. Three days since life had changed forever. Three days since the end and a brand new beginning.
No one had thought to air out the room. Or maybe they had thought about it and decided not to. Maybe they were waiting for me to give the order.
I was the don now. Every order was mine to give.
The restaurant had closed early tonight—"family matters," Sal had told the regulars with that careful blankness he'd perfected over forty years. The dining room sat empty beyond theoffice door, chairs upturned on tables, the amber wall sconces dimmed to a faint glow. I could hear the ice machine cycling in the kitchen. The tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway. Nothing else. The silence pressed against my ears like something physical.
I'd been going through his papers for three hours. Bank statements, property deeds, contracts with suppliers. The legitimate architecture of our empire, the foundation everything else was built on. Vito Caruso had been meticulous. Every transaction documented, every relationship mapped, every dollar accounted for. He'd taught me that—taught all of us, really, but me most of all. "A man who doesn't know his own business doesn't deserve to keep it," he'd said, more times than I could count.
My hands kept stopping on the wrong things.
His reading glasses, folded on top of a stack of invoices. He'd started needing them five years ago and hated it—hated any sign of weakness, any evidence that his body was betraying him. He'd ordered the frames from Milan, thin gold wire, so subtle you barely noticed them. A vanity, disguised as practicality. That was my father all over.
The half-finished glass of Barolo on the corner of the desk. No one had cleared it away. The wine had evaporated down to maybe an inch, leaving a dark ring on the crystal. He'd been drinking this when it happened. Had he felt it coming? Had there been a moment of panic, of understanding, before his heart simply stopped?
The photograph of my mother, tucked into the leather blotter where he could see it without anyone else noticing. Maria Caruso, dead when I was fifteen. In the picture she was maybe thirty, dark hair swept up, pearl earrings catching the light, smiling at something just past the camera's edge. She'd died in this office too—not literally, but the news had come here, thephone call from the hospital, and I'd watched my father's face go gray as old ash. He'd never fully come back from that. None of us had.
I set the photograph down carefully and pressed my palms flat against the desk.
Sixty-three years old. Robust, the doctors had said afterward, as if that made it more surprising rather than less. He'd played tennis twice a week. He'd eaten Rosa's cooking, sure, but he'd also walked everywhere, kept his weight in check, hadn't touched a cigarette in twenty years. "Sudden cardiac arrest," they'd told me, with that clinical detachment medical professionals learn to wear like armor. "A widow-maker. The blockage was complete. There was nothing anyone could have done."
I didn't believe in coincidences.
But I also didn't have evidence of anything else. Just a dead father, a city watching to see if I could fill his shoes, and the cold mathematics of power: when a don dies, someone benefits. The only question was who.
I pulled another file from the drawer. Real estate holdings on the South Side. Properties we'd owned for decades, the legitimate face of less legitimate money. I knew about these. I knew about most of it—Vito had been grooming me since I was eighteen, walking me through the family's interests piece by piece. But there's a difference between being shown the engine and being handed the keys.
The clock ticked.
Somewhere distant, a car alarm went off and stopped again.
I thought about the funeral to come. St. Ignatius, the church where my parents had been married, where my brothers and I had been baptized. Half of Chicago would be there—politicians, businessmen, other family heads. Paying respects, yes. But also watching. Assessing. Calculating whether the Caruso empire wasstill strong or whether the old man's death had created an opportunity.
I would have to stand in the front pew with my siblings and perform grief while simultaneously projecting strength. I would have to shake hands with men who might have ordered my father's death—if it had been ordered at all—and smile and thank them for coming. I would have to be what my father had trained me to be: controlled, deliberate, every word measured.
The thing no one tells you about inheriting power is how much it weighs before you've done anything with it.
I picked up the photograph again. My mother's face, frozen in that long-ago happiness. Vito had kept her here, close, all these years. He'd never remarried, never even dated as far as I knew. That kind of grief—the kind that calcifies into a permanent condition—had always seemed like weakness to me. Attachment made you vulnerable. Love made you stupid. I'd watched it nearly destroy him after she died, watched him drink too much and trust the wrong people and almost lose everything we'd built.
I'd sworn I wouldn't make the same mistake.
And yet here I was, three days after his heart stopped, pressing my thumb against the edge of a photograph as if I could feel her warmth through the paper. Here I was, angry at myself for being angry at him—for all the conversations we hadn't finished, all the silences that had grown up between us like weeds. Three years of distance. Three years of me questioning his decisions, of him retreating into stubborn pride, of both of us too proud to be the first to bend.
Now I'd never have the chance to repair it.
Death. Everything starts with death.
