Chapter 1
Santo
Pain.Everythingstartswithpain.
The first hit sent a jolt of white heat through my left side, but I didn't stop.
Couldn't stop.
Stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant sitting with the fact that in exactly fifty-seven minutes I was going to be in a room with the man who'd taken Dante's woman right out of her own apartment like she was something he could borrow.
I hit the bag again. Left hook, right cross, the chain rattling against the basement ceiling.
The gym was mine—a concrete box under the Oak Brook house with bad lighting and equipment I'd hauled in myself over the years. No mirrors. I didn't need to watch myself bleed and curse. The heavy bag was duct-taped where I'd split the leather twice, and the speed bag in the corner had been broken since March. Nobody came down here. That was the point.
My left side screamed on the next rotation and I breathed through it, the way I'd been breathing through it for nine days. Nine days since the raid on the Valenti warehouse in Albany Park. Nine days since a bullet caught me just below the ribs on my left side—in and out, clean, the kind of wound that sounds minor until you try to throw a punch or roll over in bed or do anything that requires having a functioning torso.
The doctor Dante kept on retainer, Dr. Ferraro, had stitched me up in the back office at Caruso's while Rosa pretended not to notice the blood on her kitchen floor. Fourteen stitches. No hospital. Hospitals meant questions, and questions meant paperwork, and paperwork meant the kind of attention a Caruso couldn't afford the week before a sit-down with every family in Chicago.
I peeled the tape back from my right hand with my teeth and rewrapped it tighter. My knuckles were a mess—scar tissue over scar tissue, white lines crossing brown, a topographic map of every bad decision I'd ever made.
The wound pulsed. I let it.
Pain was information. Pain meant the body was still working, still healing, still doing its job despite the fact that I kept asking it to do stupid things. I'd had worse. The scar on my right shoulder—the old one, the one from the summer I was ten—still ached when the weather changed. Family story said I fell off my bike. Family stories said a lot of things.
I drove my fist into the bag hard enough to feel it in my teeth.
Enzo Valenti. The Patient Man. I'd heard people call him that like it was something to admire—this ability to wait, to move slowly, to apply pressure in increments so small you didn't notice the walls closing until you couldn't breathe. Patience was a nice word for what Enzo did. What Enzo did was watch for the moment you loved something, and then he put his hands on it.
Gemma Moretti.
No—Gemma Caruso. Dante's girl. Small, quiet, the kind of woman who apologized when you bumped into her. She'd been in Dante's life for what, a few months? And already she was the softest thing about him. Already Enzo had clocked her as a pressure point and acted on it.
He'd taken her from her apartment. Broad daylight, two men, a black car. Forty-six hours before we got her back, and in those forty-six hours I watched my brother become someone I didn't recognize. Not the don. Not the strategist. Something raw and desperate and badly stitched together, like me after the raid, except his wound didn't show.
We got her back. I put two of Enzo's men in the ground doing it, and one of them put a bullet in my side first, which was fair. That was the math.
I hit the bag again. The chain groaned.
Dante. Married. Not just that. He washappilymarried. A rare feat in our world of arranged marriages.
He even smiled. Sometimes.
I was happy for him. I was. Somewhere underneath the fury and the wound and the sleeplessness that had become my baseline, I was genuinely, honestly glad that Dante had found whatever it was that made a man's face do that. He deserved it. He'd spent thirty-four years being the responsible one, the careful one, the one who carried every secret our father ever buried. If Gemma Moretti made him stupid with love, then good. Someone should.
But the sit-down.
Fifty-two minutes now. The five families would gather at Marchetti's on Taylor Street, neutral ground since before I was born, and Enzo Valenti would walk in with his silver temples and his steady hands and his dead wife's ring still on his finger, and he would ask for Bridgeport.
Bridgeport. The centre of everything we held. Our operations, our people, the blocks where Caruso soldiers had raised their kids for three generations. Enzo wasn't asking for a corridor or a concession. He was asking for the heart, and he was framing it as fairness, as rebalancing, aswhat's owed—because he'd spent twenty years collecting a debt our father never told us about, and now he wanted interest.
I knew what Dante would do. Dante would be measured. Dante would be strategic. Dante would find the angle that gave away the least while appearing generous, because that was what a don did—he played the long game, he preserved options, he kept the peace that kept people alive.
What would I do?
I would put Enzo's face through the table at Marchetti's and let God sort out the politics.
Which was why Dante was boss and I was the blade.
