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Aria was the first woman I hadn’t chosen for myself, and I probably wouldn’t have ever chosen. If Father had left the choice up to me to pick an Outfit girl, I’d have chosen someone else because, from the first moment I’d seen Aria, I’d wanted to protect her. Even back then I’d known deep down that marrying her posed a fucking risk to everything I’d built. Marrying Gianna would have been the safe choice because, with her personality, I wouldn’t have had trouble to be an asshole, to keep up my monstrous mask. With Aria it was a losing game. The most dangerous game I’d ever played.
What the fuck was she doing to me? “Your breasts are fucking perfect,” I said into the silence, needing to break this insane moment.
Aria brushed her fingertips over a scar on my stomach. “Where did you get this scar?”
Safer terrain. “I was eleven.” The memories slithered up, clawing their way through all the other, many worse memories.
Shock flashed across Aria’s face. She knew what story was coming. Everyone knew the story. The boy who killed his first man at eleven, even then a monster. His father’s son. Maybe people had been scared of me even before then, but the first time I noticed how other people regarded me like someone to be wary of was after that first kill.
“The Famiglia wasn’t as united as it is now,” I began and told her how everything had started, how I’d become a Made Man, a killer. Even back then I hadn’t felt guilt over killing another human being. Killing my father could rip the Famiglia apart again if I wasn’t careful.
Aria watched me with an intent expression, lacking the sick fascination or reverent fear usually directed my way when this story was told.
“That was your first murder, right?”
“Yeah. The first of many.” I wasn’t exactly sure how many people I’d killed, not just because it wasn’t always clear if Matteo’s or my bullet ended someone in the chaos of a mass shooting, but also because at some point I’d stopped counting. What did it matter if I’d killed twenty, fifty or one-hundred?
Aria’s fingers still stroked my scar, but I doubted she noticed. She was completely focused on my face. “When did you kill again?”
“That same night. After that first man, I told Matteo to hide in my closet. He protested, but I was bigger and locked him in. By then I’d lost quite a bit of blood, but I was high on adrenaline and could still hear shooting downstairs, so I headed for the noise with my gun. My father was in a shooting match with two attackers. I came down the stairs but nobody paid me any attention, and then I shot one of them from behind. My father took the other down with a shot in the shoulder.”
“Why didn’t he kill him?”
Oh, Aria, so innocent. “He wanted to question him to find out if there were other traitors in the Famiglia.”
“So what did he do with the guy while he took you to the hospital?”
As if my father would have ever stopped torturing someone to get me medical help, much less take me to a hospital.
“Don’t tell me he didn’t take you.”
“He called the Doc of the Famiglia, told me to put pressure on the wound and went ahead and started torturing the guy for information.”
Aria shook her head slowly. “You could have died. Some things need to be treated in a hospital. How could he do that?”
“The Famiglia comes first,” I said. It was a truth I lived by. It was something we demanded of our soldiers and something Matteo and I had to live by as well. “We never take our injured to a hospital. They ask too many questions and the police get involved, and it’s an admittance of weakness. And my father had to make sure the traitor spoke before he got a chance to kill himself.”
“So you agree with what he did? You would have watched someone you love bleed to death so you could protect the Famiglia and your power.”
Love.
Someone you love.
Did Aria really think I was capable of love? That men like my father or I had it in us to harbor that kind of pure emotion? Maybe every child was born with the need to love and be loved, but I’d been raised without that notion and eventually it had been burnt out of me with violence, betrayal and cruelty.
“My father doesn’t love me. Matteo and I are his guarantee for power and a way to keep the family name alive. Love has nothing to do with it.”
Aria’s face scrunched up, despair flashing in those baby blues. “I hate this life. I hate the mafia. Sometimes I wish there was a way to escape.”
My body grew tense at her admittance. “From me?” I asked, holding back the fury as well as pain the idea brought me.
