I wake to an acute kind of pain, dazed from memories that masquerade as nightmares.
For what might be minutes, or maybe hours, I let it wash over me—gradually bringing me to a state of consciousness where I am able to comprehend my surroundings.
The room is dimly lit with a singular bulb that hangs from the ceiling, casting everything in a rusty orange glow. I take stock of my injuries, observing the blood that trickles down from the shackles cutting into my wrists. I'm hanging from the wall like a fucking martyr, my aching arms stretched above my head. The blood runs down the length of my arms and torso, painting me in crimson stripes.
I breathe, and the pain rushes forward in waves, some more muted than others, but overcast by a dark, murky cloud that tinges everything in uncertainty, lethargy, and dizziness.
The feeling is familiar. I've been drugged, likely to keep me complacent. An ocean of pain and uncertainty rises—not pertaining to my physical wounds, but to that one pervading fact, and I breathe again as I let the thought resurface...
My father is alive.
I watched him die, yet he is alive.
As if I've summoned him, the door creaks open and he's there, floating soundlessly closer like a vindictive ghost, and I'm still not fully convinced that I'm not trapped in some nightmare.
"You're awake," he smiles.
"And you're alive. How?" I grit out the words, slow and slurred on my tongue.
He only smiles. Always just smiling. He always fucking smiled like nothing ever affected him, like he knew something everyone else didn't. Sudden fury pulses through me, so strong that I jerk against my restraints without meaning to, causing them to dig further into my skin and send new pain and blood coursing down my body.
Everything about him is like nails on a chalkboard. Everything. Even just the easy movement of his body, the health that is still apparent in his physique—it's enough to blind me with rage. The turmoil inside me is a thousand-edged sword, cutting into me with no relief.
Because the last time I saw him like this, alive, my mother was too. And suddenly I become convinced that she's here, that she's going to walk through that door any second. And I'd rather face my father a thousand times than face her once, please, God, no, she can't be alive. She can't.
I don't realize how much I'm shaking until my chains start rattling. The rage is suddenly gone; for the first time, it's not there for me to grasp ahold of.
My father sighs through his smile, as if he's having difficulty maintaining his mask. "Why are all my sons more incompetent than they were when they were children? Why? The last time I saw you, you had just killed a man for simply existing. Where is that killer right now?"
Something drips onto my torso. My body is in a constant state of pain; if he were carving into me, it would only blend in with that which already exists. I jerk back, crying out at the pain it causes, convinced he's cutting into me again. I'm not sure I have any blood left to bleed. Blinking my vision back, I realize he hasn't moved. He's just staring at me blankly.
And I'm apparently going fucking insane.
Looking down at myself, seeing no new blood, I register the wetness of my face. Tears. That's what splashed down my body. With the realization, my chest suddenly feels like it's in the process of caving in.
There's the sound of a door closing and I realize I'm alone again, left with only my wounds and the tears that, like my father, have seemed to make a reappearance from my childhood.
Could she be alive? Could she be here to torture me again?
Please, Mamma, please be gone. Please.
Like a little boy, I'm fucking crying, begging her to listen to me this once. Unlike a little boy—because that implies innocence—I'm praying that my mother is dead, even though I'm convinced that she's alive just as much as I'm convinced that my soul is damned.
Eventually, my consciousness fades black around the edges, and I lean into the numbness with sweet, sweet relief, only hoping that if I dream, she won't be there. That wherever I end up, she'll be somewhere far away.
But I know that if she were to walk through those doors—with that dark hair and her eyes clear of that filmy mania I recall so well—and if she were to fold me in her arms, I'd go without hesitation. I'd curl up and I'd let her wrap herself around me, just long enough to fool myself into thinking that I could've been someone to deserve it.
And if she were to still be as I remember her, with a knife clutched in a trembling fist, I think I'd go just as willingly.
+
When I awake, my father is there again.
His eyes assess me coldly, flitting down my body and across my face numerous times before he decides I'm acceptable. Antonio Romano has ever liked extreme displays of emotion. I remember that so vividly now. He'd just shut down. An unhinged laugh almost pushes past my cracked ribs at the memory.
