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Emilio and Stefano Lombardi—the two cousins who were three grades above us and who’d called me mother-killer. After school had let out one day, Raphael had confiscated a wooden bat from the gymnasium and hunted them down. He broke Emilio’s leg in two places and shattered Stefano’s elbow before the security guard could subdue him.
My throat was tight. “What about them?”
“The night I fucked them up, I told Athair that I wanted to tell you the truth. I told him that it wasn’t fair that you and everyone else in this fucking city believed that you killed our mother when it was his fault she was dead.”
A fist seized my heart. Every time he reiterated that fact, my body wanted to reject it, but my mind knew he spoke the truth.
“Do you know what his reply was, Lucifer? Can you imagine? The father you believe is so virtuous?”
His questions landed like jabs to my skull. They rattled my brain and scattered the facts and images in my head as dread washed over me.
Raphael climbed off the cot and returned to the front of his cell. Under the faint glow of the catacomb lights, our gazes locked. An unfamiliar look registered in his eyes. It was an emotion my brother had never shown before now: resignation.
He forced a swallow. “He said he’d chosen the wrong son.”
The chair scraped along the floor as I pushed to my feet. My body vibrated with the raw force of my wrath.
Raphael didn’t utter a word of protest as I fled the catacombs. I’d leave him to lick his wounds until I’d decided what to do with him.
I took the stairs two at a time and made my way through the hidden door that led into the study. Bleach burned my nostrils. Everything in the room had been put back into its rightful place.
I passed Liam sitting on the couch. “Get some rest,” I ordered.
“Aye, Boss.”
In under a minute, I reached the landing between the first and second stories. For the first time in twenty-three years, I didn’t drop to my knees and pray for my mother’s forgiveness.
A peaceful comfort swept through me, but it was fleeting, swiftly replaced by something else.
Something sinister.
If it weren’t for Willa, would I ever have learned the truth? I shook off the self-inquiry. It didn’t matter. I knew now. The past couldn’t be undone. The future couldn’t be predicted.
The power was always in the present.
I continued my path. My resolve grew stronger with each footfall. My father’s bedroom came into view, and I slowed my gait. I had a lifetime of memories to replace. This felt like an appropriate substitute, and I wanted to capture every fucking detail.
I paused outside the door before easing it open, then stepped inside.
My eyes fell to the lifeless vessel. I felt nothing that resembled grief or pity.
I prowled to his bedside, using the time to take measure of the pain, sorrow, and self-hatred that his lies had created in the last several hours.
In the last twenty-three years.
How had he lived with himself after what he’d done to my mother? How did he reconcile the manipulation of one son and the destruction of the other? What kind of monster forces his sons to carry the lifelong burden of his misdeeds?
I didn’t know this man. He was a stranger to me.
The man I’d once admired, respected, and loved? He wasn’t real.
With a steady hand, I removed the emerald ring with the family crest emblazed on either side from his finger and dropped it into my pocket.
I leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “I know, Athair.”
Then I slipped the pillow from behind my father’s head and pressed it to his face.
Willa
