The nursery was dark except for the rain, and Dante Moretti had his hand inside his jacket

The basement beneath the Saint Jude Athletic Club on Taylor Street was thirty degrees colder than the penthouse, smelling of damp limestone, sweat, and thirty years of unwashed boxing ring canvas.

A single circular table of weathered pine sat beneath a cone of yellow light from a fifty-watt industrial bulb.

Around the table sat the three men who carved up the South and West Sides of Chicago like a side of prime beef in a packing plant:

Silvio 'The Fox' Vitucci, seventy-one years old, whose grandfather had run liquor off the lake with Capone; Antonio 'Big Tony' Moretti, Dante’s uncle, whose neck was thicker than his skull and whose rings were so heavy they rattled against his water glass; and Frankie 'The Hook' Kowalski, representing the Polish syndicate from the yards, his face crisscrossed with scar tissue from an industrial shredder accident thirty years back.

Dante sat at the head of the pine table.

He wore a plain black turtleneck and a heavy wool overcoat. He had not brought Marco or Lucian into the room. He had walked down the concrete stairs alone, his hands in his pockets, his Kimber tucked behind his hip.

"The girl," Kowalski growled, spitting a fleck of tobacco onto the floor. "She’s living in your house, Dante."

Dante did not reach for his glass. "Her name is Miss Jenkins. And her business is not your concern, Frankie."

"It is my concern when her brother owes me forty-two large, and your people pull him out of my holding cellar with three guys carrying submachine guns," Kowalski snarled, leaning his massive bulk across the pine. "We had an agreement on the territory, Dante. You don't reach your long arms into my bookmakers on Archer."

Antonio Moretti cleared his throat—a wet, rattling sound like gravel turning in an iron drum.

"Your uncle tells me you've lost your mind, Dante," Antonio said, his watery, bloodshot eyes fixing on his nephew's face. "The girl has no family. She has no connections. The whispers on the street say you took the lights out of the nursery because she told you to. They say the daughters of Isabella Moretti are running around the roof in twelve-dollar overalls like the children of dockworkers."

"The children are sleeping, Uncle," Dante said softly.

"We don't care about their sleep!" Antonio roared, his fist slamming down until the water glasses jumped. "We care about the New York contract! The Lucchese family is landing at O'Hare on Thursday to inspect the river terminals! If they see you living like a hermit with a crazy waitress and two ruined girls who screech at the wind, they will take the grain docks and give them to the Greeks!"

Dante tilted his head.

The room fell into that specific, terrifying silence that always preceded an execution in the Second Ward.

"You speak of my wife's children as if they are broken inventory, Antonio," Dante murmured.

Antonio did not back down. He was sixty-five, had survived three federal grand juries, and believed that blood gave him the right to spit on the floor of any room his brother's son commanded.

"They are broken, Dante!" Antonio shouted. "Your father would have put them in a home in Switzerland two years ago and married a woman from the Falcone family to shore up the docks! You are letting a nineteen-year-old beggar girl tell you how to run your estate while the city slips through your fingers!"

Dante reached into his pocket.

He did not pull out the Kimber. He pulled out a small, leather-bound notebook with blackened, smoke-damaged corners.

He laid it on the pine table, right in front of his uncle’s water glass.

Antonio’s eyes dropped to the leather. The color drained from his jowls with such sudden, sickening speed that his gray skin looked like wet parchment.

"Where... where did you get that?" Antonio whispered.

"The car bomb that took Isabella on the Skyway," Dante said, his voice level, conversational, almost soothing. "The police told me the ignition switch was wired to a commercial detonator from the stone quarries in Lemont."

He tapped the leather notebook with his index finger.

"This is the distribution ledger from the Lemont quarry for the spring of twenty-one. A crate of forty sticks of Dupont dynamite was logged out to a commercial contracting firm registered under your wife’s maiden name, Antonio."

Kowalski went completely still. His hand, which had been reaching for his lighter, froze in mid-air.

Silvio Vitucci leaned back into the shadows, his eyes half-closed, his ancient hands resting flat on his cane.

"You're lying," Antonio croaked, but his voice was thin, reedy, the sound of a dry reed snapping under a boot. "The bomb was the Greeks. We all agreed it was the Greeks."

"We agreed because you paid the police captain twenty thousand dollars to find a Greek shipping manifest in the wreckage," Dante said. "And you did it because Isabella had discovered that you were skimming seven percent off the harbor pension funds to pay your gambling losses in Atlantic City."

Dante stood up.

He did not raise his voice. He did not pull his weapon. He simply looked down at the old man who had sat at his father’s Sunday table for thirty years.

"Frankie," Dante said, not looking at Kowalski.

"Yeah, Dante?"

"The girl’s brother is in Idaho. His debt is settled. If you or any of your boys ever drive past her apartment on Division again, I will give the Lemont quarry manifests to the federal prosecutor on Clark Street, and I will let your three cousins take the fall for the harbor fraud."

Kowalski stood up immediately, knocked his chair back, and walked toward the stairs without looking at Antonio once.

"Silvio," Dante said.

The old man with the cane nodded slowly. "The family needs order, Dante. If the branch is rotten, the gardener cuts it before the winter."

Dante looked down at Antonio.

"You have until six o'clock tomorrow morning to board the flight to Palermo," Dante said. "You will live in the old house in Gibilmanna. You will not leave the village. You will not use a telephone. If you step onto an aircraft that leaves the island, Marco will meet you at the gate, and you will not have an open casket."

Dante turned and walked toward the stairs, his coat swinging behind him.

"Dante!" Antonio wept, his voice breaking into the ragged, pathetic sob of a doomed man. "She was just an outsider! She was just a girl from the hills! She was making you weak!"

Dante paused on the bottom step.