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I underestimate him, I realized tonight.
He’s angry and spiteful, and I know he has no affection for me. I’ve known that since I was a little boy, but I can’t understand why it still burns.
At least now I am in the position of power. Not him. Not anymore.
I’ve worked hard to rebuild our family. To haul us back up to our rightful place at the top of the food chain. When his grief almost destroyed what our forefathers had built over generations, after the accident when he cost us too much.
He became weak, my father.
I was the one who took the reins when things fell apart.
I was the one who did what needed to be done.
The Di Santo family has had its hand in the darker side of business for as far back as our written history goes. Small-time crooks who, over time, grew into powerful shipping magnates and dangerous men.
And the kind of money we have is not attained by any legal means. It’s not possible.
Once under the cover of trees, I draw my phone out and train the flashlight on the ground. I follow the well-worn path to the work shed.
I don’t have to worry about my father coming out here because he physically can’t get here unless he has Johnny carry him, and that’s too much for him. Too humiliating.
I arrive at the shed and use my key to unlock the padlock. Inside, I find the kerosene lamp and turn it on. It’s a big space. An old carpenter’s shed of ages past. Since I was fourteen, I’ve slowly been refurbishing it. Lucas and I even worked in here together for a time.
My mother knew about our hobby. She knew we’d come out here to work, to build, and she kept our secret, because to my father, it would be a disgrace that either of his sons did the work of laborers. I remember when he caught us in here. We were sixteen then. It was just a few days after our birthday. That was the night my father learned Lucas’s weakness.
All that time, I think Lucas was more afraid of him than I was. Even given the fact that he would become his successor. The chosen son.
Lucas was the gentler of the two of us. But that night, my father figured out how to get through to him. Because the surest way to teach a lesson is to punish not the offender but what that offender holds dear. What he loves.
I knew all along if Lucas just did what he was told to do, it would be over sooner. He couldn’t wrap his brain around it, though. Couldn’t let go of the guilt even when I was the one who paid for his weakness.
I look around at the pieces scattered throughout the space. Some are covered, the more special pieces I made for my mom or Annabel. Furniture and art. The crib I’d started working on for Annabel’s baby.
My greatest achievement, though? The thing that makes me most proud?
The Gates of Hell doors.
I take a long drink of whiskey, switch on the music. Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies, 1. Lent et douloureux.” I don’t know why I do it to myself. I guess I’m a masochist.
I sit in my chair and close my eyes.
It’s cold in here. I don’t build a fire, though. Instead, I drink, and I look at the pieces I’ve neglected as memories dance in my mind.
Were we a happy family once? If we were, I don’t remember it. No, I don’t think we were ever that.
The cold wind whistles through the trees outside. Pitch-black and dense out there. If I believed in ghosts, I’d say this was their haunting ground.
Maybe that’s the real reason I come out here.
Maybe I hope my mother or Annabel will haunt me.
Will I make Cristina into a ghost?
She is my test. A test of my loyalty and of my humanity.
And I can’t have both.
Something about her challenges me, contradicting that hate and vengeance that’s been in play since the night of the accident and more so after we buried Annabel.
But something about her cries out for protection, and that call is answered by something primordial in me.
When I first saw her in that hallway, she was barely ten. A child. I am not monster enough to hurt a child.
But that feeling, that need to protect her, it’s stronger now than it was then.
Protect her from him.
Protect what’s mine.
But there’s more.
There’s a primal need to possess her.
I close my eyes as the music plays on. And as I listen, I think about her upstairs in her room. I think about the horror in her eyes when she saw what she’d done to me with that knife. I hear her fear in that dark corridor.
From the gloom of that shadowy hallway, she called out for me. As if I’m not the dark she fears.
