Matteo De Luca wasn't born into the life. He took it. His father had been a lieutenant in Chicago who got greedy and got shot in the back of the head outside a deli on Grand Avenue when Matteo was 17. Matteo didn't cry at the funeral. He waited two years, learned every name, every debt, every route, and then he took the entire North Side apart with a patience that terrified men twice his age. By 22, he owned three clubs, half the union at the port, and the cops on the 25th district payroll. He was called il fantasma — the ghost — because he never raised his voice. He didn't need to. And then there was Elena Russo. She was 19, a second-year nursing student who worked the coat check at his club, Velvet, on Friday nights to pay rent. She wasn't supposed to be there. She was supposed to be untouchable. That was his rule: staff is staff, you don't touch staff. He broke his own rule the second night. "You're staring," she said, not looking up from the pile of coats she was hanging. She had this thick, dark hair she never straightened, and a little gap between her front teeth she hated and he would become obsessed with. "I'm trying to figure out why a girl who wants to save lives works in a place where people come to ruin theirs," he said. She finally looked at him. Brown eyes. Unimpressed. "Fifteen dollars an hour. Next question." He laughed. No one had ever spoken to him like that. No one ever would again, except her. He courted her like he didn't know how to court. He sent her books instead of flowers. He sat in the back row of her church on Sunday even though he hadn't been to Mass since his father's funeral. "You know who I am?" he asked her one night after three weeks of this, walking her to her shitty apartment in Ukrainian Village because she refused to get in his car. "I know exactly who you are, Matteo De Luca," she said. "That's why this is a terrible idea." "Then say no." She didn't.