Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Anastasia
“ I don’t like you.” My brother uttered the first words he had spoken since we had left the tarmac. He had been glaring at Valerio the entire ride to the villa. You would think that his face would have frozen like that with the scowl he had been giving him.
Had we not been in such a shitty position, I would have taken time to admire the Tuscan villa that we were staying in.
“The feeling is mutual,” Valerio answered him.
We were seated in the living room, my brother sat on the armchair opposite the loveseat that Valerio and I occupied.
A lot had taken place in the last twenty-four hours, and there was a lot to digest. My mind was still reeling from the plane. I had told him about the baby. There had only been two people who had known about the baby, and that had been me and Leonardo. Now, Valerio knew about him, too.
He had taken the news much better than I thought he would.
“You have some nerve being that close to her after the shit you pulled.” My brother glared at the minimal space between Valerio and I on the loveseat. “You literally blew up her entire life.”
“With good reason. You were going to sell her to that psycho. Going to? No, I need to correct myself. You already had.” Valerio was just as angry at my brother as Danill was angry at him. “I saved her, unlike what you did. Do you know what that monster has done? And you wanted her to lay with him?”
“She would have been catered for,” My brother shot back like that was enough. “She wouldn’t have a mad man chasing after her.”
“He would have killed her after the first heir.” The ice in Valerio’s voice was cold enough to rival the north pole. “You did her an injustice. I'm the one who saved her, and I am the one who is correcting the wrong you have done. If anyone should be angry, it's her, not you.”
My brother flashed his angry eyes my way. “Are you? Are you angry with me? You know I was only trying to protect you!”
“Don’t yell at her,” Valerio interjected. “You gaslit her into taking on this union. You won’t do the same to the way she’s feeling now. You are the one at fault here. Not her.”
“Stay out of this!” My brother stood to his full height and towered over Valerio. He kept about a few feet between them, but the tension only increased. “You just blew everything we worked for!”
“You,” Valerio said calmly. “Everything you worked for. She never asked for this. She never wanted this.”
“You don’t know anything. You are nothing but a selfish, good for nothing monster who only cares for himself.”
“I didn’t sell my sister for a lick of power,” Valerio shot back with the intensity of a thousand suns. He stood from his seat and stared down at my brother. “You took money in exchange for your sister, from a man who could give two shits about brotherhood or the Code.”
“The Code? You want to talk about the Code? Does she know? Does she know what you did? The kind of monster you are?” The venom in my brother’s voice was so lethal that even I could taste its bitterness in my mouth. “Tell her how you spilled blood. Tell her how you held a gun and murdered a ten-year-old girl.”
“What?” My neck snapped in the direction of Valerio, who looked still as stone. His fists were balled at his side, and the anger that rolled off him bounced off every surface in the room.
“Shut up,” Valerio ground out.
“Tell her,” my brother sneered. “Tell her, or I will.”
Valerio was tense, and he didn't move an inch. The room was laden with tension, so much so, it was suffocating. He balled his fists at his side and then released a low huff. He then turned slowly to face me.
“Valerio…”
“My father made me take my first blood at ten years old. He had told me that the girl’s family wanted to eradicate ours, and that I, as the future underboss, needed to take down any and all threats that were presented or likely to occur in the future. He said it was for my brother’s protection and I… I wanted nothing more than to protect my brother.”
I held my breath as he spoke. I could hear the pain in his voice, see the misery that flashed in his eyes.
He was only a boy, and his father had turned him into a murderer.
“He said that I would be honoring the Code. I would be doing what I needed to for the Brotherhood, and I believed him. I found out that the girl had been the daughter of my father’s business partner, who he wanted to send a message to. She had been innocent in all of it, and I had taken her life. Her mother committed suicide as that was her only child, and the father… he… he tried to kill my brother, and I had to put him down. I had told myself that I was honoring the Code. It was no excuse, but it was the only thing that would offer me some reprieve from the guilt I felt. That was what my father had taught me. The only life I knew.”
It all made sense now. The darkness he carried, the way his father had betrayed the very Code that robbed him of his innocence as a young boy.
Grief and guilt. It was such a lethal and potent concoction that left your soul and heart paralyzed. It tore at the last shards of innocence you had.
He had carried that with him from the time he was just a boy.
He didn’t need to explain anything to me. I understood. Darkness didn't just suddenly fall on someone; it was brought from pain and trauma, and now that I knew where it all began, it made sense. The haunted look he had at the ball that night. The pale look he gave me when his father was mentioned.
The man had been wrestling with his humanity. The Code had justified his actions, and he had set his standards based off of that. When his father had decided to throw that very Code away, his mind snapped. The justification he’d had for killing that little girl was gone, and he soon realized how much of a monster he had been. But he had not been a monster by choice. He had been led into it by his father, and his mind had been groomed to justify the evils he had forced his son into.
Valerio held my gaze. The fear in his eyes was very visible. He was scared that I would see him for all the faults he had. But instead of seeing the monster my brother wanted me to see, I saw a broken boy who only needed love. The cracks in his soul needed to be filled, not judged. They were not formed by him.
I stepped toward him and pressed my palm over his heart. “You are not a monster, Valerio. You were only just a boy.”
At my words, his shoulders sagged like a massive weight had been lifted off of him.
“Are you fucking serious right now?” My brother’s voice broke through the thick tension. “You are fucking defending him?”
“Enough.” I raised my voice at my brother, a thing that I never really did. “I am not some pawn that you get to play with. I’m so tired of this never-ending quest that you’re on about restoring glory and honor to our Family. We lost!”
“So, you will stand here and defend him, but you will point the finger my way? I only wanted what was best for you!”
“You wanted what was best for you !” I was tired. This whole mess had started because he had linked me to that monster. “Not once did you ask me what I wanted. You said you were protecting me, but what you were truly protecting was your plan. Your big five-year plan to get our family a seat at the table. News flash, brother, I never wanted a seat at the table. Maybe, if you were just content with being normal, then we wouldn't be in this mess right now.”
“At least I know where I belong. You’re trying to run from a world that I built for you. You think you can fit in there? In the ‘normal world’? Try it. But you will see that you carry the same burns as the rest of us, and you will see that this is where you belong. In the darkness, with the rest of us.”
“Sometimes I wish I had a different brother.” The words left my mouth before my brain had any time to process them. As soon as they filled the room, instant regret flowed through my body.
The hurt flashed across his features, which only added to my guilt. The room fell silent. No one dared to utter another word. But then, the thick silence was disrupted by a beeping sound.
“Fucking hell…” Valerio stormed over to my brother and grabbed his hand that had one of his rings on it. “Where did you get this?”
Danill looked a little confused, at first. “What are you talking about?”
“The ring, idiot, where did you get the ring?”
Danill ripped his hand from Valerio’s grip. “It was a gift from Sergei.”
“You idiot! There is a tracker inside of?—”
It all happened so quickly I didn't even have time to fully react. One minute we all stood in the living room. The next, my body was being thrown backwards and shards of glass sprinkled over us. Valerio leapt over to cover my body with his. But before he could get to me, white smoke filled the room, making me cough violently like my chest was on fire.
I breathed in the toxic fumes, my vision already coming in and out of focus. “Valerio!”
I called for him, but the smoke was thick. I couldn't even see two meters ahead of me. I coughed violently, my body trying to reject whatever was filling up my lungs, but it was too late. The strength left my muscles, and my entire body tumbled to the floor with a loud thud, my skull taking the brunt of the fall.
The next thing I knew, my vision went black, and consciousness left me.