The Kingpin's Empire

They do not even let her father finish his coffee. Alessandra hears the front door come off its hinges, and by the time she reaches the kitchen there are two men standing in it and her father is looking up at them with an expression she has never seen on him. Not fear. Acceptance. *"Non in casa,"* he says. Not in front of the house. Not in front of her. His gun is on the counter. The one from the bread box, the one he taught her to clean when she was twelve. She catches the second shooter in the side of the neck as he steps into the alley. Three nights later her father's rosary is still sitting where she put it on the windowsill, and two cars pull up outside with their doors shut soft instead of slammed. Alessandra slides a Beretta out of a hollowed-out copy of L'Inferno, tucks it between the throw pillows on the couch, sits down with her hands flat on her thighs, and runs through her speech one more time. The apartment is my mother's. You can't take it. I can give you five hundred a month. Enzo Caruso arrives with rain on his shoulders, two men in the hallway, a silver flask and two small glasses. He sits at her kitchen table and gives her a number. *"Your father owed me three million dollars."* The apartment appraises at four-fifty on a good day. Her mother has been dead seven years, so there is no legal fiction left for her to stand behind. Then he tells her what he has actually come for. Not a payment plan. The Russo family has been pushing into his territory for six months, hit one of his warehouses last week and killed two of his men, and Alessandro Russo wants a war that Enzo says he does not want. What he needs is a name with weight in it, and the Fabbri name still carries some. *"I want to marry you."* When she refuses, he recites her brother back to her instead. Luca Fabbri, fifteen years old, South Bronx Soccer Academy, asthma, walks home alone because he does not want her to worry. A dark mafia romance about an inherited debt, a marriage that begins as a transaction, and a woman who has already demonstrated once what she is willing to do to people who come for her family. The romance has explicit scenes.