Epilogue I
The End of the Beginning which leads us to the Middle
It is said that days are long, but life is short. I had always found life came in seasons and was punctuated by life-altering events. Perhaps that was why I had decided to begin my story as I had, with chapters of my life that had fundamentally changed it.
The experience at the witch’s tower in Maranello.
The first time I had ever set eyes on Rosaria Caffi and heard her aria.
Our marriage.
Finding our place together amid the struggle to become a couple who would not constantly pull against each other but could come together despite what we wanted and needed for the good of the family.
Scarlett Rose Fausti entering my life.
Brando Piero Fausti entering my life.
The chapters that I did not relive but had caused significant changes followed. Changes powerful enough to punctuate my story and separate them into the most important chapters of my life.
Olivier Nemours and the war he had caused.
Family turning on us .
My wife making the decision she did not want children with me. My brother was first in line and could carry on heirs.
Craving the kind of love my brother and his wife had so badly, I would have stolen his wife away from him without a second thought, even if it meant we killed each other.
Becoming close to my older brother in ways I did not foresee and in ways that filled gaping holes in my heart and soul.
My brother’s life serving as a reminder of the holes inside of me that were bleeding out.
Witnessing fate at work as it brought my sons into my life.
Massimo Leone Fausti.
Amadeo Leone Fausti.
Marzio Leone Fausti.
Ludovico Leone Fausti.
Standing tall before my father without bars for the first time since I was a young man.
My older brother publicly denouncing his right to rule. He did not want it. He had found a love that meant more to him than power, than our family name. That love meant more to him than life. Not wanting bad blood between us, since he never wanted to rule, he handed the family to me after a war we barely won, where enemies were disguised as family.
My brother stood over me as I was confined to a hospital bed, holding out his hand for me to take. Our father got to his feet, knowing what Brando was about to relinquish.
“It is yours,” my older brother had spoken to me in Italian, and I would remember the seriousness, the passion, the truth in it for the rest of my life. “I do not want it. This is me, Brando Piero Fausti, handing over what is by right mine to you, Rocco Piero Fausti, my brother.”
My eyes had met not my brother’s eyes, but my father’s.
“Do not look at him,” my brother had said. “Look at me, brother. This is between me and you.” He touched his heart, then touched mine. “He cannot give or take away what is mine by right. Marzio, our grandfather, offered it to me while he still lived. I turned it down then, and he assured me that it was my right to do so. It is yours by right to take, unless our father decides to give it to someone else.”
Those were the memories that reverberated in the bone, echoed inside of veins, stuck to the inner walls of the soul.
And that was how I was handed the title of the future king of the Fausti famiglia . My brother renounced his birthright while my father looked on in disappointment. He was not disappointed that I was to rule, but that my brother and I would not rule together.
I was the son who had lived by Fausti law. I was the son the famiglia came to when there was a problem that needed to be solved in the strict manner my family was known for—I knew rules and knew them well. However, my brother was not raised in our family, yet it was as if he was with us his entire life. The art of our language was embedded in his tongue, and his heart ran with passionate and ruthless blood. All his passion was inspired by his wife, as was his ruthlessness. He did not move unless she did.
My brother was, as they say, a wild card.
Together, me as the face and brain, my brother as the body, we would rule as our father had. Even more powerful than the Fausti, Luca Leone Fausti. It would take two men to rule as he had.
My brother did not want it. He had always been satisfied by the outskirts of our family.
My wife craved it as her heart craved blood, and when the right landed on my head, her head had become possessed.
The future had gotten inside of her and took over. All she could see was the throne, she and I sitting side by side, and the future throne, when our son, Massimo Leone Fausti, would sit in my seat, the wife we chose for him next to him.
However, the future was not ours to rule.
My brother’s son, Matteo Leone Fausti, had the right to rule after me. This was going to cause a war between our sons until one fateful night in Paris, of all fucking places, we were led to an apartment where my son fell in love with a woman from Louisiana. Chloe was an artist who had gone to Paris to study and had gotten into trouble there.
My son stole the man’s heart who had hurt his woman and sent it back to his people—the Russians—still warm.
My wife.
My wife.
