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“Already done.”

Of course it is. Nicolo knows what I’ll want before I say it half the time. It’s why he’s irreplaceable.

The main house looms ahead—a sprawling stone structure that looks like old money but was built barely thirty years ago, when my father’s business first boomed. I can feel myself changing as I approach it, shedding the man who spent the night losing himself in a stranger’s bed. With each step up the marble stairs, I become more fully what I am—heir to the Bianchi empire, my father’s son, a man who makes decisions that end lives.

My father waits in my office, sitting in my chair like it’s still his. In some ways, it always will be.

Aldo Bianchi built something from nothing, turned a small-time loan operation into one of the largest criminal enterprises in the country. Now seventy but strong as an oak, with silver-streaked black hair and eyes that can freeze a man’s blood at twenty paces.

“Marco.” He doesn’t stand when I enter, just gestures to the chair across from the desk. My chair, in my office, but I sit where he indicates. Some battles aren’t worth fighting.

“You heard,” I say.

“That we lost a man and nearly a shipment worth more than most people make in a lifetime? Yes, I heard.” His accent thickens when he’s angry, the Italian of his youth breaking through the polished English of his business persona. “This was a message. D’Angelo is letting us know the rules have changed.”

“I heard they’re with the Costas now.”

He nods, lips pressed into a grim line. “They’ve been looking for an excuse to move against us since that business with their shipping container last year. D’Angelo gave them one.”

I lean back in the chair, jaw tight, keeping what I know to myself—for now.

D’Angelo wouldn’t have waited a year to avenge the shipping container we blew up last year. He’s angry about the message I sent yesterday. I claimed a girl who owes him, and he’s showing teeth.

I said she was mine, and he’s showing he’s willing to take it all. If I tell my father this, that there’s a woman behind this mess, I know what he’d do. He’d clean up the mess—he’d hand her over. No woman’s worth fighting over, that’s what he’s always said.

So I stay quiet about the real reason, holding my father’s stare without flinching. “We’ll hit back. Harder. Send our own message.”

“Always so quick to violence.” He shakes his head. “This isn’t the time for displays of force. The Costas have the mayor in their pocket, half the city council. We start a war now, we’ll find ourselves fighting the law as well as them.”

“So what do you suggest?”

My father stands, moving to the window that overlooks the compound. Outside, men move purposefully between buildings, cars come and go. Our small kingdom, built on blood and fear.

“An alliance of our own.”

“With who? The Russians? The Colombians?”

He turns, fixing me with a stare that’s lost none of its power to make me feel like a boy again.

“Not with another family. A marriage.”

The word lands between us like a grenade with the pin pulled. I keep my face carefully blank.

“Who?”

“Valentina Costa.”

I remember her from a charity gala two years ago. Tall, model-thin, with a practiced smile that never reached her eyes. She’d flirted with me, brushing her hand against mine as she took the champagne I offered. Later, I’d overheard her telling a friend she could “fix” me, turn the crude gangster’s son into someone worthy of her family name.

“No.” The word comes out harder than I intended.

My father’s eyebrows rise. “No? You’d rather we go to war? Watch our men die, our business crumble, because you’re too proud to make a strategic alliance? If Costa is backing D’Angelo, he’ll stop the minute his daughter is married to you. Don’t you see that?”

“It’s not pride.” I stand too, refusing to let him loom over me. Even at thirty-eight, these conversations with my father make me feel like I’m fighting for solid ground. “Valentina Costa is manipulative, calculating, and has made it clear she thinks we’re beneath her family. You want to put someone like that in our home? Give her access to our operations, our finances?”

“She’d be your wife, not your business partner.”

“In this life, they’re the same thing. Besides, you won’t even realize it, but through her, Aldo Costa will be the one calling the shots on what we do. That man gives nothing for free.”