Enzo shifted. The gesture barely moved his jacket, but Marco flinched like he’d been slapped. “You two have made quite a mess.” He let the words hang, then shrugged. “But you’ve also bought us some time. Caruso’s people are getting desperate. I’ve got half the city calling me for leverage and the other half assuming I’m dead.” He smiled, all teeth and no warmth. “It suits me.”
“You’re not here for a family reunion,” I said.
“That’s true.” He glanced at Marco, then back at me. “I’m here because I want to see if you can finish what you started. If you can save your own skin without dragging the rest of the family under the ice.” He steepled his fingers. “I see you’ve made some…difficult choices.”
I pictured Jade in our bed, the curve of her arm, the way she held our future between rib and wrist like it was already fragile. I pictured what Enzo would do if he ever thought I’d chosen her over the family.
“Mostly, I’m here to protect my grandchild,” Enzo said simply.
I shook my head. “The FBI is investigating me and they want to indict me with RICO, Dad, which might mean they’ll turn thescrews on me. I would obviously never tell them anything, but not everyone is a Moretti. With the acquisition of BioHQ from Moretti Incorporated, we’re still on track for the pharmaceutical breakthroughs and—”
It was always like this with Enzo. He’d start with a feint—concern for the family, a touch of nostalgia—and then he’d cut to the chase, straight to the artery. He was a master at it. I spent years trying to train myself out of his gravity well, only to find out there was no such thing as escape velocity. He drummed his fingers once, a hollow, metronome sound on the cheap armrest. “The indictment is not your greatest problem,” he said.
“The indictment is a sideshow. You know this. What matters is what you do next. Who you choose to be on the other side.” He leaned forward, the light from the shitty desk lamp catching the old scar on his cheek. “You have the girl. You have the project. You have the loyalty of your brother. What you don’t have is time. You’re running out.”
“Then why are you here, Dad?” I said, the words sharp as broken glass in my mouth.
“Because they’re not going to let her walk away. I’ve had someone trail you since you left New York City. I almost pulled Marco away when I realized he’d been shut. But when I saw you hadn’t left Toronto and a report got back to me about Paul Victor, the broker, I realized you were probably stuck here.”
He paused, let the silence get heavy, then added: “So you see, Dante, I’m not here to meddle. I’m here to make sure you don’t get soft. Or dead.”
Marco looked up, his face a little too open. “You followed us?”
Enzo only grinned. “It’s not stalking if it’s your own blood.” He turned the ring on his finger, the old wedding band he’d never taken off, even after Mom left. “I let you run because I wanted to see where you’d go. What you’d do when the leash was off. I wanted to see if you were ready. You were not.”
Marco laughed, but it sounded weak. “We’re not dogs, Pop.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Don’t flatter yourself.” Then to me: “You know what’s at stake, don’t you?” He almost sounded proud. “You were the one convincing me to invest in Biotechnology. I suppose your little degree at Cornell paid off after all.”
I kept my face blank, but inside I was burning. Enzo always made it sound like he was here to help, to impart wisdom or some old-world mafia poetry about duty, but the truth was he’d never trusted anyone to run things but himself. Not me, not Marco, not even his own consigliere—who’d probably been the one to tip him off about Victor in the first place.
I tried to keep the edge out of my voice. “I don’t need a lesson, Dad. I need space to do what has to be done.”
He gave me a look I remembered from my teens, back when he’d caught me stealing his car and instead of yelling just shook his head, like I’d disappointed him in a way that words couldn’t touch. “You’re my son. My firstborn son. Smart as a whip, you’ve always been. Too smart for your own good. Here’s the thing. I want you to live. I want to see your child. But you didn’t build your own empire, Dante. You were born into mine. And if you let anyone—government, Caruso, or those animals in the biotech underground—take what’s ours, I’ll see to it you don’t live long enough to regret it. You understand?”
I stared at my father, at the way the light caught the edges of his face, the way he let his words echo without ever breaking eye contact. There was no threat in his voice, not even a hint of raised volume. He was letting me know—like always—that the world was arranged in rings of obligation, and every time I thought I'd stepped outside, all I'd really done was walk in a circle.
“You done?” I said.
He shrugged, like a man who’d already finished the fight in his own head. “Are you?”
I wanted to say yes, but the truth was, I didn’t have an answer. I wanted to get Jade out alive, keep Marco breathing, and maybe—if the stars didn’t collapse on us—see a future where my kid didn’t have to spend every waking second wondering who was about to kick in the door. That was it. That was the sum total of my ambition now.
Before Jade—before I had, fuck, made her a mark, before I had folded her into my life like hers didn’t matter—I had wanted this. The Moretti throne. Bringing the Moretti family into modernity.
But that didn’t even feel like a memory anymore. It felt like fiction. Like something I had read in a book once that had stuck with me.
I stared at Enzo, at the tidy knot of his tie, the hands folded over his knee, the calm certainty in every line of his body. He’d come here to prove nothing had changed, that I was still his, even after I’d tried like hell to run my own show. Maybe he was right. Maybe I wasn’t built to be anything but a son—an inheritor, a proxy, a weapon that looked a little too much like its maker.
But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, elbows on the cheap pressboard desk. “You play along with Victor. You get them the demo. You get your girl close to the finish line, and then you find out who’s bankrolling it. You get names, faces, leverage. If you can, you burn the project down from the inside.” He didn’t smile, but his eyes caught the light, cold and approving. “That’s what I would do.”
“And then what?”
“We talk acquisition, and when you own it, you dismantle whichever parts you don’t believe in. Relatively simple, right? You can do that. Your mom was right to send you to college.”
