Dark Saint [Romano Brotherhood, #1]

31 | Santo

I've been waiting so long. I can't stop fidgeting. Once he gets home, I can show him how ready I am to make a contribution to the family. I did so well in my Serpentine initiation so far. He was so proud of me, but I didn't care about that. 

All I cared about is how it felt afterward. After the icky feeling passed, after I washed off the blood, I liked it. It wasn't too much. I had been exactly who Mamma said I was, and now for the first time, I feel like I'm real. 

I'm ready for more now. I want her to look at me. Love me. 

I think if she knew how good I did, how good I'll be at the rest of it, she'd be proud of me. 

I'm reading as I wait. I love reading.

Before my initiation, father always told me I wouldn't be able to amount to anything, wouldn't be able to help Simo with the business. Just because I like to read sometimes? Father likes to read too. When I called him a hypocrite, Simo smacked me. But I know I'm right. Simo doesn't get that we should stop caring about what he says.

I hear his footsteps. They're different though. Slow, dragging. 

He's here. Walking slumped over like he's sad.

I put down my book. 

He doesn't see me. There's something different about him. I open my mouth, but something stops me from speaking. I'm scared and I don't know why. 

He sits carefully in his chair. Unbuttons his suit and fixes his sleeves. 

Puts his gun in his mouth. 

The first bullet goes through the side of his cheek, the one that's facing me, and warm blood sprays all over me. He's lucid enough to try again. I haven't ever seen anything like it, that gaping flesh. The deadened sway of his arm as he raises it. 

He swallows the second bullet.

He never saw me. 

I'm covered, it feels like, in his blood. The only thing that remains clean is the book lying face down in my lap, The Brothers Karamazov. The one with really big words that Simo says I can read when I'm older. My first thought, my only thought, is that I'll never be able to read it—or maybe anything—ever again. 

We found out the story later.

The way Mantus's father had turned informant, and the FBI had busted the illegal sex trafficking rings our father was running through his casinos in what was the biggest bust of the decade. The evidence was thorough and extensive. He was about to be destroyed—imprisoned for the rest of his miserable life—and he had nothing left to live for.

Business was, after all, what mattered most. 

That's what they told me afterwards. That's how they rationalized it to a child who had just seen a man's brains paint the walls. And it made sense. When he started initiating me for Serpentine, I stopped seeing him as a father. He was never a good at that, but he was always an exceptional businessman.

"Your fight will always be with your mother," he told me one day before he died. I didn't know what he meant then, but there's a reason she's always been my fucking undoing, even now, long after she's gone. 

I got my anger from my father. My violence. I never needed much encouragement to discover that side of myself, so he never had to worry about me. But still, he was obsessed about it. Which of his sons would rise to the challenge. How far he could push us. I thrived from that pushing; it drove me to the brink of insanity and back again a hundred times.