She would not stand for the match. Would not even consider that it was not my son’s choice to make: my son had no choice but to bow to love.
My wife rebuked this truth and slapped a label of weakness on it. Massimo would be the future king of the Fausti famiglia whether he wanted the title or not—whether he would have to kill my brother’s son, his cugino, for it. It was not unheard of in our family for two branches to war over the throne. Men killed for much less. However, after Brando Fausti entered our lives, our cluster of the family was never the same. His wife was touched, too much empathy, and we became closer than what was normal in our famiglia , though if we were stripped down to the bones, we were who we always were.
A Fausti.
Our rules were our rules.
Our way of life was our way of life.
And the woman by my side. Rosaria Caffi, on paper only, my wife .
She became even more ruthless against the power of love.
She was no longer an ice queen but a woman who would set fire to those closest to us and laugh while they burned in the name of sovereignty .
She became so calculating, her eyes were as sharp as daggers laced with poison.
Her tongue was a deep well of insults, reflecting the truth of her heart.
She would stop at nothing for our son to rule after me.
I did not recognize my first-born son. My Massimo. His mother was destroying his life with her thirst for control. For her thirst to suck love dry in our family.
My son had found what I had always craved, and that was enough to make my struggles worth all the precious blood I had lost over the years, and not just physically. The wounds on flesh had healed. The ones that went deeper were still gaping open, the blood loss weakening my heart, confusing my thoughts.
I did not recognize my life. I became a shell of my former self.
I became quieter.
Even more ruthless.
Feeling warmth in my chest less and less. The metal chain with the lion pendant around my neck turning hotter and hotter.
I was detached from the entire world, resorting to my default setting, which was the body of a Fausti solider and the mind of a calculating king.
My passionate heart was shriveling. Suffering as the grape on the vine does for the result. But I was not turning into a fine wine. I was a bitter one, as bitter as the fruit Nonno had grown in his garden all those years ago, when he sat me down and struck me with a sword of truth. It still echoed inside of the recesses of my memories, the bleeding a trickle running with time. It was not meant to kill but to remind.
I had always been the son born to sacrifice. I was created out of obligation. An offering to the family to mold. I was the son of Luca Leone Fausti, and I would take this family into the next phase of our monarchy after my father could no longer rule or would no longer rule. Even my father had found something greater than the family to sacrifice it all for.
Margherita Granchio.
The woman in America who I had met at my brother and his wife’s farmhouse in Tuscany. She had not known about us, even if we had known of her.
My father had gotten his first marriage annulled and married Margherita. Due to health issues, my father decided to get the wheels turning for the switching of power. My crowning.
My nephew became my shadow, as my son would have if he would have desired the position after me. He had not, not after meeting Chloe. My nephew was as close as a son to me. He had the power of his great-grandfather, his grandfather, and his father inside of him. He would be a great leader of this family.
That was not good enough for my wife.
And, suddenly, all that I had sacrificed for swirled inside of my head like an everlasting eddy, pulling me further and further away from the shore of my life.
Of my heart.
Perhaps even my soul.
They say no man is an island. I did not know if there was truth in this. Teach a man to fish, and he will survive. I had learned how to survive on instinct alone, able to ignore the starving roars inside of me. Or the one thing I had always desired as much as dependable shelter, clean lifeblood, and enough sustenance to keep me strong.
Love.
I had always craved to love and to know love in return.
Perhaps for most men, the assignment was simple.
It was never simple to me.
It was never close.
Love and I were strangers.
The closest I had ever come to knowing it was the love that my brother and his wife shared. And it was not mine to have, but to gaze at from this reality, almost as unreal as stars floating above my head.
The thought used to bring me warmth.
Hope that a love as legendary as my brother and his wife shared still existed, and not for only them, as if their love was the last of a dying breed.
The warmth I had felt in my chest with Nonno that day seemed to have gotten stuck there. Over the years, that ice in my veins had started to move toward it, and slowly but surely, it started to win the war over romance.
They say no man is an island.
This is not true.
I have become one.
Detached from anything, anyone, except for the instincts that keep me breathing, but not feeling.
And this is where the middle of my story begins—with something I have never told before.
A lie.
No man is an island.
That is the truth.
She proved me wrong and taught me that.