“I locked her in her bedroom, and she started to believe I was Stefano himself. She would cry all day long, try to hurt herself, sing to the baby in her stomach that she did not have for once.” He swallowed. “She did that for a year and then she smashed the window and escaped. I did not care where she was, I had her daughter to look after. Siena did not even know she had a mother, and Hugo had started to get sick and bedbound at that point, so her life was…kind. It was just us and Adriano, and I loved her dearly.” He smiled for the briefest moment as he said, “She required hugs like you do, and she would have thoroughly thrived in the pink dresses you favor.”
A tear slid down his cheek, and I kissed it away, pressing just a little love into the now as he revisited the past. He pulled me deeper into his lap, burying his head into my neck as he said quietly, “My mother returned two years later with a newborn she claimed was my brother… My full brother.”
“Ezio?” I whispered.
“She was out of her mind, saying someone gave him to her, that I had to take him or they, whomever they were, would find him. So, I took her back, took the boy, locked her in the room again, and listened to her ask the walls where her son went.”
It was unthinkable, the pain, the trauma, the endless burdens that had been placed upon him, and just when I thought there couldn’t be more, he continued. “Adriano began to live with me when my father became sicker a few years later. He was the only one who kept my brain from malfunctioning as we cared for these two young children, but he was also the only one who could secretly check on my other boys in Philadelphia without Stefano or Hugo knowing. Adrian would bring themback occasionally, though they were upset with me because they believed I had simply let them go, so Brenno was the only one who came back. He did not speak to me. He came to visit our mother despite the fact that she did not recognize him and thought he was Hugo. One day, he brought his pocketknife with him, the one she had gifted him once. I had not known. Neither had Adrian, and when he went upstairs to visit her, he gave her the knife and left her door unlocked.”
I began to shake my head against his chest, and he stopped, but I cupped his jaw and kissed him, kissing the words back into his mouth.
“Will you stay after I tell you what I did?” he whispered, his words shuddering.
I exhaled against his lips. “Always.”
“Adriano and I were right down the hall, trying to force medication into Hugo’s throat. Brenno was still asleep in the next room, and Siena was shouting my name as she always did so I didn’t go to her straight away, and?—”
He closed his eyes, the tears slipping, his heart feeling. “Mom saw her. She remembered her, remembered how her birth had been the catalyst to Stefano taking the boys. She took the knife, and she—she hurt her. Siena was crying and screaming and Mom waslaughing.I used to be better at understanding people and their expressions, and I knew that the look in her eyes was hatred for a child who was still holding my shirt in her hands because she liked to sleep with it. We ran, but it was too late, and then Adriano was clutching Siena to his chest, trying to cover her wounds, to stop her pain, and I did not go to her. I did not go to save her, Sicily.”
He shook his head, frantically almost. “I took the knife, and I stabbed my mother five times. It was then that the delirium broke and she became the mother who had loved her children again. She sobbed; told me she loved me and begged me to killher. Said she was sorry and I stopped, but she begged.‘You are capable, Milano’. She said it over and over.” He paused, closing his eyes. “Fifty-three times; I stabbed my mother fifty-three times. I do not know which one killed her.”
“Milan—”
“No. Do not speak. That is not the worst part. The worst of it is that Brenno did not see it all, but he saw me stabbing his mother. He was standing in the bedroom doorway, still in his pajamas, and his face, Sicily. He was fifteen and terrified. I did not realize until I saw the blood on my hands and had an…episodeas you saw at the wedding. I threw the knife across the hallway, then looked at him, and he startled, took the knife, and ran. I realized then that he could not see Siena’s dead body from where he was standing. To this day, he believes that I murdered our mother for nothing. He took Ez from downstairs as he ran, took him, and left.”
I cupped his cheeks and turned his face to mine, kissing him so hard he winced. “You were a protector. You were, and are, someone good who had awful things happen to them. It’s not your fault.”
He frowned for a long moment, as though the notion of such a thing was unimaginable, and then he broke, crumpling into that boy from the past and began to cry.
Not just cry, sob.
He sobbed into my chest, gasping for air, tugging at me as though I could somehow make this better when all I could do was stay and hold him. He’d told me before that he never cried, at least not in years, so I knew that this was so many years of tears, of feeling, of emotion that nobody told him was okay to feel.
“I told Hugo, Sicily, even though he was sick, I told him,” he spluttered, his tears soaking into the skin of my neck. “He told Adriano’s father, his Consigliere, and they amended the contractso that Adriano, Cesare, Brenno, and I could not speak of what had occurred that morning. If we told anyone, Diego or his men would kill us, and they would kill whoever we told, too. Diego forced me to find Bren to make him sign the contract.”
My fingers raked through his hair, drawing him as close as I could, holding him together so he could talk freely. “What happened?”
“I went to locate him the next day, after we had buried my mother and Siena in the garden. He had gone home. I do not know how he got there. The front door was open. Ezio was only two, sitting in a pair of tiny blue dungarees on the front step. He was singing nursery rhymes with his hands over his ears. I went into the manor, and it was so dark and cold, and Cesare and Brenno were standing over Stefano’s beaten, bloody body. He had copied me, had killed Stefano with a blade still covered in his mother’s blood. He became Capo at fifteen years old, and all I did was force them to sign the contract. I held a gun to Ezio’s head. Made the boys believe I was the murderer Brenno had seen me as so that it did not feel like more of a betrayal.” He gasped, trying and failing to draw in breath. “I cannot reverse it now. We would be outcast from society for the lies, without protection, and I refuse to let anyone harm you or Adrian.”
“Even though it’s harming them?” I whispered.
Milan pulled his head up, his shattered expression amending into the boss he was for just a second. “You come before anyone and everything, Sicily, even them.”
“And do you know who puts you first?” He frowned at my question. “Me, Milan. I put you first. You come before anyone and everything. You can smile, you can cry, you can feel, and I’ll still be here.”
His hands found mine, and then my arms, and finally my cheeks. He was looking at me like he didn’t know where to look,how to touch, how to believe. His mouth opened, but no words came, not when he’d already said it all.
“Sicily, I—” He closed his eyes, and I knew.
He couldn’t say it, not yet, not now, but I knew.
“I know.”
22
MILAN
The agent had stopped cryingby the fourth time my electric vehicle wires sparked through her bones.
