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End tone.
Gritting his teeth at the order, Dante walked out of the mansion, down the hill, to the shack in the woods. Once upon a time, the little shack had been a hunting shed. It was barely bigger than a few square feet, and mostly abandoned. Nobody really went there so it had been a pretty good place for his little trysts over the years.
Frowning as to why his father would call him that far out, Dante breathed evenly and adopted the little mask he usually wore around the older man. As much as he despised him, Dante admitted that he was a powerful leader and he didn’t get to that place by being dumb. He was sharp and he scented weakness before anyone even knew about it.
There was both pride and shame in him for having that blood in his veins.
He saw his father standing outside the shed, dressed in a suit, his beard starting to show little greys here and there. And he was smoking a cigar. Not a good sign.
“You called?” Dante asked, joining him, realizing that he was taller than the other man now, much more casually dressed though. His father didn’t like his attire. He didn’t want Dante in ripped jeans and leather jackets, looking like the quintessential bad boy. No, he wanted Dante in suits and ties, looking like a good bad man.
Bloodhound Maroni smiled. “Yes. It’s time.”
Dante’s stomach dropped, even as he kept his face even. It was time for the kill.
Taking a cigarette out of his pocket, he lit it up, and exhaled a cloud of smoke, seeing it swirl up at the cloudy sky. Usually, Dante loved the winters in Tenebrae. It got cold, wet, and snowy, and it made him love the summers even more. Not today though. Today, the clouds seemed gloomy, foreboding.
That feeling returned tenfold.
“Who is it?”
>
Lorenzo Maroni smiled again, a smile that made the back of Dante’s neck prickle and went to the shack’s door. Dante threw his cigarette to the side, crushing it under his boot before slowly approaching the door, to see who was inside.
Roni.
No.
Fuck, no.
She sat tied to a chair, tape over her mouth, her eyes red and swollen from tears as Al and Leo stood behind her.
Tension knotting on his shoulders, he turned to look at his father, his spine rigid as his hands fisted. “What the fuck is this?” he demanded.
“This,” his father said with a theatrical flourish, “is what you created, my son. You thought you would get involved with an outsider, a common girl, and I would do nothing?”
He hadn’t thought of what his father would do. He might be indispensable but she wasn’t. He should have thought of it. Fuck, he should have.
“Let her go,” he told the older man, his voice firm. “I won’t see her again.”
Lorenzo Maroni shook his head, finally putting out his own cigar. “This is a lesson, son. A lesson you need to remember. Love has no place in our world.”
Dante locked his jaw. “You loved mama,” he reminded the man.
His father laughed. “No, I didn’t. I wanted her, so I took her. That’s what men like us do. You’re too soft and I’ve let it go on too long.”
“What do you mean you took her?” Dante stared at his father, surprise filling him, followed by disgust at the implication. He had never imagined what his father was hinting at.
“Took. Snatched. I saw her and took her right from her car, brought her here, married her,” his father said, almost proudly.
Dante thought of his mother, beautiful, warm, but always sad, acid in his stomach. “Did you rape her?”
“Why does it matter?”
He had.
Disgust filled Dante, bile rising his throat as he swallowed it down. He looked away from the man who had sired him, perhaps forcefully, on his mother, and his skin crawled.