"So we're over that earlier... mishap," he says with a grimace. "You—"
"Stop. Just fucking stop." My chest aches, breaths coming too short. "You have me where you want me." Where that is, I realize, I have no idea. But does it matter? One dingy basement is the same as the rest. "I watched you die years ago, raised your sons. I deserve answers."
"But I am so enjoying your confusion," he smiles.
"I fucking watched you, Antonio. I watched you kill yourself. Your blood and brains were all fucking over me!" My voice rings out loudly in the air between us. "I remember it. I was six. I was in your library, waiting for you to—" I break off, unable to go on. "And then I watched you destroy Simo even after you were gone. I watched you destroy Tommaso without him even remembering shit about you."
"You shouldn't trust so much in what you think you remember, son."
His face lifts as he looks at me, and I know he's getting sick satisfaction from seeing the effect he has on me. His grand entrance back into our lives has been planned all this time, and we've missed it, and now he's ripping through what we've built like a tornado, uprooting fucking everything. Loving every second of it. I know this, yet I can't bite back the pathetic pleas.
"Then tell me. Please. I don't understand." My throat aches with the desperate need to know just how broken things are, how my brothers will come back from this. "You won. Give me answers. You know," I have to swallow back the disgust like bile at uttering the words, "you know I'd beg for that."
My father cocks his head, considering my words. Then he comes closer, until my heaving chest is mere inches from his perfectly pressed suit. He reaches into his pocket, pulling out something that glints at me for a moment before he plunges it into my side.
I groan, the pain multiplying in a way that immediately has blackness clouding the edges of my vision. I fight to stay conscious, and he leans forward, twisting the knife as he says, "then beg."
The fight leaves me then.
I curl in on myself, swallowing all of it. The panic, confusion, desperation. It festers inside me but I don't let it out. Instead, it bubbles and toxifies and burns me from the inside. It's what I learned to do after the first stage of my initiation into Serpentine—when he made me kill for the first time—and doing it now makes my eyes burn with the horrible unjustness of it all. I don't know if I'll be able to survive my father this time.
The blood pulses from the wound and I watch it, watch as it starts pooling at my feet and spreading in a small puddle that looks like black ink in the low light. My father pulls out a handkerchief, holding it to the cut. The longer he holds it there, staunching the blood flow, the quicker my heart rate becomes, until I'm practically heaving with the effort it takes to breathe. Unable to draw in a full breath, my face feeling so hot that I swear I'm on fire.
What I want is for him to let me bleed out. In that moment, I'd give anything for exactly that. What I need is for him to do whatever he wants with me, as long as it's not caring for my wounds.
"Every time," he murmurs, "it fascinates me. The effect I have on my children. I'll miss it when you're all gone."
I sag in the chains, and he continues, his mouth loosened now with my defeat. "You don't want the answers, Santo. You think you can save them somehow? You can't." His eyes blaze suddenly, mouth twisting, and he jabs a finger into the wound. My torso buckles on a soundless cry. "Your brothers are done."
I shake my head, refusing to believe it. We've survived so much. This can't be the end. Even once I'm gone, they'll find a way to go on. They must. It's all we've always done.
But I think of Simo. I think of the way I've never really known what went on between him and our father. How there's a lot I don't know about those years my brother provided for us, somehow, when we were on the streets. And the horrible threat of what I don't know makes the back of my neck prickle.
"You know, I watched her—your mother—after you were born," my father muses. "You drove her insane. You ruined her. You were just existing—this tiny, beady-eyed thing—and she tried so hard to get rid of you. Did you know, the whole way home from the hospital, you wouldn't stop crying? You would barely sleep for the first twenty-four hours. You just cried."
He dabs at my wound, frowning down at it like he's concerned. It's almost comical how he's focusing so hard on that one, when my body is absolutely coated in my own blood.
"It was like," he continues thoughtfully, "you didn't even want to be here. Being alive was so horrible that you were going to cry and scream at us and never let us forget the unforgivable fact that we had brought you into this world. That first day, she tried to grab the wheel and drive us into a tree," he chuckles. "And over the months and years, I caught her so many times. Trying to strangle you. Throw you out the window. Poison you. Santo, her efforts were tireless. And you always survived. Either because I would stop it, or Massimo would. Or somehow—against all odds—you simply managed to live."
