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“Yeah, I did.”
I nodded. “I thought I heard someone that day, but when I checked, there was no one there. If you heard us, why didn’t you just say something?”
“Father died the next day and then there was the funeral and all that shit to deal with. I thought you would talk to me. But you didn’t—you were happy to carry on lying to me.”
“Why not just be a man and have it out with me face-to-face?”
“What?” he sneered. “Like you told me to my face that you weren’t the rightful Underboss?”
“I was following our father’s wishes.”
“Like hell you were!” he yelled. “You just wanted the Underboss position for yourself when you knew it should have been mine all along.”
“I never wanted the position. We were brought up being told that I would be Underboss one day and you would be my second-in-command. That’s just the way it was. I never had a grand plan to be Underboss.”
“But you didn’t refuse the position, even when you knew you were a bastard and it wasn’t rightfully yours.”
“Christ, Aloysius, you know what I went through with Rita—how she wanted me to leave the Mafia life behind and start somewhere else afresh. You know that being in this life is what drove the mother of my children to kill herself. How can you think that I saw the Underboss position as being something so special that I had to have it no matter the cost? I would have willingly given up my role if I could have done so without destabilizing the Fratellanza and everything our father had built up over the years.”
“Yeah, it’s all about you, Lorenzo, just like it’s always been. You keep harping on about how your life’s been affected, but what about mine? I’m the one who was cheated out of his rightful position, the one who’s had to make do with less power and influence within the organization, and the one who’s always had to play second fiddle to his superior brother.”
This wasn’t getting us anywhere. “I thought you were preoccupied because you were involved with a girl, but now I realize you were actually preoccupied with revenge. Christ, how did I not see it? And why did you target Anni?”
“After she left her cell in my car, she was easy to set up to take the fall for the leak to the Feds. All I had to do was bide my time until the opportunity arose, and that happened the day you took her to the drug factory. It’s a shame, because I liked the girl, but it was business.” He frowned. “I’m curious. How did you figure out that she wasn’t the leak and that it was me?”
“There were too many coincidences.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “You always were a paranoid bastard.”
“For good reason it seems.” I shook my head. “I just can’t believe that you did this—that you shopped me and the whole organization to the Feds. Didn’t us being brothers mean anything to you?”
“Brotherly love works both ways,” he retorted. “How did you expect this conversation to turn out? For me to say that it’s all okay and that I don’t mind that you’ve cheated me?”
“I expected you to have some remorse at least. I’ve always felt bad that you weren’t Underboss, but there wasn’t anything I could do to change it. If our men knew that our father had stayed married to our mother after finding out she was pregnant with another man’s child, our family name would have been weakened forever in the eyes of the rest of the organization. What was I supposed to do?”
Suddenly, a gunshot rang out through the room and Aloysius’s body reeled backward.
Withdrawing my weapon, I spun around and found Marco standing there, his gun aimed at where Aloysius had been standing.
“What the fuck, Marco?” I whipped my head back around and ran over to Aloysius.
He lay there, a bullet through his chest and struggling for breath.
“What have you done?” I yelled at Marco.
I fell to my knees and hauled Aloysius into my arms, cradling his body against me. “Hold on, little brother! We’re getting a doctor, you’re going to be okay, just hold on.”
“It’s…too late,” he croaked.
“No, damnit, it’s not!”
“I deserve…this,” he said. “I b-betrayed…the Fratellanza.”
“No!” I roared.
But I could do nothing as his body slumped in my arms and all life seeped from his veins. “Call a fucking doctor,” I shouted at Marco.
Marco walked over slowly. “He’s gone. He signed his own death warrant the moment he betrayed us to the Feds—you know that. I killed him so that you wouldn’t have to do it.”
