Every empire, every vendetta, every transfer of power. The old order dies and something new grows from the bones. My mother's death when I was fifteen. My father's death three daysago. The deaths still to come, because in this life there are always more deaths to come.
I closed the file. Set it aside. Reached for the next one.
The office door slammed open hard enough to rattle the photograph frames on the wall. Santo stood in the doorway like a storm looking for somewhere to land, and I knew before he spoke that this conversation was going to require every ounce of control I had.
He was still wearing the same clothes he'd had on at the hospital three days ago. The dark shirt, wrinkled now, untucked. The jeans he'd pulled on when we got the call at two in the morning. I could smell the whiskey from across the room—good whiskey, from the weight of it, probably something from his own private stash—but his eyes were clear. He wasn't drunk. Santo could drink half a bottle of Jameson and still put a bullet through a playing card at fifty feet.
What he was, was vibrating. That barely contained energy that made him so good at what he did and so dangerous to be around. I'd seen it a hundred times before. The way his shoulders squared, the way his hands couldn't stay still, the way his jaw worked like he was chewing through something too tough to swallow.
"We need to talk about the Valentis," he said, and crossed to the desk in three strides. He planted both hands on the surface, leaning in, and I got the full force of his presence—the size of him, the coiled violence barely held in check. Santo had two inches on me and maybe thirty pounds of muscle, and he'd never learned to make himself smaller.
I didn't lean back. Didn't react at all. This was a skill I'd learned from watching our father handle exactly these kinds of moments: you let the other person spend their energy while you stayed still. The one who reacted first was the one who lost.
"I've been asking around," Santo continued, when I didn't respond. "Enzo had dinner with Papa two weeks ago. Private meeting, no one else present. Just the two of them in that back room at Il Sole, talking for three hours. And now Papa's dead from a heart attack he shouldn't have had." His voice cracked on the last word, just slightly, and I saw it—the grief underneath the rage, the loss he was trying to bury under action.
Il Sole was the de facto headquarters of the Valentinos. Flashy, new, expensive. Everything that Caruso’s wasn’t.
"You think Enzo killed him."
"I think it's a hell of a coincidence." Santo pushed off the desk and started pacing, his usual inability to stay still amplified by whatever was churning inside him. "There are drugs, Dante. I've been reading about it. Compounds that trigger cardiac arrest, shit that doesn't show up in standard autopsies. You inject someone and twelve hours later they drop dead from what looks like natural causes. The Valentis have a doctor on their payroll—remember? The one who trained at Johns Hopkins before he lost his license for selling prescriptions out the back door."
I remembered. Dr. Anthony Ricci. He'd been useful to the Valentis for a decade now—patching up gunshot wounds, signing death certificates that didn't invite questions, doing whatever else Enzo needed from a man with medical training and no ethics. I hadn't considered him in the context of my father's death.
I was considering him now.
"Even if you're right," I said, keeping my voice level, "we don't have proof. Not a shred of it."
"We don't need proof." Santo stopped pacing and turned to face me fully. The overhead light caught the scar that ran along his shoulder, visible through the open collar of his shirt—a knife wound from seven years ago, a fight that had nearly killed him. He touched it sometimes without realizing, a tell I'd learned toread. He was touching it now. "We need to send a message. Tonight. Before they think we're too weak to respond."
"A message."
"Enzo. His underboss. Maybe that doctor too, if we can find him." His hand drifted to his hip, where I knew his gun sat holstered under his jacket. Muscle memory. The weapon was always there, always ready. "We hit them hard, we hit them fast. Show the whole city that the Caruso family doesn't fuck around, even with the old man gone. Especially now he’s gone."
I watched my brother's face and saw everything he wasn't saying. The grief that looked like anger because Santo had never learned any other way to process pain. The fear underneath—fear that our father's death meant something was coming, something we weren't ready for. The desperate need to do something, anything, rather than sit with the unbearable weight of loss.
I understood.
I felt it too, that same itch under my skin, that same urge to act. But I'd learned a long time ago that the urge to act and the wisdom to wait were rarely the same thing.
"Santo." I said his name carefully, the way you'd talk to a wild animal you didn't want to startle. "What you're describing is a war. You understand that, right? Not just a message—a war. Because if we're wrong, if Papa really did just have a heart attack, then we're killing men for no reason. And if we're right, if Enzo did this, then he's been planning for our retaliation. He's ready for it. He wants us to come at him blind and angry."
"So what?" Santo's voice rose. "We just sit here? Let them think they got away with it?"
"I didn't say that."
"Then what are you saying?"
The question hung in the air between us. My brother, waiting for an answer. The empty restaurant around us, silent as a heldbreath. My father's papers spread across the desk, his reading glasses still sitting where he'd left them, his wine glass still holding that last dark inch.
I was the don now.
The decision was mine.
And I didn't have enough information to make it.
"I'm saying we wait," I told him. "Not forever. Not while they make another move. But until we know more. Until I understand what Papa was doing that made someone want him dead—if that's what happened."
Santo's jaw tightened. His hand was still on his gun, and for one long moment I thought he might argue, might push, might do something we'd both regret. But he was still my brother. And despite everything—despite the rage and the grief and the whiskey—he'd spent his whole life following the don's orders.