He pauses, and my labored breaths fill the silence. They make my chest burn and seize as my father tears me open with his bare hands and shoves his poisonous words into the gaping wound.
So I drop my head and I think of Nina. Of her porcelain skin, that wild hair and the way it gets caught in my mouth when she's laying with me. That particular way she smiles, shy but defiant at the same time—it's always made me feel a desperate need to kiss her, but now it makes me want to fall at her feet. She's like my own personal savior, and I pray for her to be with me now.
And just like that, I'm back in my kitchen—back there with her in the hours before dawn, and she's holding that stupid dog, smiling at something I've said like I'm the most pleasant person she could find to spend her time with. My father's words are some faraway thing, and I can breathe a little easier.
"Your mother and I, we were always so displaced in this world. She—so entirely ruined by the births of her sons. She never recovered. So possessed by something that made it impossible to live with the life she had brought into the world, and I saw it sometimes. I saw it clawing its way out of her, like a monster stuck inside her weak, thin skin. It was excruciating." He removes the cloth, making sure the blood has stopped, and begins bandaging the wound with quick, efficient movements.
"And I," he continues, "I only wanted a peaceful life, believe it or not. I'm not sure you know this about me. The extent I wanted that, I mean. I thought after leaving my old life, the toxic mess that was our family, I could move on. You were too easy to fool, so tormented were you by your mother's torture and my preparing you for the society. You did watch a man die that day, Santo. He wore my suit, my shoes, my cologne. He looked like me, just enough that we could convince you."
"Convince me?" I try and think back on what I remember from that day, but all I can see is my father and that torn flesh that had been his face. My head is splitting down the middle.
"It actually took a while. You don't remember—trauma has a way of changing the way we remember things—but for weeks afterwards, you kept insisting I was still alive. Everyone thought you were losing it. You were volatile, violent, and unstable. But a mind that frayed is easy to trick, to mold into whatever you want it to be. You gave up eventually."
Not for the first time, I numbly wonder how long my father has been a sociopath.
"I had to make sure Serpentine would let me go. They would've come after me if I didn't ensure one of my sons could take my place. You helped me, Santo," he smiles, finishing with the bandage. "You helped me disappear. And I had no faith you or your brothers would survive after that. I figured she'd kill you, or you'd kill her and perish in the years following, so torn apart by the way your life had played out. But you and your brothers, you survived. You killed your mother and you banded together, and you lived. And I had to keep tabs on you, waiting for the moment everything fell apart, but instead you grew up."
He shakes his head, staring absently at the wall behind me now. "So many times, I almost got rid of you all. So many hits I called back at the last second. It became like a game, seeing how long you'd go on. But I'm done playing now. I've wasted years that I could've been living unencumbered by you. This ends now."
"You ruined her first," I rasp, my voice not sounding like my own. "I might've done damage, but you're the one who got her pregnant when she was just a child herself, who imprisoned her and—"
"You poisoned this family," my father snaps. "You. Not me. She was fine after she had Massimo and Tommaso. She never hurt them. She cared for them, loved them. They might've experienced some of it, sure, but that was only when they got in-between her hurting you. You were always the fucking problem, the piece that didn't fit."
I bow my head, unable to speak. He's right. She always looked at them the way a mother looks at her children; she looked at me the way one looks at an intruder.
"Now," he clears his throat, loosening his collar as if he didn't mean to get worked up. "I can't truly live until I know all traces of my old life are gone. I'm just going to break you a little more first."
"They'll survive this too," I lie. "They've survived worse."
My father steps back, looking at me like a scientist discovering a new species under the lens of his microscope. "You don't even believe that." His eyes begin to glint with something dangerous. "You know, you've actually turned into something I'm quite proud of. This reputation you've built for yourself, it's exactly what I saw you becoming. But since the day you were fucking born into this world, the very universe and everyone in it has been trying to take you out of it. And you have to wonder why, Santo. You have to wonder why."
---
Oof. Antonio, huh? Hate that ugly mf, but had to get some questioned answered... others, like how the Dad Squad came to work together, shall be left for another chapter.
Thank you for reading! Don't forget to vote!
- G