Bella lowered her knees and leaned forward as she said quietly, “I think if you all just admitted you were sad, this whole thing could’ve been fixed already.”
Her words stirred that sadness within me, creating a whirlpool that seemed to swallow every other emotion too. Sadness had the power to take everything away, to make the happy things feel like burdens, to make even anxiety feel like drowning.
I cleared my throat, releasing the clog there. “Why would my brothers be sad?”
Bella leaned back into her chair, placing a hand on the small swell of her stomach. “They’re stubborn, a lot like you. It’s not about ruining you. It’s not even really about the contract; it’s about taking back everything they lost, getting their voices back, feeling safe again.”
There were no words to adequately explain how wrong she was because she did not seem wrong at all. The Feras had lost everything: their mother, their father, their home, Adriano, and evenme.I had lost a lot, but I had been allowed to keep what was most familiar: Adriano, my home, the legacy, even my name. It struck me like a bullet wound that they had not even been able to keep theirname,what linked them to their childhood and their safety. Their identities had been stolen, yet I was still wondering why they were not the boys they had left me as.
“Brenno believes I killed our mother for nothing,” I explained. “They both believe I did not fight for them to stay within New York.” I trembled, the unexpected blur of tears lining my eyes, except I did not brush them away, not this time. “I did not do that.”
Bella’s brows pulled together. “Wait… What happened?”
I took a deep breath, one that stung my chest, and I told her everything I had trusted Sicily with, no longer fearing the contract that lacked the very thing it should have been founded on.
Emotion.
If enough of us knew our truths, if enough of usfeltwhat we wanted one another to understand,maybe the contract would void itself. Perhaps we could all get what we wanted if wefeltit for one another.
“What do you recommend I do, Bella? How can I amend this?”
She reached her hand across the table, squeezing mine as she smiled through her tears. “Talk to them. Tell them what happened, because they don’t know.”
I snatched my phone from the desk and clicked Cesare’s contact despite how my fingers shook and my stomach lurched. Each ring was silenced beneath the erratic thump of my heartbeat, and when the rings stopped, I was certain my heart flatlined too.
“Milano!” I frowned at his ecstatic tone. It did not suit this scenario. “Good timing. I’ve just sent you an email. Why don’t you give it a look while we’re on the phone together?”
Knowing was a strange concept, almost stranger than feeling.
How could my body know that what was in that email would change everything without my brain wanting to accept that?
I pressed the phone to my ear against my shoulder, racing to my laptop to open the only unread email I had. One beat passed with Cesare’s breathing in my ear, and for that moment, I did not want to click on the file, to know what was there, but I owed it to my wife, even tohim.
The file loaded and the phone slipped out of my hand.
Sicily was there, in a basement with wet stone walls and a yellowing mattress in the corner. Her wrists were bound aboveher by metal chains, her mouth biting down on a bundle of cloth. She wore only a short, silk white dress that revealed purple splotches of bruising, and as the camera panned out, the blood decorating her pale skin became evident and only increased until the whole room was in view, and her blood was painted across every surface surrounding her.
Cesare appeared in the camera, watching with rapt attention as Sicily dropped her head to her chest in defeat. He showed the camera some kind of weapon, an axe with metal shears sticking out of it, before he gripped my wife by the throat causing tears to leak from her eyes.
Sick.
It was sick and twisted, but so was my brother. No sane person could do this to somebody smaller and weaker than them, somebody who was entirely innocent.
“Sicily,” I whispered as though she could hear me, but this was not a window. If it was, I would have smashed it through with my bare knuckles and used the shards to rip out Cesare’s throat.
He laughed as he pointed one of the shears’ sharp rusted points over her body before charging forward, taunting her, causing her to sob harder. She was terrified, utterly frozen against the chains, and as I watched my brother find this amusing, I knew that I would have to kill the boy who had once been the light of our lives.
I dropped to my knees, scurrying for the trash can. I barely made it before the nothing I had eaten in the previous days violently heaved from my stomach.
My hand fumbled for my smashed phone as my chest panted, and I brought it to my ear once more and whispered in hoarse pants, “Anything you ask, I will do it, I will do whatever you want. I will find a way to void the contract. I will threaten Diego Sansone’s life. Take all that I have, Cesare, but do not take her.I will give you anything, my territories, my title, my money, my home, just nother.”
A moment of silence passed before I heard a deep sigh. “Bring Bella alive and meet me at the location I sent you.”
The phone line clicked closed, and the video continued to play until Sicily screamed. She screamed so loudly and so violently that it hummed in my eardrums even when it was over and the screen went black.
25
SICILY
