Chapter 9 - The Dinner at Rosso’s
Rosso’s Restaurant was the crown jewel of the North Side—a three-story limestone building with crystal chandeliers, red velvet booths, and private dining rooms where the fate of Chicago had been decided for forty years.
Tonight, the main dining room was filled with sixty of the most powerful criminals in the Midwest. At the head of the long U-shaped table sat Luca Ferraro, wearing a pristine white suit, a large cigar smoking between his fingers as he raised a glass of expensive champagne.
“To a new era!” Luca cheered, his voice boisterous. “An era of profit, an era of clarity, and an era without the old, stubborn rules of Lorenzo D’Angelo!”
The room erupted into applause and cheers. Wine flowed, silver plates clattered, and the air was thick with the smug complacency of men who believed their victory was absolute.
Then the lights went out.
The entire restaurant was instantly plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness. The music stopped. The cheers turned into a sudden, panicked murmur as sixty men instinctively reached for the weapons hidden beneath their tailored jackets.
“What the hell is going on?” Luca shouted, standing up from his chair. “Get the generator on!”
A single, brilliant industrial spotlight suddenly cut through the dark from the balcony level, pinning Luca Ferraro in a blinding circle of white light.
Standing in the center of the balcony, looking down like a vengeful deity, was Enzo D’Angelo. He wore a fresh black suit, his hand resting casually on the marble railing, his gray eyes burning through the glare. Beside him stood Marco, Silvio, and thirty heavily armed soldiers with their tactical rifles trained directly on the tables below.
The silence that fell over the room was so heavy it nearly crushed the air.
“You always did like white suits, Luca,” Enzo’s voice cascaded down the room, smooth, cold, and entirely devoid of mercy. “It’s a shame. It makes you a very easy target.”
Luca’s face turned an ugly, mottled shade of purple. “Enzo! You... you’re supposed to be dead!”
“I was,” Enzo said, stepping down the grand staircase slowly, his heavy boots sounding like a funeral march. “But a little girl in a pink raincoat told me that her mother always knows what to do. And she was right. She told me to clean up my trash.”
Before Luca could give an order, the back doors of the dining room flew open. A squad of federal agents, led by a prosecutor Enzo had secretly fed a mountain of encrypted financial files through Silvio that morning, flooded the room with their weapons drawn.
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“Federal Bureau of Investigation! Nobody move!” the megaphone roared.
Luca looked at the balcony, then at the federal agents, realizing with absolute, crushing horror that Enzo hadn't come to start a gang war. He had come to use the law he had spent a lifetime avoiding to erase his enemies permanently.
