Sold To The Devil's Son

Chapter 2

Enzo Caruso had shaken hands with murderers before, and one trick, he'd found over the years, was to shake first, before the other man could decide whether you were worth the gesture at all.

So when the De Luca convoy came to a stop on his gravel drive and the doors began opening, Enzo was already moving toward it before his own front door had swung shut behind him, hand extending, smile in place, the whole performance running on rails he'd greased a long time ago.

"Dante," he said. "Welcome.. Welcome to my home."

Dante De Luca looked at the offered hand for exactly as long as it took to make Enzo aware that he'd noticed it. Then he took it. His grip was dry and even and entirely without warmth, the handshake of a man doing you the courtesy of touching your hand rather than a man glad to see you.

"Enzo."

That was all. One word, flat. He'd expected Some flicker of the boy Enzo remembered from fifteen years ago, gangly and furious at his father's funeral, trying so hard not to cry in front of men who would have used it against him for the rest of his life. That boy was gone.

"You made good time," Enzo said, because silence was worse. "The roads have been terrible this week, all this construction on the coastal route, I don't know what the county's thinking -"

"The roads were fine."

Another flat sentence.

Behind Dante, four men fanned out from the second and third cars, positioning themselves along the drive. Enzo recognized one of them, Carmine, Dante's right hand, a broad man with pale eyes who Enzo had met exactly twice before and both times had left him faintly nauseated for reasons he couldn't fully name. Carmine caught Enzo's eye now and offered him nothing at all.

The last man to step out of the lead car was younger, dark-haired, with an easy set to his shoulders that Dante's didn't have; Matteo, Enzo assumed, the younger brother, the one who handled the family's legitimate business fronts and had a reputation, unlike his brother, for something almost resembling decency. Matteo's eyes went straight up to the house, to the second-floor windows, and lingered there a beat too long before he brought them back down to the gathering on the drive.

Enzo led them inside. He'd rehearsed this part — the walk through the front hall, past the good art he'd bought specifically because it photographed well, into the drawing room where Francesca had arranged flowers that morning. He talked the whole way. Weather. The renovation on the east wing. A story about a mutual acquaintance in Palermo that he'd been saving for exactly this kind of occasion, a story with a joke at the end that usually got a laugh out of men far less patient than the one walking silently beside him now.

Dante didn't laugh. Dante didn't say anything at all until they'd reached the drawing room and Enzo had gestured him toward one of the good chairs, and even then what Dante said wasn't a response to the joke. It was simply:

"Where is she."

Not a question. Enzo had noticed that about him already, in the ninety seconds they'd been in each other's company; Dante didn't ask things. He stated the shape of what he wanted and waited for the world to arrange itself around the statement.

"Getting ready," Enzo said. "You understand, these things take time, the dress, the.. she'll be down shortly. Can I offer you something? Scotch, I have a very good bottle I've been saving --"

"Scotch."

Enzo poured two glasses at the sideboard with hands that he was proud, in the moment, to note were almost steady. He'd imagined charm working on Dante the way it worked on everyone else, imagined rapport establishing itself over good scotch and small talk, some human give in the exchange that Enzo could work with, the way he'd worked with every other dangerous man he'd ever needed something from.

There was no give here. He was starting to understand that the hard way.

He handed Dante the scotch and took the chair across from him, crossing one leg over the other in a posture he'd practiced in mirrors decades ago until it looked natural and unbothered. A man completely at ease in his own home.

"I want you to know," Enzo said, "that this arrangement and whatever complications brought us here, I intend for it to be the beginning of something good. For both families. Alessandra is a remarkable girl. Smart. Cultured. She'll make you an excellent --"

"I didn't come here for a sales pitch, Enzo."

Enzo felt his own smile hold in place through pure muscle memory.

"Of course," Enzo said. "Of course. I only meant --"

"I know what you meant."

