Chapter 5
The back room of the print shop was warm and smelled of ink and paper and old coffee. Dario put a burner phone on the table, still in its packaging, then stood against the far wall with his arms folded and his eyes moving between the two of them with the careful attention of a man calculating risk in real time.
“How bad is it?” he asked.
“Santino,” Enzo said.
Dario’s face went very still.
“Russo. And Camila.”
The stillness deepened. Then Dario uncrossed his arms and sat down heavily in the chair behind his worktable, like the name had physically displaced something in him.
“God Almighty,” he said quietly.
“I need to know who I still have,” Enzo said. “Not who I think I have — who I actually have. Anyone who’s been in contact with Santino in the last sixty days, I have to assume they’re either turned or compromised.”
“That’s a short list,” Dario said slowly. “Santino’s been running your day-to-day for two years. Every captain talks to him. Every lieutenant.”
“Then I need the people who don’t talk to captains.” Enzo leaned forward. “The ones at the bottom. The old ones. The loyal ones — the ones who’ve been around long enough to remember who I was before any of this. The ones who wouldn’t have been worth Santino’s time to buy.”
Dario rubbed his face with both hands.
“Sal Benedetto. Sal’s still alive. Seventy-three years old, runs a card game on Tuesday nights in Bridgeport. Been with your family since before you were born. Santino wouldn’t go near him — too old, too small, no strategic value.” He paused. “Which means nobody’s touched him.”
“I need Sal to make three calls for me. From his own phone, from his own address. Three men who owe me personally, not the organization. Men who’d answer a call from Sal without flagging it.”
Dario nodded slowly. “I can get you to Sal.”
“I need it tonight.”
“I understood that.”
Sophie spoke from across the table, and both men looked at her.
“The drive has recordings of Santino on the phone with a maintenance technician. A man named Gary Pard — works for a contractor out of Midway that services private aircraft. Pard filed the false report on Enzo’s Gulfstream four days ago. If we can get to Pard before Santino realizes the plane didn’t go down, we have a living witness.”
Dario looked at Enzo.
“She’s right,” Enzo said.
“Who is she?” Dario asked — with the tone of a man who genuinely wanted to know the answer before he went any further.
“Her name is Sophie Valente,” Enzo said. “And right now she’s the reason I’m standing in your shop instead of somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic. That’s all you need.”
Dario held Sophie’s gaze a moment. She held his back, steadily, without flinching.
He gave a single slow nod. From Dario Fenn, that was as close to a formal endorsement as anyone was likely to get.
“I’ll call Sal,” he said, and reached for the phone on the wall.
While Dario made his call in the front room, Enzo sat at the worktable and opened his palm. The drive sat there — small, black, ordinary.
Sophie watched him from across the table.
“Say it,” he said without looking up.
“Say what?”
“Whatever you’ve been holding back for the last forty minutes.”
A pause.
“The recordings are enough to destroy Santino publicly. In front of the right people, with the right timing, they’d strip him of every alliance he’s built in the last year.” She leaned forward slightly. “The Chicago families don’t tolerate a man who moves against his own don. Not openly. It’s a line that, once crossed, makes everyone else in the room nervous about their own position. But to use the recordings, you need a stage. A moment where all of those people are in the same room — and you walk in when they believe you’re dead, and you make it impossible for anyone to look away.”
Enzo finally looked up.
“You’ve been thinking about this a while.”
“Since I finished the fourteenth recording.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Your funeral,” she said simply.
A silence fell over the room. From the front, they could hear the low murmur of Dario’s voice on the phone.
“Santino will arrange a service,” Sophie continued. “He almost has to. Disappearing at dawn without a public acknowledgment of some kind would look suspicious to the other families. He’ll hold something formal — a gathering of the major players. He’ll want the optics. The grieving inner circle. The transition of power looking inevitable and ordained.”
She paused.
“He’ll want to look like the natural heir.”
“And I walk in,” Enzo said.
“You walk in. With the drive, with a projector, with every person in that room watching the footage before Santino has time to move, before his men have time to react, before anyone in that building can look anywhere else. You strip him in front of the people whose opinion is the only opinion in his world that matters.”
Enzo sat with that for a long moment.
“It’s a good plan,” he said.
“I’ve had six weeks to work on it.”
“There’s a problem with it. The service will be his environment. His men, his location, his timeline. I walk in there without a prepared position, and he just has me shot.”
“That’s why you need Sal’s contacts,” Sophie said. “You need men already in the room before you arrive. Men who look like mourners and aren’t. You need the exits controlled, the sight lines covered, and at least two of Santino’s own people turned before you walk through that door.”
Enzo stared at her.
“That requires a level of operational planning I have approximately seventy-two hours to execute — while officially deceased — using a list of contacts Dario hasn’t finished compiling yet.”
“Yes,” Sophie said. “That’s correct.”
“And you’re telling me this like you have a plan for that, too?”
She reached into her jacket and produced a small notebook — the kind with a soft cover and spiral binding, the kind a housekeeper might use for shopping lists. She opened it to a page near the middle and slid it across the table.
