Fabio sees it. He is sitting across from me. His elbows on his knees. His face still white. Still furious. Still buried under every lie I told him to keep him safe.
For once, he says nothing.
He reaches across the aisle and grips my shoulder. One squeeze. Hard. Fabio's grip promises everything in the pressure of five fingers:I am here. I am angry. I love you, and we are going to burn them to the ground.
Then he lets go.
I close my eyes.
The sun rises over Lake Michigan six hours later. Chicago is a wall of glass and steel pushing out of the flat earth like a fist. Cold. Hard. Indifferent. A city that does not care who you are, what you lost, or how far you have come to wage war on its soil.
The city does not know three Costa brothers just landed. It does not know that a shadow army is already converging—sevencousins filtering in through separate routes, arriving through the cracks, quiet and deliberate and furious in ways that do not make noise yet.
The Bellanti think the silence from Pine Valley means we are paralyzed. Ruined. Finished. They have no idea that the man who spent years operating from behind the architecture just stepped out into the open. Stripped of the empire, stripped of the distance, and stripped of everything except his name, his rage, and his brothers—this is the version they should have feared from the beginning.
I am Dominic Costa.
I have not slept more than four hours in a night since I landed in this city. I have not touched a woman in longer than I care to calculate. I have not held my niece.I have not told my brothers I love thembecause the words are trapped behind a wall I built when I was a boy covered in his parents' blood.
My parents are dead. My sister is safe. My brothers are beside me. My enemies will bleed.
I am done hiding.
I am done building empires made of screens and shadows. Done calculating from a distance. Done being the man who sends soldiers into the war he kept at arm's length.
The city is dark. The screens are bright. I have not yet begun to move the piece that will end this war.
That piece is not on the board yet.
But I am on the board now—not behind it, not above it. On it.
Standing in the open with my name on my chest and my brothers at my back and the ghosts of my parents watching from whatever place the dead go when their children finally stop running.
Tomorrow, it changes.
Tomorrow, we begin building. Every restaurant, every storefront, every dollar cleaned through legitimate paper—all of ita weapon aimed at the family that murdered ours.
It will take time. Months. Maybe a year. But when we strike, we strike from a foundation they cannot burn.
1
Sienna
The humidityof the Chicago summer clings to the back of my neck, thick and oppressive, as I wrestle the massive ceramic vase out of the rear of my delivery van. My copper curls are glued to my skin, my muscles burning from the sheer awkward weight of the arrangement. A custom five-hundred-dollar arrangement of coral charm peonies, dark baccara roses, jasmine, and hydrangeas ordered for the pre-opening of L'Ombra, the high-stakes centerpiece of the Riverwalk.
It is ten-thirty at night. The restaurant isn't supposed to open to the public for another week, but the corporate account under Costa Hospitality Group had paid double my usual rush fee for a late-night delivery. For Petal & Stem, my chronically struggling floral shop, double the fee means keeping the lights on through August. I would have dragged this vase through a hurricane for that kind of money.
I nudge the van door shut with my hip, the heavy ceramic chilling my bare arms through my thin cotton sundress. The Riverwalk is quiet this far down, the usual hum of tourists muffled by the thick, sultry night air. The front glass doors ofL'Ombra are locked and dark, but the delivery instructions had been explicit: Use the alleyway service entrance. Knock twice. If open, bring it to the back office.
L'Ombra itself is impossible to miss even shuttered. In the year since it opened, it has become the kind of place that gets whispered about in the right circles—permanently booked four months out, photographed in every Chicago lifestyle magazine, the kind of restaurant where the maître d' knows your name before you give it. The awning is a deep, bespoke black, the brass lettering polished to a mirror shine. Through the locked front glass, I can see the ghost of the dining room: white linen, candlelight fixtures still glowing on their timers, tables set for a service that won't happen tonight. It looks rooted. Established. Like it has always been there and simply waited for the world to catch up.
The alley smells of damp brick and old rainwater. I shift the massive vase, the condensation making the ceramic slick against my forearms, and approach the heavy steel service door. It is a seamless slab of reinforced metal, flush against the brick, equipped with a high-end biometric scanner. As I approach, the magnetic lock disengages with a heavy, pressurized thud that vibrates through the soles of my boots. The door doesn't swing open on a timer or an automated sensor. Someone behind those cameras pulled the bolt at the exact moment they wanted to—when I wasprecisely where they needed me to be. The door doesn't just sit open; it waits like the mouth of a trap I've just walked into.
I balance the massive ceramic arrangement against my chest, the weight of the water-logged clay and five dozen stems threatening to snap my wrists. There is no way to open the heavy steel door without shifting the load. I have to lean myentire weight into the frame, bracing the vase with one forearm while I use the palm of my free hand to shove the metal inward. My muscles scream, the rough, cold glaze of the vase scraping against the tender skin of my inner arms, leaving red, chafed marks I'll feel for days.
"Hello?" I call out.
My voice echoes off the pristine stainless steel of an industrial kitchen. No one answers.
