Chapter One: The Return
Vincent Moretti stepped off the Amtrak at Union Station wearing a three-thousand-dollar coat and a face like a cracked monument. The city hadn't changed—its skyline still jagged like broken teeth, its streets still bleeding stories into the gutters. But he had. A decade in exile carves deep. Especially when you left in cuffs and came back in silence.
Chicago greeted him with cold eyes and colder air. Snow blew like ash across the sidewalks, and no one recognized him. That suited him just fine.
Ten years ago, he'd been the youngest made man in the Moretti syndicate. At twenty-eight, he had control over half the West Side's bookies and a reputation for doing things clean—clean enough to scare the dirtiest of them. But even clean gets bloody when the brass decides you're too smart, too popular, too dangerous.
They sent him to Joliet on a frame job. Murder. A body that didn't belong to him, but a message that did: stay down, stay quiet, and stay gone.
He'd done the time. But not the forgetting.
Now he was back.