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Instead, I get angry. Really angry. Crazy angry to the point I’ll do anything to anybody involved.
Leandro. Stefania. Ivan. My shithead fake son.
Every person who has ever made me suffer is gonna suffer tenfold.
For the rest of their miserable lives.
They don’t know who they’ve fucked with. I’ll make them cry tears of blood and beg me as I show them there’s no stopping me. There’s no keeping me down.
When you’ve been humiliated and disfigured like I have, you’ve got nothing left to give a fuck about but making everybody else suffer even worse.
I won’t let them keep me down, let the fucked up circus that is life happen to me. I will make my life happen. I will destroy them all.
salvatore
present…
Nobody uttersa word when the tape finishes playing. The stunned silence is pervasive, its own presence cloaked over the room. On my right Delphine stiffens, equally as speechless. Stitches on my left is no better.
It’s the sound of discomfort. Unease.Pity.
Lucius’s men are no different. His most trusted crew cringe, the muscles in their faces and bodies acting of their own accord, recoiling in disgust from what we just watched.
But I’m paying most attention to Lucius—he’s facing the now blank projector screen, his back turned to everybody. He stands stock-still, though his pudgy face colors into the deepest plum shade I’ve ever seen.
A color beyond embarrassment. A color of pure, unfettered humiliation.
Which brings me a twisted sense of satisfaction. I allow my grin to form, watching him soak in it, observing him feeling what it’s like.
To feel truly powerless.
Humiliated and less than. Treated as if he’s some disgusting vermin nobody can stand the sight of.
It’s how he made me feel every day of my existence. As a small boy, defenseless and unable to stick up for myself, forced to take whatever beating—and other kind of abuses—he doled out. Always on a whim, always dependent on how he was feeling in that moment.
Whatever fucked up punishment his equally fucked up brain thought of.
Now he knows what it’s like to feel like nobody.
Nothing.
All over again.
Some might say it’s fucked up of me. I’ve gone too far. I’m no better than he is.
Maybe they’re right. The thing is, I don’t give a damn. I never have.
This was always my end goal. Tear him down ’til I’ve crushed him and destroyed him. I can die knowing I’ve accomplished my life’s mission.
The pin-drop silence wears on.
It becomes clear what we’re all waiting on—a real reaction from Lucius. Everybody sits in their chair and stares at his wide back in horrified anticipation, waiting for him to explain. Others, like Kozlov, have got questions.
“Well,” I say finally. “Got anything to say for yourself, Pop? Or should I say Aleksander Volchok? Like how you pretended to be full blood Italian to infiltrate the Crotone family, win Stefania’s hand, and betray Leandro to take over? How about like how you’ve spent the last twenty years lying to Kozlov about Ivan Volchok, your own brother—to everybody about him and his whereabouts—when, really, you had him in a prison cell?”
My questions land on another thread of prolonged silence. It doesn’t stop me from continuing, firing off more inconvenient questions that demonstrate his fuckery.
“Stefania wanted nothing to do with you. She was pregnant by your brother. My real father. It destroyed you to know that, didn’t it? You weren’t man enough for her. She recoiled at you… even though you forced her to marry you. Then, when Leandro found out what you’d done, and he fucked you up real good, you couldn’t handle it. You couldn’t take it that even as the new boss, you were stillnothing. Stefania still wanted Ivan. I was still his son. And you were a disfigured eunuch who was afraud. Every moment of your life is a humiliating lie.”
