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Chapter One
RICHARD
People often said I reminded them of my dad, which I considered the highest of praises. Not because he was a "good" man; no, a good man would be enjoying this lovely Chicago spring day doing ordinary things, whereas my dad spent his days on shipping docks, ensuring that his heroin supply arrived safely.
Good men didn’t run mafias. Good men didn’t extort, deal, and murder. Good men didn’t train their sons to do the same.
But God above, I was proud to be like him.
According to my mom, I looked more like her than him or my biological father.
Of course, our similarities were not physical. Physically, we were very different.
Where dad had curly blonde hair, now streaked with grey around the temples, mine was as black as my mother’s.
I was built with lean muscle for speed and maneuverability, whereas my dad had always had more visible strength.
Fifty-one years alive, and that muscle definition wasn’t as obvious as it used to be, but I knew from experience that he could still lay a man flat out.
It wasn’t his body that showed his age. That privilege went to the wrinkles on his face, the crow's feet from laughing with us, the frown lines from his stern demeanor at work and the wrinkles on his forehead from the stress of both.
Sometimes, he said he didn’t know what was harder—being a father of three or ruling over the largest, most prominent mafia family in Chicago.
We’d always laughed at him when he said that because we all knew he’d never give up either.
Now, shielding his light eyes from the glare of the water and his grey-threaded blonde curls displaced by the breeze, I was filled with quiet awe of him.
It happened on occasion, watching him shoulder what seemed like all the world’s weight without flinching, and not for the first time, I hoped I was half the man he was.
Again, a weird thing to contemplate while waiting on a shipment of Colombian heroin, but that was just how things went sometimes in this family.
I turned away from him to peer up the ship's lofty side as the crane pulled container after container from the deck and stacked it neatly on the concrete. It was a tedious and noisy procedure, but dad told me that this was one of the most important shipments he'd received during his time as Don. It was a new era for the Marino family, and until this process became customary, one of us would need to be present to supervise it. Everything had to go well.
The crane operator did as we instructed and placed our shipping container separately, and as soon as we had the clear, my dad walked up to it with single-minded intent. I followed him, as did the four soldiers with us.
The door unlatched with a loud metallic clank as one of the soldiers hefted it open for us, forcing his entire body into it. The locks on these things were no joke. I took a subtle, deep breath to calm my nerves.
It looked like any other shipping container, with ten ordinary pallets of average crates neatly arranged and wrapped in layers of plastic wrap to keep everythingtogether. A forklift would be required to move them, but that could wait. We merely needed to open them and ensure that the goods had arrived.
I waved my hand, and the remaining soldiers moved forward. They sliced the plastic with a pocketknife, cut the strap with a jerking saw-like motion, and finally pulled the corner box down from above their heads with a grunt. I resisted the urge to wipe my sweaty palms on my pants.
Dad nodded to me, all business, and I stepped forward. Normally, menial work like opening shipping crates would be below me as the underboss, but then again, even being at the shipping dock wasn’t something I’d had to do more than a handful of times. And none of them had ever had a payload like this.
The crowbar pried open the crate with a loud crack as I twisted it, and with a little wiggling, the thing was open.
And then things went to shit.
“Chicago PD, step away from the box!” My hand, along with every other, went straight for our guns. Frankly, it was an instinct. Dad didn’t even twitch.
“Stand down!” he barked at us.
The emotional whiplash of just those two sentences had me drawing up short.
It was astonishing how quickly I went from terrified to defensive to bewildered to betrayed to understanding to angry. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—Even though I was internally both panicked and seething, I slowly released my weapon and saw the others do the same.
A shootout would not work out in our favor today.
My father put his hands up but otherwise stayed perfectly still. He didn’t even turn around to look at the officers as he addressed them. I counted seven, but who knows how many they had hidden in the recesses of shipping container towers? I gritted my teeth and glared.