Dante hadn't raised his voice. Hadn't leaned forward. He sat in the leather chair with the scotch untouched in his hand, watching Enzo with an attention so total and so unhurried that Enzo found himself, absurdly, wanting to check that his tie was straight, that nothing about his appearance was giving something away that his words weren't. This was the patience Enzo remembered hearing about, secondhand, from men who'd done business with the De Lucas over the years.

Fifteen years, Enzo thought. Fifteen years since the night that had put them both in this room, and Dante had spent every one of them becoming exactly this; a man who didn't need to raise his voice because raising it would have suggested he had something left to prove.

Enzo had spent those same fifteen years becoming very good at pretending he didn't remember what he'd done.

"How is business," Enzo tried, reaching for the old rhythm, the small talk that had never once failed him in thirty years of rooms exactly like this one. "I hear the shipping contracts out of Naples have been --"

"Fine."

"And your grandmother, she's well? Rosa, I always admired --"

"She's well."

Every attempt Enzo made landed against the same flat wall and slid off without purchase.

The scotch in Enzo's own glass had gone warm from his grip. He made himself set it down.

"Dante," he said, and let something real slip into his voice now, because the performance clearly wasn't landing and he needed, badly, to try something else. "I know there's history between our families. I know the circumstances of... of this arrangement aren't what either of us would have chosen, under different --"

"You didn't choose it either?"

The question came so mild, so genuinely curious in its tone, that it took Enzo a full second to register what had actually just been asked.

"I meant," Enzo said, "that none of us wanted it to come to this. The debt. If there'd been another way --"

"There was another way." Dante's eyes hadn't moved from Enzo's face this whole time, hadn't blinked more than they needed to, "You could have told my father the truth the night he died instead of letting my family bury him not knowing who to blame."

The room went very quiet.

Enzo felt his own pulse in his ears, a thick, unpleasant thudding that he was certain Dante must be able to hear from across the room. He kept his face still through pure force of will and reached for something to say that wouldn't sound like the confession clawing its way up his throat.

"I don't know what you mean," he managed.

Dante looked at him. Then slowly picked up the scotch he hadn't touched yet and took a single sip, his eyes finally leaving Enzo's face.

They didn't come back.

Because that was the moment the drawing room doors opened, and Alessandra came in.

Dante eyes found Alessandra in the doorway; ivory silk, veil, the sapphire drop at her throat catching the light from the window and they did not move again. Not to Francesca, coming in a step behind her. Not to Matteo, who'd slipped into the room sometime in the last few minutes and now stood near the wall with an expression Enzo couldn't read. Not back to Enzo, not even for a second.

Just Alessandra, held in that unblinking attention like she was the only thing in the room worth the effort of looking at.

Enzo watched his daughter cross the floor toward the man who had just, without raising his voice once, told Enzo he knew exactly what had happened the night Salvatore De Luca died.

He should say something. He was her father; some part of the role required him to say something, to step between whatever had just passed through the room, to reassert himself as the man in charge of this exchange. But he found, standing there that he had nothing left to say at all.

Dante stood as Alessandra reached him. Set the scotch down on the side table without looking at it. And when he spoke next, his voice had shed every trace of the patience he'd used on Enzo for the last ten minutes.

"Alessandra."

Just her name. The way he'd said Enzo's name at the start, one word and nothing else, except this time it landed like a claim being staked.

Enzo watched his daughter's throat move as she swallowed, watched her hold Dante's gaze without flinching, and understood that whatever was about to happen in this house over the coming weeks and months was no longer a negotiation he had any real part in. He was a man who had run out of things to offer, standing at the edge of a transaction that was now happening entirely without him.

He picked up his own scotch again. Drank it down in one swallow, the burn of it doing nothing at all to loosen the cold, tight knot that had settled into his chest the moment Dante said 'there was another way.'

Fifteen years, and the boy had known. Or suspected enough to say it out loud, unprompted, in the ten minutes before his own wedding, just to watch what it did to Enzo's face.

Enzo's hand, holding the empty glass now, had started, very slightly, to shake.