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Chapter 25
I’ll never forgetthe look in the eyes of the first man I ever killed.
At sixteen, I’d already been under the Riccis’ guidance for three years. I met Rafael during one of my mother’s trips to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute for clinical trials of a drug that could stop the growth of her cancer cells.
Rafael had been sitting in the lobby, awaiting news on whether or not his grandmother was in remission. He sat tall, in his crisp navy suit, twirling rosary beads around his fingers like a man who didn’t fully believe in their power.
I remember passing him on my way to the cafeteria, and the gold metal of his thumb ring shining in the fluorescent lighting.
In my short time on Earth, I’d never seen anything or anyone so inherently lavish. The man oozed luxury and authority, and he knew it. Let it collect in the air around him, daring someone to try and assert otherwise.
I didn’t officially meet him until our last day in Boston. I’d been standing outside, watching my breath appear and disappear in the chilly November air, trying to mask the disappointment on my face for when the nurse brought my mother out.
Rafael stepped outside, dressed in another dark suit, and pulled a cigar from his breast pocket, lighting up as he leaned against a concrete wall with a NO SMOKING sign hanging on it. He’d glanced at me, nodding as if he understood some unspoken request.
“Just you and your mom, kid?”
I swallowed, nodding, aware that I wasn’t supposed to be talking to strangers. But an obviously rich stranger, hanging around in a hospital? How bad could he be?
He sucked on the end of his cigar—Cohiba Behike, a brand I would eventually come to know by heart—and dipped his chin. “What’s your name?”
My eyes narrowed.
He chuckled at my expression, laughing as if we were sharing an inside joke.
A few moments later, he was joined by a leggy brunette, wrapped in a deep purple fur coat, cradling a baby to her chest. They made their way to a blacked-out Cadillac waiting in the emergency lane, but not before he clipped me on the shoulder, dropping a card to the ground bearing the Ricci Inc. Insignia.
It was a simple crest, a lion wearing a crown made of skulls, but nevertheless, it engraved itself on my brain that day, as if it was always meant to be there.
But it was the woman I couldn’t stop staring at, and when her dark, captivating gaze met mine just before she climbed inside her vehicle, I was a goner.
After my mother died, and my biological father rejected me again, I sought out the Riccis, unaware of how their presence would alter the course of my fate forever.
It’d started innocent, with me running tickets for one of the illegal gambling operations Rafe ran from the back of a deli in Roxbury. But when he started training me to fight, to defend, I knew things were turning.
And when I carried out my first hit, I did so in the dead of night, in a dirty alleyway while the man who’d been accused of ratting on Rafe’s father pissed himself.
When I put the bullet between his teeth, blood spraying across his wife’s white blouse, brain matter splattering against my face, all I could see was the horrified look in his eyes. The pure terror, frozen forever in time, as he looked up at me, pleading for mercy.
In the years since, it’s that look I’ve never forgotten, although not because I was disturbed.
Because I felt nothing.
When I drag my scalpel down the chest of one of Elena’s attackers in the present day, it’s that feeling I try to focus on. Pushing what’s left of my moral compass to the recesses of my brain, I tap into that chasm that exists within me, using it to stave off the things a normal person would feel.
Guilt. Worry. Nausea as the man’s flesh opens for me. His eyes are wide and teary as he stares, screaming around his gag, probably pleading for mercy.
For a moment, I’m tempted to listen to him. To play the part my grandfather wanted me to, the part my sister would be more open to learning about.
But then I see the ring on his right hand, matching the one Rafael wears, and I’m reminded why that isn’t something I can do just yet.
Tony had been chilling at the docks a couple of afternoons after I chased Jonas from the bar’s office, and Jonas just happened to recognize him from a picture he’d seen a few weeks ago circulating online, where Rafe and Carmen were trying to look like grieving parents.
He lured him into a fake coke deal, then bagged him, gagged him, and dropped him on my doorstep.
And even though I’d resigned myself to an early retirement in both medicine and official business, I couldn’t look the other way when he showed up.
I needed Rafael to get the message about his daughter: that she belongs to me.
