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“I’d rather you spit it out than keep torturing me with this fucking charade.”
Mario nods. “I understand.”
“Well then?”
He surveys me for a second longer. “When was the last time you visited Camilla, Marcello?”
I freeze. Of all the things I thought he might say, this was far from the top of the list. “Excuse me?”
Mario says nothing. He just regards me with those goddamn infuriating eyes. Those eyes that say do not lie to me, Marcello. Very few people in my world get to look at me like that.
Unfortunately, Mario is one of them.
It’s not that I don’t want to visit my mother. It’s that seeing her reminds me of a past I have spent many gallons of whiskey and many years of pain trying very, very hard to forget.
Mario rises without saying another word. He leaves the door ominously open behind him. Does he want me to follow him?
I growl under my breath when the room is mine again. “Fuck you, old man,” I whisper, though I don’t truly mean it.
Sighing once more, I set the whiskey glass down on the side table and go after him into the darkness of the hallway.
The house is quiet and still. I make my way through the long hallways, leaning on the walls to stop from stumbling. Mario is waiting for me outside the locked steel door. He nods when I walk up and scowl at him.
He turns and lays his thumb on the biometric scanner, then pauses for a moment. “You know,” he muses, “when I gave Harper her tour of the house, she asked me specifically about this door.”
“And?” I say in a low voice.
“She’s a smart girl.” As if that concludes whatever mysterious tangent he was going on, he turns back and finishes opening the biometric security. The door swings open, and Mario steps aside to usher me through.
I pause just before I cross the threshold and look at him. He arches an eyebrow as if to say, Yes?
I open my mouth to say something; I’m not sure what exactly, though. Should I reprimand him for clearly trying to guilt me into this visit? Should I thank him for coming to me when he knows that my head is full of dark thoughts?
In the end, I decide to say nothing at all.
I walk inside. Mario remains in the hallway.
It is mostly dark in my mother’s room, although the life support machines offer a dull green glow along with the steady beep-beep of her heart rate monitor. I cross over to the foot of her bed and survey her for a long moment.
She looks like a corpse. Only the rise and fall of her bony chest tells me she’s alive.
I reach out and touch her pale wrist. Her bones jut out. Even though she is on a feeding tube, she can’t seem to retain much muscle mass.
Her hair is the only thing that’s retained its former glory. She was a beautiful woman once, and if I look just at her hair, I can still see the remnants of her beauty. Even today, after fifteen years spent mostly drugged up and half-awake in this bed, it’s still long, dark, and lustrous. I shift my fingertips from her wrist to touch a stray lock of it.
“Spero che tu possa perdonarmi, Mama,” I whisper in a low croak.
I hope you can forgive me, Mama.
I sink down on the chair next to her bed. I’m so fucking tired, I could rest my forehead on her sheets and sleep for centuries.
Leaning my head against my mother’s limp hand, I close my eyes, but there’s no relief to be found. Because I can’t help but think of the war with the Russians and the role Harper has come to play in my life.
I think of her every time I close my eyes. We’re torturing each other—two fated souls locked in a sickening dance that’s getting faster and more intense with every passing second. Seeing who will quit first. Who will give up and submit to the other.
I’ve spent my whole life dominating, not submitting. I refuse to give in to her—to her temptations, her secrets. She is mine, not the other way around.
Still, the prospect of throwing everything away feels so tempting right now.
Ten years earlier
With the Irish and the Italians united, all our rivals have only two choices: submit or die. We control too much territory and too much weaponry for anyone to dare go up against us. We have control over the courts, the police department, and the bureaucracies of all the building committees and business organizations.
We are everywhere.
And now, with this meeting here in the Italian restaurant Vitruvius, we were about to become unstoppable.
The restaurant is reserved for us alone tonight, and I cannot wait to fill my belly with the delicious food they offer. The hostesses takes our coats and shows us to our luxurious looking seats. I find myself in the middle, seated across from the Irish, with my father to my left and my mother to my right.
