When it ends, the silence comes back.
It’s louder than the video ever was.
“I miss you,amori miei,” I tell the frozen image of my wife and daughter as they smile back at me through the phone. “I love you both to the moon and back.”
I toss my phone aside and lie back on the bed, not bothering to undress.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of my wife and daughter’s deaths.
Their murder.
The word sits heavy in my chest, sharp and unforgiving.
Everything in me wants to go out into the world and wreak havoc on the men responsible for taking them from me.
But I already have.
I made sure they paid.
There’s no one left to take my anger out on.
And if I’m being completely honest with myself, there isn’t much anger left.
Just brokenness. Loneliness.
Emptiness.
That thought alone makes me feel guilty, but I’m a reasonable man. I know there’s nothing to be guilty about.
My wife and daughter never came second to the family business. They were always first in my life.
I have no regrets in how I treated them. How I loved them.
My only regret is that I’m the reason they were killed.
It was done to make me lose control. To leave my growing business vulnerable.
I smile at the memory of the blood that seeped into the grounds of my estate in Sicily.
Yes, I may have lost control of my emotions when those bastards killed my family, but it sure as hell didn’t leave any weaknesses in my walls.
If anything, it made me stronger.
It took months to capture the man who followed my family to the store and shot them dead. Three more months to break him and get a name.
Years to find the man who gave the order.
Lorenzo DeLuca.
The man who thought that if he weakened me enough, he could take me out and take over as Don to The Moretti Family Mafia.
His ultimate mistake was going after my twin brother, Stefano.
I knew DeLuca would target my only other weakness, so I made sure my brother was protected every moment of his life.
Much to his annoyance.
DeLuca got desperate one day and put a hit out on Stefano.
