Even when the don was me.
"Fine," he said, the word sharp as a blade. "We wait. But not long, Dante. I'm not going to let them get away with this."
"Santo, sit down before you fall down." We both turned to see Marco, slipping in through the door Santo had left open, quiet as a shadow.
At twenty-six, my youngest brother had always been the diplomat. The one who could talk to anyone, smooth over anything, charm his way into rooms the rest of us had to fight to enter. Tonight the charm was stripped away. His eyes were shadowed, his jaw tight, and there was something harder underneath the exhaustion—a reminder that the golden boy had grown up in the same house as the rest of us, learned the same lessons, carried the same weight.
“I said sit, Santino.” Marco crossed to the cabinet where our father had kept his private reserve. The good stuff. The bottles no one else was allowed to touch, not even us, not without Vito's express permission.
Marco poured himself three fingers of the twenty-year Macallan without hesitation.
The small desecration felt deliberate. A way of saying: the old rules are dead too. Papa's gone. We make our own laws now.
Santo didn’t take Marco’s advice. He stood by the window, arms crossed, watching our younger brother with barely concealed impatience.
"Did you come to lecture me about patience?" Santo's voice was tight. "Because I've had enough of that shit from—"
"I came to make sure we don't do something stupid." Marco took a long drink, then set the glass down on our father's desk with a deliberate click. "You want to hit the Valentis. I understand. I even agree there's reason to be suspicious. But Dante’s right, suspicion isn't proof, Santo. And moving on Enzo Valenti without evidence would be the worst strategic mistake we could make right now."
"Strategic." Santo spat the word like a curse. "Our father is dead."
"Our father is dead," Marco agreed. "And every family in Chicago is watching to see how we respond. You want to know what they're thinking? They're thinking: the old man's gone, the sons are young and hot-headed, maybe this is our chance to renegotiate some agreements. Maybe this is our chance to test the new don." His eyes flicked to me, acknowledging my position, then back to Santo. "If we attack the Valentis and we're wrong, we're murderers. We lose every ally we have. The peace Papa spent twenty years maintaining shatters overnight, and we spend the next decade fighting a war on three fronts instead of one."
"And if we're right?" Santo pushed off from the window, his bulk filling the small office. "If Enzo did kill him?"
"Then we need proof. Evidence we can show to the other families, something that justifies what comes next." Marco'svoice stayed even, controlled, but I could see the effort it cost him. "Even if we're right, Santo—why? What does Enzo gain from killing Papa now, when the alliance with the Moretti family is about to cement Caruso power for another generation?"
It was the right question. The question I'd been turning over in my own mind since Santo had first started talking. Enzo Valenti was many things—patient, calculating, ambitious—but he wasn't stupid. If he'd wanted Vito dead, there had to be a reason. A gain that outweighed the risk.
I didn't know what that gain was.
"Maybe he's scared," Santo said. "Maybe the Moretti alliance was the thing that scared him. The Carusos getting stronger, more connected—"
"Then why kill Papa instead of disrupting the wedding?" Marco shook his head. "The marriage isn't until November. Plenty of time to interfere, if that was his goal. Killing the don makes us angry, sure. But it doesn't stop the alliance. It doesn't even weaken us that much, strategically speaking—no offense, Dante."
The marriage.
My mariage.
A marriage I didn’t want.
"None taken."
"So why now? Why this way?" Marco spread his hands. "Either Enzo is making a move we don't understand yet, or Papa's death was exactly what the doctors said it was—sudden, unexpected, nobody's fault. I know which one you want to believe, Santo. Hell, I know which one I want to believe. But wanting something doesn't make it true."
The silence stretched between us, heavy with everything we weren't saying. I watched my brothers—Santo with his barely leashed violence, Marco with his careful logic—and saw the same thing I always saw when we were together. Three different men,three different ways of surviving this life. Santo fought. Marco talked. And I—
I calculated. I weighed. I waited for the path to become clear.
Both of them were looking at me now. The new don. The tiebreaker.
Santo wanted war. His whole body was angled toward action, toward violence, toward doing something with the grief that was eating him alive. I understood the impulse. I felt it too, that same burning need to make someone pay.
Marco wanted patience. Time to gather information, to think, to play the long game our father had always favored. He was right about the risks—if we moved on the Valentis and we were wrong, the consequences would be catastrophic. We'd lose everything.
Two choices. Two paths. And every second I didn't decide, my authority eroded a little more.
This was the test. I realized it with sudden, cold clarity. Not whether I made the right choice—there might not be a right choice—but whether I could make any choice at all while my brothers watched. Whether I could hold the weight of this family on my shoulders without buckling.
