We walk into the building. For as bright as it is outside, it’s dark inside. It’s a dinner club, not a breakfast club, with dark walls and curtains, tinted windows and elegance all around.
“Gentlemen,” I say, taking inventory.
Dante does the same, moving to stand at the opposite end of the room.
A single representative from each of the five families in Italy sits at the table. I haven’t seen them in ten years. I tell myself that’s why I don’t recognize them. Not because of my missing memory.
“Cristiano,” Matteo Gribaldi says, standing to shake my hand. I only know it’s Matteo because I studied the photos, the histories.
“Matteo.”
“It’s good to see you. We’d thought…well, we’d believed the worst.”
I smile but it’s just a stretching of my lips. I feel nothing.
He resumes his seat and each of the others greets me in turn. These men have been working with Rinaldi in the ten years I’ve been gone. They’ve participated in and gotten richer off the one thing that was forbidden to them. They’re greedy, all of them. But it’s not their greed that bothers me. It’s their duplicity and their weakness I despise. Because only after I attacked Rinaldi did they have a change of heart.
I take my seat at the head of the table, noting the soldiers standing around the room.
“You are here because you agreed many years ago, some when your fathers were in command, to the rules my father set. The one activity we will not deal in. The Rinaldi family is finished. The De La Cruz Cartel has been dealt with. And now that I’m back, I resume my place at the head of this table.” I pause. “My father made your fathers rich. My grandfather made your grandfathers rich. And we did it without trafficking in human flesh.”
“Cristiano, Marcus was the cancer that ate his family from the inside out. Without your family to unite us, we became divided. We agreed to things we should not have agreed to. But we are not all as honorable as your father,” one of the men says. It doesn’t matter who. They’ll parrot one another to save their lives.
“Honor killed my father,” I say, shifting my gaze around the room. “I will avenge my family. You’re here because you did not have a hand in the massacre. You’re here because I believe we can return to the original pact. Am I correct to believe this?”
“Cristiano,” one of the representatives, an older man with whom my family shares the most history starts. Lorenzo Ricci.
I raise my eyebrows.
“They killed my father, too, because he stood in their way.” He stands dramatically. “The Ricci family is with you.”
“Rinaldi is still alive. Both father and son,” one of the others says.
“I have rendered them powerless.”
“If the cartel chooses to work with Marcus—”
“They won’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I’m sure.” I don’t mention Scarlett or Noah. The less they know the better.
His eyebrows rise up.
“Are you with us?” I ask. I could give a fuck about anything else.
He nods.
“You’ve risen from the dead, Cristiano,” another says. “I stand with you and your brother.”
All eyes fall on the final two. They look around the room and together, they nod.
I stand, button my jacket. “I’m glad to see we’re once again aligned. Gentlemen.” They remain seated as I turn to the door, Dante flanking me.
“They’ll turn on us in a heartbeat,” Dante says when we’re outside.
“I know. I don’t trust them, but I’ve already made the example. They will obey me because I am mightier than them.” Mightier than Rinaldi or any other family. The instant they see weakness, they will pounce. I have no doubt. Even those with the more impassioned pledges.
Not too long ago I found a letter my father had written to my mom. The letter itself had to have been thirty years old. It had been tucked inside the pages of a photo album. In it, he’d told her how he’d grown up with stories his mother had told that his family were descended from angels. He told her he knew better, even as a kid, but knew she needed for him and his brother to believe they were the good kind of angels.
He’d said in his letter that his family, and he in particular, was here to watch over the rest of this criminal underworld. Try to keep some control over it. To rein in the evil we do.
My mom didn’t come from a mafia family and I get the feeling he was trying to reassure her, to win her over. He told her in that same letter he’d fallen in love with her the instant he’d seen her. She’d been working for my uncle at the time as one of his secretaries. She wasn’t even Italian. I know he was supposed to have married the eldest Ricci daughter and I know the turmoil it caused within the families when he eloped with my mother instead.
Charlie told me how it cost our family, but my father was in love. And that was all there was to it.
It’s a fairy tale.
And the task I have embarked on is a hellish tale.
What that letter left out was how the Grigori angels hated the humans they watched over. Just as I hate every one of the men at that table. Just as I hate myself.
12
Scarlett
I’m sitting in the kitchen flipping through an old Italian cookbook, my hand absently petting Cerberus when I hear the sound of the chopper. I look at the clock. It’s a little after nine at night.
Lenore, who has been sitting across from me making a shopping list, gets up and puts the espresso pot on the stove.
“He’ll want coffee,” she says to me.
Alec glances out the window. He’s been my shadow today and if it wasn’t for Lenore telling him I could walk out to the greenhouse to collect fresh vegetables, I’m pretty sure I’d have been locked up inside all day.
At least I got to see Noah. He told me that Alec had brought down the entirety of the cake last night.
I wonder if I should go up to my room. Well, his room. Will he really make me kneel to apologize to him? And if so, would he make me do it in front of Lenore? I feel my face burn just thinking about it.
But he does deserve an apology. I do know that. What I said, what I accused him of, it wasn’t right especially knowing what I know. What my brothers allowed to happen to his mother.
“I’ll go upstairs,” I tell Lenore, just getting to my feet when the kitchen door opens, and Cristiano walks inside. I’m surprised because I guess I expected him to use the front door. This seems so domestic.
I take a moment to look him over. I can’t help it. His hair is ruffled from wind, the tip of his nose red with cold, and the scent of whiskey lingers on the wind that blows in with him.
His eyes land on me and stay there even as Cerberus rushes to him.
“Where is your jacket?” Lenore asks him, going to close the door. The temperature was nice during the day in the sun, but it’s cooled off a lot since.
Cristiano shifts his gaze to the cookbook on the table. Even though I’m standing, I’m still holding a page open. It’s the one with the recipe for the Crème Caramel Lenore made. I had a taste, and it was amazing.
He finally turns to Lenore, giving me space to breathe again.