Then there’s me. The opposite of what they’d want in every way. Simone is a stained-glass window, and I’m the stone gargoyle outside the cathedral.

High-school education. Criminal record. My family’s got money and power, but from all the wrong sources. The Gallo name is as dark as our hair.

None of that will pass unnoticed by Simone’s father. As soon as she tells him about me, he’ll put his people to work, digging up every skeleton I’ve buried—figuratively speaking, I hope. Though it could be done literally, too.

It’s dangerous, putting myself in his crosshairs.

And I plan to do a fuck of a lot more than just draw his attention. I’m going to make myself his enemy—the would-be thief of his baby girl.

I know as well as Simone that Yafeu Solomon won’t accept that. Not for a second.

But there’s no way around it.

Not if I want to be with her for real, forever.

So I pick up my phone and I send my message to her:

No more hiding. I want to meet them.

I wait for her response, my mouth dry and my jaw tense.

Finally, she replies:

I’ll tell them tonight.

I set the phone down, letting out a long sigh.

I hope I’m not making a huge mistake.

Papa tells me to meet him at Stella so we can have dinner with Vincenzo Bianchi, the head of one of the other Italian families. His son got himself in trouble, driving drunk with two sixteen-year-old girls in his car. He went off the road in Calumet Heights, and one of the girls went through the windshield. Bianchi is trying to keep his son out of prison.

“It’s this fuckin’ DA,” Bianchi says, shoveling up a mouthful of ravioli. “He’s on a fuckin’ witch hunt here. My Bosco is a good boy. Never been in trouble once in his life. And just because this is his second DUI—”

Bosco is not a “good boy.” Actually, he’s a piece of shit. Thirty-two years old, making a fucking mess of his father’s businesses, roaring around the city with jailbait in his passenger seat, coked out of his mind. We’d all be better off if the prosecutor locked him up and threw away the key, before Bosco brings down any more heat on the rest of us.

But because Papa is Don, he has to do his best to help Bianchi—whether he deserves it or not.

“I’ve got some pull with the district attorney’s office,” Papa says. “But you have to understand, Vincenzo, he may do some time over this. If we’d been able to get there first—put one of the girls behind the wheel . . . it’s not good that the cops found him in the car. They did the drug test and the breathalyzer . . .”

“Fuck the drug test! Bosco doesn’t do any fuckin’ drugs.”

“Maybe we get some of the evidence to go missing,” Papa says. “There’s always some cop willing to ‘misplace’ the paperwork for a couple grand.”

Papa looks over at me, swirling his wine in his glass.

This is where I’m supposed to chime in with suggestions, or some encouragement for Bianchi. Let him know we’ll help him out with the usual threats, bribes, intimidation of witnesses . . .

I haven’t been paying attention, though. I’m distracted, agitated. Thinking about Simone. Wondering if she told her father about me yet. Maybe she doesn’t want to. Maybe she’s embarrassed of me. My chest burns at that thought—burns with shame and anger.

“What do you think, Dante?” Papa prods me.

“Is the girl dead?” I say abruptly.

“What?” Bianchi says, looking offended.

“The girl that went through the windshield. Is she dead?”

“She’s in a coma,” Bianchi grunts. “I’d pull the plug if it was me. Why keep a fuckin’ vegetable hooked up like that?”

“You should be glad her parents don’t share your opinion. Or Bosco would be looking at a murder charge.”

My father throws me a warning glare.

“Her parents should have kept their daughter at home,” Bianchi sneers. “You should have seen how she was dressed. Like a ten-dollar whore.”

My fists are balled up like two rocks under the table. I want to smash Bianchi right across the jaw. He’s a fucking hypocrite, acting like a father of the year when his own son is worth less than spit on the sidewalk.

This is exactly the kind of dirty work that Simone’s family would most look down on. Right in this moment, I’m exactly what they disdain.

I push away from the table before I say something I’ll regret.

“I’m gonna go find Nero,” I say.

As I stalk away, I hear Papa smoothing things over with Bianchi. “We’ll take care of it, Vincenzo. Don’t worry.”

I head back to the kitchen, where I nod to Zalewski, the Polack who owns the restaurant.

“You going down to the game?” he asks me.

“Is Nero playing?”

He nods.

“I’ll go watch, then.”

I push through the narrow door that looks like it leads to a storage closet. Instead, it gives way to a steep, dark staircase that descends into the bowels of the building.

This is where Zalewski runs his illegal poker game.

It’s not the biggest or the fanciest game in the city, but it’s the one with the most cache. While the ringers and the grinders like to play the bigger games where they’re assured at a least a couple of fish they can strip for chips, only the best of the best play at Zalewski’s game. You win there, and you can win anywhere.

I’m guessing this is what Nero’s been saving his money for, when I give him his cut of the armored truck jobs. He thinks he’s going to take down Siberia, the Russian ringer.

They call him Siberia because he always gets the cooler—the hand that kills your hand, even when you played it perfectly.

Sure enough, when I get down to the dim, smoky table, I see Siberia sitting at one end, flanked by two fellow Bratva, and then Nero sitting opposite with a hefty stack of chips in front of him. The other three players are The Matador, Action Jack, and Maggie the Mouth.

“Hey, Dante!” Maggie shouts, as soon as she sees me. “Where you been, big boy? I haven’t seen you in a month!”

Nero spares me a glance, his gray eyes flashing up at me before he turns them right back at his stack of chips again. I see him counting his stack and Siberia’s, which takes him all of two seconds. My brother is brilliant, much as I hate to admit it. But he’s also reckless and eager to make a name for himself. I don’t like that he’s playing, especially against Siberia, who’s as cold and humorless as his name would suggest.

Siberia looks more like a Viking than a Russian, with a full red beard and a barrel chest. He’s tattooed all the way down to his fingernails.

It looks like he’s got about $15k in front of him, though I can’t count it at a glance like Nero did. Nero has about two-thirds as much—maybe $10,000 in chips, which as far as I know, is about all the money he owns at the moment.

I’d like to grab him by his collar and haul him out of here, but you don’t leave mid-game.

So I just have to watch as the dealer lays out the cards.

Siberia’s on the small blind. He throws in a ten-dollar chip. The Russian on his left folds, then The Matador does the same. Maggie thinks about it a minute, before laying down her cards. Nero opens the betting with a hundred-dollar chip.