"He would hate this," Donatella said between bites of pasta. "All of us sitting around being sad. You know what he'd say."
"'Grief is for when the work is done,'" Marco quoted, and even Santo's mouth twitched in something approaching a smile.
"'Emotions are for the weak and the Irish,'" I added, and Donatella laughed—a small, wet sound that was half sob.
"He was such a bastard," she said. "I loved him so much."
"We all did," Santo said quietly. It was the closest he'd come to admitting his grief wasn't just rage in disguise.
I watched my siblings—my sister eating mechanically, my brothers slumped in exhaustion—and felt the truth of what Donatella had said settle into my bones. Tomorrow we would perform strength for the city. Tomorrow we would stand in that church and shake hands and smile and pretend the Caruso family was unshaken.
But tonight, in this room, we could just be what we were. A family with a hole in the middle of it, trying to figure out how to keep standing.
Donatella finished the pasta and set down the fork.
"Thank you," she said, looking at me. Just those two words, but I heard everything underneath them.
"Get some sleep," I told her. "All of you. It's going to be a long day tomorrow."
She nodded and stood, gathering herself with visible effort. Marco rose to walk her out. Santo lingered a moment longer, meeting my eyes across the room.
Whatever had passed between us earlier—the argument, the tension—had been set aside. Not forgotten, but shelved. We were brothers first. The rest could wait.
Aftermysiblingsleft—Santoto walk off his rage, Marco to finalize arrangements with the funeral home, Donatella to get the sleep I'd insisted on—I returned to my father's papers. The silence in the office felt less oppressive now, more like a companion than an enemy.
I was tired, but I wanted to go through the files so I could understand what I'd inherited.
All of it.
The legitimate businesses—the restaurant, the construction company, the laundry services that cleaned money as efficiently as they cleaned linens. The less legitimate operations—the gambling, the protection agreements, the quiet arrangements with city officials who looked the other way. The alliances and debts and favors owed, stretching back decades.
Most of it was what I expected. Papa had been grooming me for this since I was eighteen, walking me through the family's interests piece by piece, testing my memory, my judgment, my ability to see connections other people missed. I knew about the real estate holdings on the South Side. I knew about the arrangement with the Moretti family, the marriage that would bind our organizations together. I knew about the cold war with the Valentis, the careful balance of power that had held for twenty years.
But there's a difference between being shown the engine and being handed the keys. A difference between understanding how something works and being the one responsible for keeping it running.
I pulled open the bottom drawer of my father's desk, looking for the files on the Moretti alliance. What I found instead made me stop.
A false bottom. Poorly concealed—just a thin panel of wood that didn't quite match the rest of the drawer, a slight gap where the seams didn't align. The kind of amateur hiding spot you'd expect from someone who never thought anyone else would look.
My father, who had taught me to trust no one, who had insisted on redundant security for every sensitive document, had hidden something in a desk drawer like a teenager hiding a diary from his parents.
I pried up the panel. Underneath was a single leather-bound ledger, smaller than the others, its pages yellowed with age.
The entries were coded. Numbers and initials, dates and amounts, none of it immediately readable. But the code wasn't sophisticated—a simple substitution cipher, the kind you'd learn from a spy novel. Vito had been a brilliant strategist in many ways, but technology and cryptography had never been his strengths.
I cracked it in twenty minutes.
And then I sat staring at what I'd found, trying to make sense of something that didn't make sense at all.
Regular payments. Substantial ones—fifty thousand dollars a month, transferred to an account marked only with the initials "MV." The first entry was dated October 15, 2003. The last entry was dated six weeks ago.
October 2003. Right after the Caruso-Valenti war ended. Right after the peace agreement that Vito had brokered, the one that had supposedly ended hostilities and established the territorial boundaries that still held today.
Twenty years. More than twenty years of monthly payments, adding up to—I did the math quickly—over twelve million dollars. Paid to someone, or something, identified only as MV.
The last entry was circled in my father's handwriting. Next to it, a note: "Final payment. It's done."
Final payment. Six weeks later, he was dead.
