Bad Bishop

Don Vello Ferrante, the dying head of the New York Camorra, sits before a Battle of Waterloo chess set and contemplates his succession.

Don Vello Ferrante, the dying head of the New York Camorra, sits before a Battle of Waterloo chess set and contemplates his succession. His diagnosis is a mystery, his decline unmistakable. He has three sons—Luca the calculated eldest, Achilles the feared middle child, Enzo the charming youngest—a new son-in-law, and a secret favorite whose identity he guards. Each could inherit an empire stretching from the East Coast to Naples. But the don is a chess master, and he knows that every move reveals as much as it conceals. The question of who will rule isn't simply about power. It's about which piece on the board is willing to sacrifice everything else to reach the other side.

Tiernan hands the Ferrante princess his severed eyeball

Tiernan Callaghan, a twenty-eight-year-old Irish crime lord who rules the South Bronx, is beaten and interrogated in the Ferrantes' basement for killing the Russian Bratva boss in Camorra territory. As punishment, Achilles Ferrante carves out Tiernan's left eye with a dull knife—and Tiernan doesn't flinch. Leaving the mansion with a human skull tucked under his arm, he spots eighteen-year-old Lila on the courtyard fountain at midnight, sketching in a nightgown. He smears blood across her cheek, nearly drowns her, presses a knife to her eye, then places his severed eyeball in her palm. He vanishes into the dark. Lila sprints inside, soaked in his blood. She keeps the eye, preserving it in a jar of isopropyl alcohol—her first dark secret.

A faceless attacker destroys Lila's innocence on a moonlit shore

At her eldest brother Luca's wedding on the private Ferrante island, Lila watches couples dance in aching isolation, wearing a tiara of white roses. When her mother publicly refuses a man's request to dance with her—maintaining the charade that Lila is intellectually disabled—Lila flees through the wine cellar to a remote beach. A man follows her into the darkness. He seizes her from behind, beats her savagely, drugs her with a chemical-soaked rag, and rapes her. She fights until the chemicals take hold, then goes limp. She cannot see his face. Her brothers find her at dawn, battered and bloody, the once-white roses now crimson. Eight weeks later, she discovers she is pregnant from the assault.

The Ferrantes trade their daughter to bury shame and forge alliance With Lila pregnant and unmarried, Vello refuses an abortion on religious grounds and arranges her marriage to Tiernan—the one man volatile enough to believably claim the baby and protect the family's reputation. The deal is transactional: Tiernan gains Camorra soldiers for his war against the Bratva,…