It buzzed again.
And again.
The sound was small—a vibration against wood, barely audible over the morning quiet—but it cut through the warmth like a blade. I felt the shift in my own body before I consciously registered it. The looseness in my shoulders tightening. The easy rhythm of my breathing going controlled. The don sliding back into place over the man like armor he'd never fully learned to take off.
Gemma felt it too. She went still against me, her hand flattening on my chest.
"You should get that, Don Caruso," she said quietly, teasing me gently. “Could be an offer you can’t refuse.”
I grinned and reached for the phone.
It was an unknown number. Three lines of text that rearranged the architecture of my day.
We should meet. Privately. There are matters concerning your father's estate that require discussion. —E.V.
Enzo Valenti. Reaching out directly. Not through intermediaries, not through the carefully choreographed dance of emissaries and neutral parties that had governed mafia diplomacy for a century. A direct message to my personal phone from a burner number, phrased with the surgical politeness of a man who knew exactly how unsettling each word would land.
Matters concerning your father's estate.
He knew. Knew that we'd found the ledger, traced the payments, uncovered the debt that Vito had buried for twenty years. He'd been waiting for this—waiting for us to discover the scope of our vulnerability before making his move. The patient man.
"Daddy?"
Gemma's voice. Quiet. Careful. I looked up and found her watching me with those eyes that missed nothing—brown and warm and already shifting from sleepy contentment to alert concern, reading the change in my posture the way she read every room she entered. Cataloging the tension in my jaw, the stillness that had replaced the easy warmth of thirty seconds ago.
"Business," I said.
She nodded. Didn't push. The quiet acceptance of a woman who understood the rhythm of this life. I hated it. Hated that she'd been trained to read dangerous men and accommodate their silences. Hated that the skill was useful now, with me.
I kissed her forehead. "I need to make some calls."
"I'll make coffee," she said. Simple. Steady. An offering of normalcy in a morning that had just gone sideways.
I called Marco first.
He answered on the second ring—already awake, already alert, because Marco slept like a cat: lightly, with one ear open, ready to move. I read him the message. Heard the silence that followed—not empty, but full. The sound of a sharp mind processing.
"Burner phone," he said. "Give me an hour."
It took him forty minutes. By the time I arrived at Caruso's, he was in the back office with his laptop and a double espresso, the number traced through three carriers to a prepaid device purchased with cash at a convenience store in Humboldt Park. No name. No trail. The kind of careful anonymity that was itself a message:I am choosing to be invisible. I am choosing to let you know I'm choosing.
"Deliberate," Marco said, confirming what I already knew. "He could have called from his personal line. He could have gone through channels. Instead he bought a disposable phone, typed a message that reads like a polite dinner invitation, and signed itwith his initials like a calling card." He closed the laptop. "He's performing."
"He's always performing," I said.
Santo arrived fifteen minutes later, still pulling on his jacket, his face carrying the particular thundercloud expression that meant he'd been dragged away from the gym. He read the message on my phone. His jaw did the thing it always did when violence was being considered—a slow grind, molar against molar, the sound just barely audible.
"It's a trap." Flat. Certain. Like he was reading from a script he'd already written. "He's luring you somewhere to put a bullet in your skull and call it a business dispute."
"He doesn't want me dead, Santino."
"You don't know what he wants."
"I know what he doesn't want. He doesn't want a war he hasn't prepared for. Killing me brings Santo and every soldier we have down on his operation within twenty-four hours, and he loses the leverage he's spent twenty years building." I leaned against our father's desk. Felt the weight of the wood at my back, solid and scarred and old. "He wants something. This is an opening move, not an endgame."
Santo's eyes were dark. Furious. The knuckles of his right hand were white where he gripped the back of a chair.
"And if you're wrong?"