Enzo looked down. The page was covered in handwriting — small, precise, organized. Names. Phone numbers. Locations. Relationships. Notes on schedules, habits, known loyalties. Two pages of it, front and back, dense and careful, clearly the product of months of patient, meticulous work.
“Third name from the top,” Sophie said. “Marco Vatelli. One of Santino’s lieutenants. He’s also been skimming from Santino’s private accounts for eight months. Santino doesn’t know. Marco is terrified he’ll find out.”
She tapped the page.
“A man who’s terrified of being exposed by the person he’s supposed to serve is the most turnable asset in any organization.”
Enzo read the name. Read the note beside it.
“How do you know about the skimming?”
“Because Marco used a burner phone to transfer the funds, and he kept the burner in the third drawer of the guest-suite nightstand every time he stayed over.” A pause. “I changed the linens in the guest suite.”
Enzo set the notebook down. He looked at her for a long, quiet moment — not the assessing look he’d been giving her since the pantry, cataloging threat and utility. Something else. The look of a man recalibrating something fundamental.
“Sophie,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I’ve run an organization of four hundred people for fifteen years. I’ve spent my entire adult life building intelligence networks, maintaining informants, cultivating sources inside every organization that could threaten mine.”
He paused.
“You did all of this alone, in eight months, while cleaning my house.”
She was quiet.
“I’m not saying that to flatter you. I’m saying it because I need to understand who I’m dealing with. Not what you’re planning to do — who you are.”
She met his eyes, and the thing that had fractured in the corridor opened a little further.
“My father used to say the most powerful person in any room is the one nobody’s watching,” she said. “He said it as a warning. A thing to be careful of.” Her voice tightened. “I decided to become it instead.”
The front door of the print shop opened. Dario came back into the room, and his face had changed. Not dramatically — Dario was not a man who did dramatic — but something in the set of his mouth had shifted, and Enzo read it immediately.
“What.”
“Sal made the calls. Two out of three came through clean.”
“The third?”
Dario stopped.
“The third?”
“Tommy Reeves,” Dario said. “You had Tommy on the list. Tommy’s been running your warehouse operation on the South Side for eleven years.”
“I know who Tommy is,” Enzo said, his voice very careful.
“Sal called him. Tommy didn’t pick up. Sal tried the backup number. Nothing.” Dario set both hands flat on the worktable. “Then Sal called Tommy’s wife. They’ve known each other forty years — just to ask if he was okay.”
A pause.
“Tommy’s wife said he left the house three hours ago, after receiving a call. She said he seemed scared.”
The room was very quiet.
“Santino got to him,” Sophie said.
“Or Tommy went to Santino,” Enzo said. His voice was completely flat.
“Does it matter?” Dario asked.
“It matters, because if Tommy went voluntarily, it means Santino has more reach into the old guard than I assumed.” Enzo stood. “And it matters because Tommy knows about Sal. If he told Santino that Sal was making calls tonight—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
Dario was already reaching for his phone.
“I’ll warn Sal.”
“Warn him and move him. Right now, tonight. Get him out of Bridgeport.”
Enzo turned to Sophie.
“We can’t stay here.”
“I know.” She was already on her feet. “Santino doesn’t know I’m alive yet. But if Tommy told him about Sal’s calls, he’ll start trying to understand why Sal is making contact with people tonight. He’ll pull at the thread.”
“It won’t take him long. Where do we go?”
Enzo stopped.
It was a question he had not had to ask himself in fifteen years. Where do I go. His entire life had been built around the certainty of having somewhere to go — a structure, a network, a city that was, in every practical sense, his. He had operated with the absolute confidence of a man who owned the ground beneath his own feet.
Tonight the ground had been pulled out. And he was standing in a print shop on North Halsted with a burner phone, a USB drive, a notebook, and a woman he’d met ninety minutes ago who had come to his house to kill him.
He thought about it for exactly four seconds.
“There’s a woman named Rosa Carini,” he said. “Eighty years old. Lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Pilsen. She was my mother’s closest friend. She has never, in forty years, had any formal connection to the organization. Not a transaction, not a conversation, not a name in a file.”
He paused.
“Santino has never heard of her. Neither has anyone else.”
Sophie looked at him. “You’ve been holding that back.”
“I’ve been holding a lot of things back. In my position, you always keep one card nobody knows exists.”
He glanced at Dario. “Tell Sal to contact me through this number in six hours. Nobody else.”
Dario nodded.
Enzo picked up the burner, put it in his pocket, and moved toward the back door. Sophie followed.
At the threshold, she paused and looked back at Dario.
“Thank you,” she said.
Dario looked at her a moment with his unreadable, calculating face. Then something crossed it that, on a different man, might have been called warmth.
“You take care of him,” he said. “He’s harder to replace than he thinks he is.”
May you like
Sophie didn’t smile, but something in her eyes did.
Then they were out in the cold again, moving north through an alley while Chicago breathed around them — indifferent, enormous, carrying on with the business of being itself — while a dead man walked through its streets with a plan taking shape in his hands, and a woman at his side who had come to end him and chosen instead to save him.
