My ribcage tightens. Carlo Costa. Matteo's father. The patriarch.
I know the legend. Everyone in Chicago knows the legend. Twenty years ago, the Costa family was massacred in a coordinated dual strike. Igor Costa and his wife gunned down in their car. Carlo Costa executed in a warehouse. It started a two-decade war with the Bellantis that painted the streets red.
I should not touch it. I know I should not touch it. It is a violation of his privacy, a trespass into a graveyard.
My fingers brush the edge of the silver cross. The metal is freezing. I lift it off the folder. The weight of it settles in my palm.
I flip the manila cover open.
The first page is a Chicago Police Department incident report. The logo at the top is outdated. The date stamped in the upper right corner reads October 14th, two full decades ago.
Victim Identification: Costa, Carlo.Location of Recovery: Alleyway rear of 44th and Ashland. Sector 4.Condition:Deceased. Multiple GSW to the torso and cranium. Rain protocol enacted at crime scene due to severe weather conditions washing away trace evidence.
My eyes scan rapidly down the page, absorbing the clinical, detached language of a nightmare.
Reporting Officer Notes: Body discovered by next of kin prior to police arrival. Area cordoned off. Next of kin on scene: Costa, Matteo (Son, Age 24).
Oxygen stalls in my throat.
Twenty-four. He was twenty-four years old. The math clicks into place in my head with brutal clarity. He is forty-four now. He has been carrying this for twenty years.
I turn the page.
A crime scene photograph. I brace myself for the gore, but it is a wide shot. A dark, narrow alleyway. The ground is slick with standing water. Rain slashes across the lens flash. A tarp covers a shape on the ground. Standing at the edge of the police tape, soaked to the bone, is a younger, leaner Matteo.
His dark hair is plastered to his forehead. No silver at the temples yet. The thick coarse beard is just heavy stubble. But the eyes are exactly the same. Dark, brooding, hollowed out. He is staring at the tarp.
I flip to the next document. It is a log from the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office.
Date: October 15th.Time: 0600 Hours.Procedure: Visual Identification of Remains.Authorizing Party: Costa, Matteo.
He went to the morgue. The morning after finding his father dead in an alley in the pouring rain, he walked into a freezing room and looked at the body. He did it alone.
A tremor rips through my shoulders. I lower the file, pressing my knuckles flat against the mahogany desk to steady myself. The silence in the office is suddenly deafening.
The pieces of Matteo Costa align perfectly in my mind.
Arthur Reeves played poker, lost his shirt, and sold his daughter to a monster to avoid taking a bullet.
Arthur is a coward. He runs from consequences. He sacrifices anything and anyone to protect his own skin.
Matteo Costa is the exact opposite.
Twenty years ago, a twenty-four-year-old kid got a phone call in the middle of a thunderstorm. He drove to a dark alley. He found his father bleeding out in the mud. He went to the morgue. He stepped up. He took the weight of a shattered crime family on his shoulders and built a war machine out of his own grief.
The midnight baking.
The realization hits me with the force of a physical blow. The pristine, commercial-grade kitchen. The massive jars of imported flour. The obsessive, methodical kneading of dough at two in the morning.
It is not a hobby. It is survival.
When your entire world is built on violence, chaos, and unpredictable blood-spatter, you need something that obeys the laws of physics. Baking is chemistry. It is exact. Flour, water, yeast, salt. You measure it. You combine it. You apply heat.It yields a specific, predictable result every single time. It is control.
He kneads dough to quiet the screaming in his head. The tactical gears in his mind never shut down. Not for twenty years. Not since the rain washed away the evidence in that alley.
"You aren't supposed to be in here."
The voice comes from the doorway, low and dead.
