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1
DANTE
Itake a deep breath as I walk into my father’s office. I haven’t been in here since he died a couple of weeks ago, but I know that this is where all his important documents are. I’m looking for anything that might help me, really, although I’m really hoping to find his will.
My more money-grubby family members are squawking about it, but I know that my father wouldn’t leave his important business to anyone but me.
I’m an only child, after all, and he’s been training me to take over as Caputo since I was seventeen.
I walk around his desk, running my fingers along it. It’s gotten dusty since I haven’t allowed the cleaners to get in here since he passed.
Passed. That’s what everyone kept saying.“I’m so sorry to hear about your father’s passing.”He didn’t pass. He was murdered.
My phone rings.
“Hey, how are you holding?” Nico asks.
“Just going through his things.” Nico is my best friend. I’ve known him for years. We are more like brothers than anything else. I know he’d give his life for me in a heartbeat and I’d do the same for him, even if it’s his job to protect me and not the other way around.
“I just found my father’s key ring on the desk, give me a sec,” I say as I put him on speaker so I can unlock each of the drawers.
In the second to last drawer there’s a stack of paperwork. “I’ve got something,” I mention out loud to Nico.
“Anything useful?”
“Looks like his medical records, you know he had a bad ticker, right, even if it took a bullet to take him down.”
“Yeah,” he says grimly. “Fuckers. What else?”
“Stuff like my birth certificate, my mother’s death certificate, things like that.”
I remember when my mom died. “Of course they never solved my mom’s murder. They won’t be solving Dad’s either. Cops are useless, unless you pay them, and even then they are a bunch of incompetent little bitches that can only whine and beg for more money.”
Nico spits on the other side. “Pigs.”
“Not like it matters, does it? Because at the end of the day, we both know who killed both my parents.”
Luca Lorenzo. I’m almost certain of it.
“You know we own most of South Chicago, while Lorenzo rules over North Chicago. He doesn’t like that he doesn’t own the whole of Chicago, and he also doesn’t like that he doesn’t have a male heir.”
“Just that girl you saved once, right?”
“Yeah. After that, Luca swears left and right that he doesn’t have any beef with the Riccis. My dad might have believed him, but I know better than to believe Luca or anyone with the last name Lorenzo. Even if my father took strides to forgive Luca toward the end.”
A memory assaults me. A fight we’d had in this very office.
“You know he killed Mama!” I burst out, after we’d seen him at a party and my father had been friendly and charming toward him and his little daughter.
“We don’t know that, Dante,” my father said with a sad little smile. “Your mother died because of me. Because I had my fingers in too many pies. It could have been anybody.”
I gritted my teeth to keep from saying something disrespectful to my father. I loved him, and I’d always done what he said, but this? Luca Lorenzo?
“We know he’s our rival, and that he doesn’t have an alibi for when she was killed,” I said tightly, and my father sighed.
“Don’t you get tired, son? Of all the killing? Of always wanting revenge?”
“Never,” I said firmly, and my father ran a hand through his thick, mostly gray hair.
