"It's research. Sit."
So we sat—the don and his enforcer, perched on velvet barstools in an empty nightclub, while house music played at a volume that was more suggestion than sound. The bass pulsed through the bar top like a second heartbeat. Marco slid the first row of glasses toward us with the reverence of a sommelier presenting a flight.
"Start with the Velvet Sin." He pointed to a glass of deep amber. "Bourbon base, fig reduction, cardamom bitters. The finish is insane."
I picked it up. Sniffed it. Tasted it. It was, in fact, insane.
Santo took his like a shot, which earned him a look of physical pain from Marco.
"That is a seventy-dollar cocktail, you animal. You're supposed to—"
"Next." Santo set the glass down hard enough to make the neighboring samples tremble.
We worked through the row. The Confession was something dark and smoky with mezcal and cherry that coated the tongue. A blush-colored thing called Penance tasted like grapefruit and regret. The violet one—unnamed, still in development—was floral and strange and made Santo grimace in a way that was almost theatrical.
"Tastes like nonna's perfume," he muttered.
"Nonna had excellent taste."
"Our nonna was terrifying."
"Exactly." Marco grinned and slid over another glass. Pink this time. Something with rose water and gin that caught the flat overhead light and held it.
Three drinks in, the warmth had settled into my chest—not enough to blur anything, just enough to take the edge off the cold thing I'd been carrying since last night.
I set down my glass.
"Gemma told me what happened."
The music kept playing. The bass pulsed on, steady and indifferent. But everything else stopped.
Marco's hand froze mid-reach for a cocktail shaker. He didn't look up immediately—just held still, fingers hovering, the way a man holds still when he's recalibrating everything he thought was going to happen in the next five minutes.
Santo's fist closed around the pink glass. His knuckles went white. I watched the scar tissue across his knuckles stretch and pale.
“I need you to know what he did.”
So, I told them. The real version. Enzo's grey eyes across the room. The careful weaponization of Gemma's childhood. The way she was discarded.
The silence that followed was broken only by the ambient bass. A steady throb that counted the seconds like a pulse monitor in a hospital room, measuring the vital signs of something that might not survive the hour.
Santo's face was a study in controlled detonation. I watched the cycle—confusion first, because Santo always needed a moment to accept that someone could be this monstrous and this polished at the same time. Then disbelief, his brow furrowing, his jaw working the way it did when his body wanted to hit something and his brain was still catching up. Then the rage settled in. Not the explosive kind. The quiet kind. The kind that was worse.
Marco hadn't moved. That dangerous stillness—the one that reminded you he was a Caruso too, that beneath the silk shirts and the cocktail experiments lived something cold and calculating and absolutely capable of destruction. His eyes were fixed on a point somewhere behind the bar, but I knew he wasn't seeing bottles. He was seeing angles. Moves and countermoves.The branching decision tree of everything that could happen next.
"He wants you to give him your wife," Santo said flatly. "Like a fucking—"
He didn't finish. Couldn't find a word ugly enough.
"I'm not doing it." My voice cut through the silence like a blade laid on a table. "I don't care what it costs. I don't care if he releases the evidence. I don't care if the feds come down on us tomorrow. Gemma is not a bargaining chip. She is not a transaction. She's my wife, and I'd rather lose every business, every property, every dollar this family has ever earned than hand her over to a man who raped her when she was a child."
The word landed like a grenade.
I'd said it deliberately. Had chosen it with the same precision I brought to every statement that mattered, because the truth deserved its real name. Notaffair. Nothistory. Not the silk-wrapped euphemisms Enzo used to dress up what he'd done to a sixteen-year-old girl who'd just wanted someone to see her.
Rape. That's what it was.
Santo picked up the pink cocktail. Drained it in one long swallow. Set the glass down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his scarred knuckles flexing, his jaw still grinding. The grimace that crossed his face might have been the rose water.
