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“Angelo! Angelo!” My mother’s voice carried from the hallway. I remained still, my eyes glued on the lifeless eyes of my older brother. The green in his eyes no longer shined, the life wiped clean from his body.
My mother entered the room screaming, her body coming to a halt beside mine. She stared at the two men we both loved more than anything in this world lying dead on the floor, lifeless.
“Dio mio!” She ran to her husband’s body, dropping to the floor beside him, cradling his head in her lap. She reached over and pressed her hand over my brother’s chest, likely feeling for a pulse, but there was none.
“No! No! No…” she screamed, over and over again.
That was the day my mother lost herself forever.
For me… that was the day I let the darkness consume me completely, taking its spot in my veins alongside my blood.
Chapter Two
Savina’s POV
I sat in my father’s study chair, staring at my godfather, Dimitri Carotelli. My father’s childhood best friend, his second, but most of all, his most trusted aid. He stared back at me with equal amounts of sympathy and sadness.
“Vina,” he said, his usually strong and forceful voice nothing more than a gentle whisper. But the silence of the room made his voice carry far louder than what it produced.
I shifted my eyes to the spot where my father and brother’s bodies had laid, pooling with blood all around them.
They were dead. They were really dead.
I had found their bodies three nights ago, but it still hadn’t clicked. I had sat through the entirety of the funeral service, and it still hadn’t clicked. I had thrown soil on their coffins and laid them to rest, and even then, it still hadn’t clicked. It was like I was waiting for them to come through that door like they usually did after their morning runs.
But as I sat in the very room they had been killed in, it finally clicked.
It all had been wiped down, the stained rug replaced. All traces of their murders were gone, as if they hadn’t even happened.
“What’s the news on the killer?”
That was the first time I had spoken all day. I had been quiet throughout the entirety of the proceedings.
“Nothing beyond what we already know.”
“The Russians are back.” That had been one of the hard pills I’d had to swallow in the past days. There had been whispers in the streets that Vladimir’s son had returned to ‘take back’ what his father had lost. But there had been nothing from our surveillance team to indicate the rumors were actually true.
“We can’t know for sure. He may have been acting alone. He likely had a vendetta against your father.”
“Half of New York had a vendetta against my father, yet they never got close enough to pose any sort of real threat. So, tell me, uncle, how did one lone man manage to break into my father’s impenetrable fortress if he acted alone?”
He didn’t need me to spell it out for him. He knew where I was going with this.
“A mole? You think any man with sense would dare to do such a thing?”
“You speak as if the mole would have sense at all. We’re talking about a radical, for sure. But yes, I do believe a mole is a possibility.”
He visibly tensed in his seat. As my father’s second, Uncle Dimitri prided himself in the security of the Syndicate. He was thorough with his work, and made sure that the organization as a whole was a smooth-running machine. I knew he was taking the break-in hard. He was tasked with keeping my father safe, but in his eyes, he had failed. And there was a small part of me that believed he had failed, too.
“I’ll handle it.”
“You better, uncle. I cannot afford to have any more mishaps like this again. The safety of my mother and everyone in this estate is dependent on the security measures you put into place.”
I didn’t miss the slight flinch in his body. “Speaking of your mother, the doctor gave her a sedative to help her sleep. She was severely dehydrated, and her blood pressure had spiked very high.”
My heart squeezed. My poor mama. She was a soft one, she had been a young girl in Sicily when she met my father. She was all things light and pure. She was not built for this world, yet she braved it anyways, because she loved my father. And now that he was gone I… I feared the worst.
“Her husband and son died. Of course she will be a little out of it for the next few weeks, if not months. It’s like having your heart ripped out of your chest but still managing to breathe.”
