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I stared down at Fiorello; something was still missing here.
“Wait, but who is Siena?” Wyatt asked, and that was it.
“Siena—Calliope’s grandmother—no stepmother.” That was what I was missing. The sons who died weren’t just Fiorello’s; they were Siena’s. She was in this revenge game, too.
“All this time, the family war, wasn’t between Callahans…it was between Orsinis.” Liam shook his head.
“I thought she just liked repeating her name over and over again. But she’s been telling us from the start…she is Calliope Seraphina Orsini.”
“So, what you are telling me is,” Wyatt spoke up again, “we just tried to assassinate a member of our own team, as the team of assassins you didn’t finish off comes to kill us, over two boys who died before we were fucking born! Are you telling me Mom, that Ethan’s right? That I didn’t save my brother but actually fucking betrayed him and may have just helped kill my niece's mother?”
I tried to reach out to him. “Wyatt, there was no way we could have—”
“Oh my God.” He placed his hands to his face. “Mom! Dad! Do you know what we have done? If Calliope dies, this family will not make it.”
I knew but wanted to calm him down. “This family has made it through worse—”
“Worse is not what Ethan will be if Calliope dies. We didn?
??t fucking save him. We cut every single tie that binds us to him. It is one thing to kill her for betraying us. It is another thing to kill her for helping us. If not for her, how big would this group of assassins be, who come to kill us all? He was loyal to the family, and then that family killed his wife. How do you think that story ends up?”
Liam licked his bottom lip and glanced at me, but in all honesty, I was exhausted.
Today was supposed to be it.
It was only now that her voice came back to mind, “Do you even know what game you are playing?”
I worked so hard to get rid of this one fucking problem, and in the end, there were now at least three more.
A son who very well may go off the deep end with grief, one with guilt, and more motherfucking assassins.
Liam was right…I was getting too old for this shit.
8
“Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
~Robert Louis Stevenson
ETHAN
I had always been good with puzzles.
Dona was good at them, too, but she found them boring and could never sit down long enough to finish one when she started.
Then there was Wyatt. He would point to the box and say, “Why do I need to make it when I know what it looks like already?” He thought it was stupid to sit around and piece images together. So, he never even bothered; instead, he’d go outside and play. He did wonder why I liked them, and I told him it was because I got to see each piece up close, then find where they fit.
I liked that it was such a simple task, but it was calming, and in the end, the picture was always three times bigger than the box. So, I would catch Wyatt coming back later to my puzzle to look at the picture when it was finished. When I caught him, he’d huff and say, “It doesn’t look the same as it did on the box.”
That shit annoyed me. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything. I figured that eventually Wyatt would help with the puzzles—he didn’t. He did stop going straight outside to play, though. He’d watch TV, and then, every few minutes or an hour, he’d walk past me while eating a bag of chips or ice cream or yogurt and ask me if I was done.
That shit annoyed me more, so I stopped doing puzzles around him or anyone else. I’d quietly do them alone in my room when I had the free time. I told myself that one day he’d grow up, but the truth was I thought our personalities were set in stone by then, both for him and for me. We were two different people, and we would never be able to get close to one another. How could we? No matter how much I tried, he would look at the picture on the box while I pieced together the puzzle.
That was precisely what happened in our lives now.
If he were like me, he would have asked the questions I asked.
If he couldn’t have figured out the big questions, what was her end game? Who was she truly working for? Then he should have asked the simpler ones first. And the simplest question was—why did she push so hard to have Dino, Vinnie, and Italo? Why were they so loyal to Calliope? In our world, those who worked for our family did so because they either needed money, power, and protection, or they felt they owed us for one reason or another. When I asked Dino this, he said none of the above. That was impossible. So, either was he lying, or I was missing something. And so, I looked closer. The only thing that could make someone so loyal was love. If it were just one of them, I could understand, but all three men loving her? And working side by side to protect her? That was a different type of affection.
