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He says nothing when I do. Just watches me. Smokes on his cigar and stares with beady eyes that are small compared to the rest of his bald, swollen head.
For a couple seconds, the only sound comes from my shoes clacking on the wood floorboards.
I stop in front of his desk. He motions at the chair across from him. I sit down.
Another moment passes where nobody says a thing. I feel my hot-blooded temper rise up, my skin prickling with heat.
Like father, like son. Dumbasses.
“You wanted to see me?” I ask.
“Yes,” he answers finally. He blows smoke, not caring if it travels my way. “You’re alive.”
I scowl at him. “Barely.”
“Congratulations. You made it. You survived. Nobody else did. Isn’t that right?”
My hands ball up in my lap. “That’s right. You killed them.”
He smiles. The demented fucker. “I did. Your family was warned not to fuck with me. Weren’t they?”
I can barely keep myself from leaping over the desk and strangling him. The fat fuck is proud of what he did. How he massacred everybody in my life.
“You want to kill me,” he observes. His beady eyes fall to my trembling fists in my lap. “You still haven’t learned your lesson.”
“YOU KILLED MY FAMILY!” I roar in a sudden outburst. I rise up from my chair and knock it over. “YOU KILLED GLORIA YOU FAT FUCKING ASSHOLE!”
His guards standing post by the door, move forward to restrain me. He waves them off, still sitting poised with his cigar smoldering between his fingers.
His cool reaction to my explosive temper feels… anticlimactic. It makesmefeel like a dumbass.
My anger fades. I slowly sink back into my chair.
His brows raise. “You done? You got it all out of your system now? Can we continue?”
“What the fuck do you want with me? This some fucked up game?”
“Yes,” he answers, blowing smoke. “It’s all a fucked up game. That’s life. Learn to play or give up and get played. You got played last time. You going to let that happen again, or are you ready to get in the game for real?”
Lucius Mancino has a way of getting through even when you don’t think he will… or even can.
I sit and hear his calm, almost condescending words, coming down from my explosion, and realize he’s right.
It’s been years. My family lost the war against his family. We suffered for it.
He kept his word and made every last one of us pay.
I’ve spent years lost in madness and grief. Some fucking loser crying over spilt milk. Something I can’t fucking change. What good has that done me?
“Believe it or not, I identify with you,” he says, putting out his cigar. He goes for his drink—a reddish brown liquid that looks like cognac—and sips some as he watches me. “You have lost a lot. You have lived in squalor. You have known what it’s like to suffer and be at the bottom. I was you. Many years ago.”
I’ve got no clue where this is going. But I let him finish.
“You know who’s never known what it’s like to suffer?” he asks. “My piece of shit son. He’s been privileged his whole life—I raised him to be my successor. I was tough on him, but that was to make him capable to rule. The ungrateful fuck couldn’t even do that right.”
“You’re warring. The two of yous.”
“Again, ungrateful. Everything he has, he has because of me.”
