THE MAFIA BOSS’S FIANCÉE ORDERED ME TO GET RID OF HIS OLD DOG BEFORE THEIR ENGAGEMENT DINNER—BUT WHEN I CARRIED HIM INTO THE DINING ROOM, THE MOST FEARED MAN IN CHICAGO GOT DOWN ON HIS KNEES.

The grand dining table was cleared of food, replaced instead by stacks of title deeds, Swiss bank routing logs, and the black leather ledger that contained every dirty secret of the Chicago political elite.

At midnight, twenty-four capos filed into the grand hall. They took their seats in absolute silence, the air thick with the smell of wet wool, cigar smoke, and nervous sweat. Half the table leaned toward Salvatore; the other half kept their eyes firmly on Luca, who sat at the head of the table opposite his father.

I stood behind Luca with Barnaby at my side. Salvatore’s eyes flicked to me repeatedly, a venomous curiosity simmering behind his cold gray irises.

"Gentlemen," Salvatore began, leaning both hands on his wolf-head cane. "You know who I am. You know what I built. For twenty-two years, you accepted Luca because you believed the crown was vacant. But the king never died. I merely watched from across the sea."

"You abandoned us!" an older capo named Frankie Vane shouted from Luca's side of the table. "When the Feds raided the docks in 2004, where were you? Luca served six months in Cook County protecting our names! Luca paid our families' pensions when the unions locked us out! You want to come back now that the money is clean and the cops are bought?!"

Salvatore didn't raise his voice. He simply raised his left hand.

A muffled thud sounded outside the ballroom doors. A moment later, two of Salvatore’s guards dragged a heavy burlap sack into the room and dumped it onto the polished parquet floor.

The bag opened, revealing bundles of bearer bonds and property deeds worth tens of millions of dollars, stamped with the seals of European banks.

"Frankie," Salvatore whispered, his smile chilling the room. "Your brother owns three vineyards in Tuscany, doesn't he? He bought them with money he thought came from an offshore blind trust. It was my trust, Frankie. I paid for his life while you were busy taking orders from a child. Half of you at this table are already in my pocket. You just didn't know whose hand was feeding you."

Frankie turned pale, sinking back into his chair without another word. A heavy, dread-soaked silence washed over the room. Salvatore had planned this for years—buying up family debts, infiltrating offshore accounts, laying a spider's web across the continent until every capo in Chicago was bound by invisible golden threads.

"Here is my offer," Salvatore said, looking directly at Luca. "Surrender the docks. Surrender the downtown properties. Keep the suburban trucking lines and fifty million dollars in cash. Take your sister Clara, take this stray girl, take that half-dead dog, and leave Illinois forever. Never return. Set foot across the state line, and I will have you hunted down and skinned like a deer."

The capos turned their heads toward Luca. The pressure was immense. Taking the deal meant survival; refusing it meant an all-out civil war within the hour.

Luca sat motionless. He looked down at his father’s signet ring on his own finger—the ring he had retrieved from the ashes all those years ago. Slowly, deliberately, Luca pulled the heavy gold ring from his finger.

He rolled it across the mahogany table.

The ring clattered, spinning wildly, before stopping directly in front of Salvatore’s cane.

"You can take the ring," Luca said, his voice deadly calm. "You can take the gold. But you won't take this house. And you won't take my city. Because you forgot one thing, Salvatore."

Salvatore raised an eyebrow, amused. "And what is that, my boy?"