ENZO
I HADN’T SEEN Tate since the night he’d turned his back on me.
It should’ve been nothing. A boy pulling the sheets over his shoulder, rolling away, deciding he didn’t want to look at me. Should’ve been nothing. But it clung, stayed, followed me into the silence of my office, into the burn of my whiskey, into the hours where I pretended the empire mattered more than the sound of his voice.
Now it followed me to Chicago.
Luke’s voice was clipped over the phone hours ago. “He’s here. Motel off the interstate. No bells, no whistles. Just the bastard.”
I’d pictured it a hundred times. A rat in a rotting nest, thinking he could cheat me and get away with it.
The place smelled like piss, rot, and desperation. The kind of walls that sweat from decades of spilled drinks. Fitting. Johnny
