Chapter 2

Point of view: Matteo

"Tell me you did not just invite a Conti into this house, Matteo."

My uncle's voice carried across the study before I had even taken off my jacket. Salvatore stood by the window overlooking the harbor, arms crossed, wearing the expression he reserved for decisions he intended to argue me out of.

"I did not invite her," I said. "I offered her a way to keep her mother's house. There is a difference."

"There is no difference to the men who work for us. They will see a Conti sleeping under this roof and wonder if the Don has gone soft."

I poured a drink I did not particularly want and let the silence answer him first. Eighteen months since my father's funeral, and Salvatore still measured every decision I made against a version of leadership that had died with him. My father built this empire on fear that never blinked. I intended to keep it standing, but I was not interested in becoming a copy of a dead man to do it.

The study still smelled faintly of my father's cigars, even now, months after anyone had smoked one inside these walls. Salvatore kept it that way on purpose, I think, the same way he kept the old portraits hanging exactly where my father had placed them, as if the house itself needed reminding of who had built it.

"The Conti debt has been sitting untouched for two years," I said. "Nobody collected it properly because everyone assumed a broken family with a dead father was not worth the effort. That is bad business, not mercy."

"And bringing the daughter here fixes that how."

"It puts a face on the debt. It reminds every family in this city that a Rossaro obligation does not disappear just because the person who signed for it dies or disappears." I set the glass down. "It also keeps me watching her closely, which I intend to do for other reasons you do not need explained to you."

Salvatore's eyes narrowed. "Other reasons."

I did not answer that directly. The truth was simpler and more complicated than I wanted to admit out loud, even to family. Isabella Conti had stood in her mother's living room with debt collectors on one side and my own men on the other, and she had not flinched once. Most people who stood in a room with me forgot how to speak in complete sentences. She had argued with me like I owed her something.

I had noticed the way she counted the exits in that room without ever looking directly at them, the way she positioned herself slightly in front of her mother without seeming to decide to do it. She had been protecting people in that house long before I ever walked through the door, and something about the ease of it, the practiced calm underneath the fear, had stayed with me the entire drive home.

"There is history between our families that runs deeper than one bad shipment," I said instead, choosing the words carefully. "I want to understand it before someone else uses it against us."

That was not the whole truth either, but it was enough to make Salvatore's jaw tighten and his questions stop, at least for now. My uncle knew more about my father's old dealings than he had ever shared with me, and every time the Conti name came up in conversation, something behind his eyes closed like a door.

"Dante Vitale will hear about this within a week," Salvatore said finally. "He has been waiting since your father died for a reason to say you cannot hold this family together. Do not hand him one."

"Let him hear." I walked to the window and looked out at the harbor lights, the same view my father had stood in front of for thirty years, deciding who lived comfortably in this city and who did not. "Dante has been circling for eighteen months. He does not need a reason. He needs an opening."

"Then do not give him one."

"I am not planning to."

My phone buzzed against the desk. A message from the harbor office, flagged urgent, the kind that used to make my father's face go still and unreadable no matter what news it carried. I read it twice before I let my own expression do the same.

"What is it," Salvatore asked.

"A shipment went missing off pier six last night. Vitale territory borders that route." I set the phone down. "Coincidence, according to the report."

"You do not believe in coincidence."

"I believe in patterns." I picked the drink back up, finally taking the sip I had been avoiding. "And I believe Dante Vitale just found his opening a great deal faster than either of us expected."

Salvatore was quiet for a long moment, watching me with the particular expression he wore when he was deciding whether to trust his own nephew's judgment over decades of instinct built under a different Don. Whatever he saw settled something in him, because he finally exhaled and dropped into the chair across from my desk.

He rubbed a hand over his face, suddenly looking older than I usually let myself notice. "Your father would have burned that missing shipment down to ash and blamed the Vitales publicly before sunrise. He never waited to see what a thing looked like in daylight."

"I am aware of how my father handled things," I said. "I buried him, Salvatore. I know exactly what he would have done. I am also aware of how many of his decisions left this family standing on debts and grudges I am still cleaning up eighteen months later."

"Then we handle Vitale first," he said. "And the Conti girl second."

"The Conti girl is not a problem that needs handling," I said. "She is not a piece on the board, Salvatore. She is a person who walked into this house because I gave her no other choice, and I intend to remember that, even if you do not."

He studied me for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes.

"That," he said quietly, "is exactly what worries me."

Outside, the harbor lights blinked against the dark water, marking the edge of an empire my father had built on rules I was only beginning to understand were not as solid as he pretended. Somewhere across that same water, Isabella Conti was packing whatever life she had left into a single bag, about to walk into the middle of a war she did not yet know she had inherited.

And somewhere closer than either of us realized, Dante Vitale was already smiling.