The Don's Rival

Ciccio's smells the way it always smells on a Friday: cigar smoke and somebody else's vomit. Matteo Moretti comes in through the side entrance and the bouncer is wrong. Wrong face, wrong nod, and then the kid says his name out loud, *"like he's confirming a delivery."* Matteo asks where Sal is and the kid points at the kitchen. Every made man in the borough knows the real back office is upstairs, behind the fake wall in the storage closet. Matteo goes up anyway. Through the one-way glass he sees the last man who should be standing in that room. Dante Ferrara, in black from collar to shoes, a thin scar cutting through his left eyebrow, his men spreading out across a floor that has been Moretti ground for thirty years. He cannot see through that glass. He looks straight at it regardless, and there is no surprise in his face at all. By the time Matteo reaches the alley, his driver is slumped over the steering wheel with the back of his head opened up, and Matteo's own phone insists he placed a call three minutes ago that he did not place. Then Dante rings him on a backup number nobody should have. *"Your cousin's playing both sides. Your father's health is failing. And your sister is in love with mine."* What Dante wants is the name of whoever killed his father. What he believes is that it was Claudio Moretti, working with Dante's own uncle Vito, to take both families in one move. What he offers is an alliance. What he says last, before the line goes dead, is *"Because if you don't, Elena dies next."* The two halves of that phone call cannot both be true, and Matteo does not know which one is the lie. He also does not know who in his own house made a phone call while he was standing in a room nobody was supposed to know he was in. An MM mafia romance told in Matteo's own voice: two heirs, two families, a cousin with a gold watch, a sister on the wrong side of a war, and the man he was raised to treat as an enemy who is the only person telling him anything useful. The romance is closed-door.