Like Father, Like Son

Chapter 25

The wrongness hits me at 3:47 AM like a fist to the sternum—that particular brand of dread that bypasses your brain and goes straight for your bones.

I'm alone in the bed I share with Marco, though he hasn't slept here in days. The convoy left at midnight, forty-three men in black SUVs rolling toward what Marco promised would end the war. Salvatore among them, driving toward an ending that my body knows won't be the one they expect.

Sleep refuses to return, so I punch the pillow to make it more comfortable, and my knuckles hit metal. Not the soft resistance of down filling, but the hard certainty of deliberate placement. I pull back the pillowcase with hands that already know this is goodbye before my brain processes what I'm holding.

Salvatore's signet ring—the one that never leaves his hand, the absolute symbol of the Don's authority—sits heavy in my palm. The Caruso family crest catches moonlight like it's trying to tell me secrets I'm not ready to hear. Beneath it, a note in his precise handwriting:

Keep it safe. It's too heavy for me today.

The words blur as I read them again, trying to decode what he couldn't say directly. The ring weighs more than gold should, carrying forty years of blood and authority in its carved surfaces. Men have died for the right to wear this ring. Wars have started over who inherits it. And Salvatore left it under my pillow like a love letter written in precious metal.

My bare feet hit the floor, and I'm moving toward the door before logic catches up with instinct. The handle turns but the door doesn't budge. I try again, harder, putting my shoulder into it. Nothing. The wood doesn't even rattle in its frame.

Locked. From the outside.

"Hello?" My voice cracks against the silence. "Is anyone there? I need to get out."

No response. The kind of engineered quiet that means everyone's been specifically instructed to ignore whatever sounds come from this room. My pulse kicks into overdrive as I slam my palm against the wood.

"Open this door right now! I'm not asking, I'm telling you as—" As what? The Don's mistress? The wife of his son? The woman holding his ring like it means I have any authority in this world of men and their violent mathematics?

The television remote sits on the nightstand, and I grab it with the desperation of someone seeking windows in a room that's become a cage. The screen flickers to life on a twenty-four-hour news channel, because even at four in the morning, New York's violence makes good ratings.

The anchor's voice drones about a warehouse fire in Queens, but the breaking news banner that scrolls across the bottom makes my knees forget their purpose:

EXPLOSION IN BROOKLYN—MULTIPLE CASUALTIES—SUSPECTED ORGANIZED CRIME CONNECTION

The scene cuts to shaky phone footage, someone's vertical video of an intersection I recognize with nauseating clarity. That's the route to the Rossi compound. That's the street the convoy would have taken. The timestamp in the corner reads 4:23 AM—twenty-four minutes ago.

"We're getting reports of multiple vehicles involved," the anchor's voice turns grave with the particular tone reserved for tragedies that will lead tomorrow's headlines. "Witnesses describe a massive explosion that—"

The footage shifts to a different angle, someone filming from a apartment window, and there it is—Salvatore's black Mercedes, the bulletproof one he trusted with his life, engulfed in flames that burn white-hot against the pre-dawn darkness. The car looks like a medieval pyre, metal twisted into shapes that shouldn't exist, fire eating everything with the hunger of something that was designed to consume rather than simply burn.

My legs give out. I hit the floor hard enough to bruise, but the pain doesn't register past the roaring in my ears. The news keeps playing, the anchor's mouth moving, but all I can see is that inferno where Salvatore should be.

A total inferno. Nothing could survive that. The kind of fire that doesn't leave bodies, just shadows and dental records.

The door crashes open, and Marco stumbles in looking like he's been wrestling demons and lost. His shirt is torn, ash streaking his face, blood—not his—splattered across his collar. The performance is almost perfect, this portrait of a son who barely escaped his father's fate.

"Lucia." He collapses against the doorframe with theatrical exhaustion. "God, Lucia, it's—they knew we were coming. The whole thing was a setup. They had explosives planted—"

"Is he dead?" The words come out flat, emotionless, because if I let myself feel anything right now, I'll shatter into pieces too small to ever reassemble.

Marco's face cycles through expressions—grief, shock, devastation—like he's auditioning for the role of mourning son. "The car... nobody could have survived that. They targeted him specifically. Someone gave them our route, our timing, everything."

The ring burns cold in my pocket where I shoved it when I heard footsteps. Twenty-eight grams of gold that feel like they weigh enough to drag me through the floor. My fingers curl around it, the edges cutting into my palm with beautiful precision.

"You locked me in." Not a question, just evidence presented for the record.

"For your safety. I knew if something went wrong, you'd try to follow, try to help." He moves closer, and I smell gasoline on his clothes, acrid and accusatory. "I was trying to protect you."

The laugh that escapes me sounds unhinged, broken glass in my throat. "Protect me? You orchestrated this whole thing. The intel, the safe houses that were just good enough to keep us alive but never win, the perfect coordinates that led them straight into an ambush you designed."

His face shifts, the mask slipping for just a second before he reconstructs it. "You're in shock. You're not thinking clearly—"

"I'm thinking more clearly than I have in months." I stand on legs that shake but hold, my hand still closed around the ring that Marco doesn't know I have. "Your father left at midnight. The explosion happened at 4:23. That's four hours, Marco. Four hours for someone to make different arrangements, to realize what was coming and prepare."

"What are you talking about?" But there's a wariness in his eyes now, the predator recognizing another predator.

The metal in my pocket isn't just gold—it's keys to kingdoms, access codes etched in micro-engravings that control the family's offshore accounts. Salvatore didn't just leave me his ring; he left me his empire. Which means he knew. He walked into that inferno with his eyes wide open.

"Tell me, Marco, when you set this up, did you consider that your father might be ten steps ahead of you?" I watch his face carefully, cataloging each micro-expression. "Or were you so focused on killing the king that you forgot he's been playing this game longer than you've been alive?"

The grief hits then, delayed but devastating, because whether Salvatore died in that car or disappeared into smoke, he's gone. The man who touched me like I was worth saving, who loved me in the spaces between violence, who gave me his ring like a promise or a curse—he's either ash or absent, and both feel like death.

But underneath the grief, a harder truth crystallizes: Salvatore didn't just die or disappear. He transformed me into whatever comes next. The ring in my pocket pulses with possibility, with power I never asked for but can't refuse.

Marco studies my face, and I see him calculating, trying to determine what I know, what I have, what I've become in the space between his father's leaving and this careful return.

"We need to prepare for the funeral," he finally says, voice measured and careful. "The other families will expect a show of strength, and with my father gone, that falls to us."