He paused. Let the pause do its work.
"Those intermediaries share accountants with Valenti Hospitality Group. Shared office space in one case—same building in Schaumburg, different floors. And Northlake Consulting Group—the shell that rented the sedan — shares a registered agent with two other entities that have done business with Valenti-adjacent real estate holdings in the last eighteen months."
The room was quiet.
"Not Enzo directly," Marco said. "Never directly. Three, four layers of separation. Clean enough to deny. Dirty enough to trace if you know where to dig."
Dante spoke.
"He's escalating."
Two words. Delivered in the register I thought of as the don's frequency — lower than his speaking voice, slower, each syllable carrying the weight of a conclusion that had been reached through a process nobody else was invited to observe. His eyes were on the table, his fingers laced in front of him. Still. Completely still.
"If he's using external contractors—imported, not local, no existing ties to Chicago operations—it means he wantsdeniability. He wants to move without being seen moving." Dante looked up. His eyes found mine, then Marco's, and in them was the cold, clear light of strategic certainty. "The break-in wasn't the play. It was a probe. He's testing the perimeter. Measuring response time. Cataloging assets."
"He's planning something bigger," Marco said.
"He's always planning something bigger," Dante confirmed. "And the sit-down performance—Bridgeport, the handshake, the speech about being reasonable men—that was the cover. He needed us looking at the front door while he sent someone through the back."
Dante stood. Moved to the window that wasn't there—a habit, the restless circuit of a man whose body needed to pace while his mind worked. He stopped at the far wall, turned, and the fluorescent light caught the silver at his temples and the line of his jaw and for a moment he looked so much like our father that something in my chest flinched.
"We need to know what the main event is," he said. "Marco—the shell companies. Follow the money. Every transaction, every wire, every invoice. If Northlake Consulting spent a dollar on a paperclip I want to know which office supply store and who signed the receipt."
Marco nodded. Already reaching for his phone.
"The girl," Marco said.
I felt the shift in the room. Subtle. The way air shifts when a window opens in a closed house—not a sound, not a movement, just a change in pressure. Marco's eyes were on me. Casual. The way Marco's eyes were always casual, which meant they were anything but.
"She stays with me."
My voice. Harder than it needed to be. The same tone I'd used the first time, in the restaurant, when I'd said my place, myproblem and heard the possessive weight of it and couldn't take it back. I heard it again now. The same weight. Heavier.
Dante looked at me.
Not the don. The brother. The look that peeled back everything—the muscle, the ink, the scar tissue, the years of being the loud one, the violent one, the one who hit things because it was easier than feeling them—and saw whatever was underneath. I didn't know what was underneath. I wasn't sure I wanted to know. But Dante saw it, the way Dante always saw it, and his expression held nothing except the quiet, careful attention of a man deciding how much rope to give.
"Fine," he said. "But I want to know who she is by the end of the week. Name. Background. Who sent her and why. Everything, Santo."
I nodded.
"End of the week," he repeated. Not unkindly. But final.
I stood. Pushed my chair in. Gathered the paper with Vladimir's burner number and folded it into my back pocket. Normal motions. The motions of a man wrapping up a meeting and heading home.
Of course, I didn't mention the kiss.
I didn't mention her mouth, or the sound she'd made, or the way her scarred fists had grabbed my shirt and pulled. I didn't mention the fact that I'd locked her door last night and stood in the hallway for three full minutes with my forehead against the wood, breathing, trying to put back together the thing she'd taken apart just by letting me close.
I walked out. The morning was grey. The drive back to Oak Brook was thirty-two minutes of silence and the taste of her still on my mouth.
SalFerrantearrivedattwo. Eddie—twenty-four, eager, the kind of young soldier who saidyes signorewithout it sounding like parody—arrived at two-fifteen. I put Sal on the front approach, Eddie on the alley, gave them each a radio and a thermos and the specific instruction that if anyone came within fifty feet of my property line they were to call me before they did anything else, because I was done finding surprises in my own house.
I started with the camera. A wireless unit, compact, weather-rated, the kind of thing you could order online and install with a drill and twenty minutes. I mounted it under the eave where the alley approach met the rear fence line—the same route I'd used to enter unseen, the same blind spot the sedan had exploited. The angle covered forty feet of approach and the first third of the alley in both directions. Not perfect. Sufficient.
The drill bit into the fascia board and the vibration traveled up my arms and into my shoulders and I thought about her hands.
Stop.
