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“You and Pietro are half siblings,” she blurted, squeezing her eyes shut like she knew my reaction would stop her if she saw it, and she knew I wasn’t going to accept half a story this time.
Then, before I could process the depth of what she’d just said, she dropped the next bombs, one after the other.
“He—his father r-raped me. I was engaged to Dad at the time, and I thought he was going to leave me, but he didn’t. We realized I had got-gotten pregnant, and there was no way it could be Dad’s, but Daddy wanted to tell everyone Pietro was his so no one would have to know what had happened to me. It was a different time, honey, we didn’t talk about these things, and we were scared what would happen if Pietro’sbiological father,” she spat the words with disdain, “ever found out.” I was speechless.
“O-okay,” I stuttered, trying to digest all of that. “So what—what does that have to do with now?” Mom swallowed thickly.
“Because,” she said, shoulders rising around her ears as she tensed further and further, “the man who raped me—Pietro’s birth father—is Cristiano Pellico. The mafia boss.”
I stared at her. I remembered a video where someone dropped a bowling ball into jello, and the way the bowling ball carved its way to the bottom, growing slower with every second of resistance but never stopping. At that moment, I felt like I was that jello.
Pellico, Pellico… I didn’t know the first thing about the mafia, but I’d seen that name somewhere recently.
“You think he found out?” I asked, half-numb.
Mom nodded jerkily, eyes frantically pleading with me as we finally made eye contact.
“I don’t know how,” she said. “I thought I’d buried our secret, not even your grandparents know. Daddy’s name is on his birth certificate, we registered him as Daddy’s son, I never wrote it down anywhere or talked about it to anyone but your dad. I don’t know how he knows, but he does.”
“And now he’s… joining the mafia?” I asked, the words fitting wrong in my mouth.
That was ridiculous. Pietro wasn’t a criminal.
He wasn’t a scarred-up thug who roamed the streets looking for fights, he was the brother who had skipped high school parties to watch his little sister swim like the seven years age difference was nothing.
He didn’t do drugs or any other weird stuff, he was just a guy. Just an average 31-year-old.
He worked at a tire shop. He hated pistachio ice cream.
“I don’t know,” Mom said, voice cracking. “The letter dropped through the letter slot maybe fifteen minutes before you got here, I haven’t—I haven’t figured anything out yet, but that is the only thing I have ever hidden from the two of you.”
“But—but why?” I asked, lost. “Why would he join the people who hurt you?”
Mom shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said morosely.
Pellico! The image of my phone screen! My phone automatically opened to a news feed, that is where I had seen, in big red letters, the words “Nicola Pellico Found Murdered.”
I gasped.
“My phone,” I said, trying to stand and ignoring my mother trying to urge me back down. “I need my phone!”
Yep, right there—Nicola Pellico, the only son of suspected mafioso Cristiano Pellico, was found just hours ago in his apartment with four bullet holes punched through him, face down in a puddle of his own cooling blood, gunshot residue on his hands, his gun nowhere to be seen. So far there was no evidence of a forced break-in or a stated suspect.Information was still being gathered from the crime scene.
My mouth dried up, and my mom went rigid where she was looking over my shoulder.
Nicola had been 26, just two years older than me, and he hadn’t done anything important or notable. The only reason anyone would target him was because of his father.
His father, who was also Pietro’s father.
If someone killed Nicola in order to get back at Cristiano for something, then wasn’t Pietro living under the same threat? Is that why he left, to keep us from getting caught in the crossfire?
“We have to do something!” I said, shaking my head There had to be something we could do, right? Some way to go back to normal? Mom’s fists wrinkled her work blouse.
“What, Mary?!” she snapped.
I reared back, and she reigned in her voice a little. “What can we do? He’s right, if we go to the police he’ll get killed. With all of… this… Cristiano will be desperately looking for another heir, so if Pietro shows up he’ll probably be welcomed with open arms.”
