Chapter 14
Leo
Three years later
I’ve been summoned by my father. It’s not uncommon lately, and I dread what’s awaiting me when I’ll get to the family home. Whose death will he announce today?
Our family and its soldiers have been relatively spared in this conflict that’s erupted in the past eighteen months. After Bianca’s disappearance, the memorial held for her solidified the fact she’s gone. She isn’t legally dead yet, but in all aspects, it’s the case—Bianca Bonucci died in that seedy alleyway in The Bronx.
When she went, she took my heart. The void she’s left behind, it’s one that created an abyss in my soul, a bottomless darkness that threatens to take over me if I don’t keep it under control. This darkness is what made me kill a man with such ease, as if he were a mere cockroach.
Ardian Abrashi’s lifeless body was discovered at the foot of a fire escape staircase at the back of a questionable strip club near the Port Authority in Hell’s Kitchen. My father’s capo found him with a broken neck at the bottom of the stairs to the cellar of my restaurant; I let him believe it was an accident. Abrashi fell, end of the story.
He couldn’t be found on my property, though, hence how he was moved to the location where his body was discovered. No one, not even his own people, blinked an eye at the location—after all, he was The Butcher ’s brother. That family was cast in a bad light afterwards, their influence all but extinct a year later.
Despite this, the Albanians pushed for another alliance for a long time. They still are, at least some of them, on the organizational level. Brokering a truce through marriage, it’s like they still have some hope this will work. Or it’s all an eyewash. Because on the ground, their men have been advancing, staking claims on our operations.
They’re going for the ports, where most of the Italian-American Mafia operations happen on the import-export trade routes. Some of these fuckers are also advancing on European ports like Turin and Palermo and other territories notoriously controlled by the Cosa Nostra and the ’Ndrangheta. They have no qualms, much less any respect for age-old institutions.
My family owns clubs and security companies, so we’ve been spared their attacks. Until recently, when they tried to make a move on one of our operations near the container park of Port Newark. They killed two of our men on the team overseeing that area.
My father, Don Pellegrino, didn’t want to get involved in this war. But we were drawn into it, and now, we’re facing the consequences as there’s at least one attack on our crews every other week.
This has forced me and my brothers to step up, to grow up and become men when still in our twenties, a time when we’d have a free pass to be wild and carefree until we’d have to settle down as soldiers and also family men at thirty.
I’m thirty-one now, turning thirty-two in May, and this isn’t the life I had envisaged for me at this age. On most days, I feel weary and worn out. To think I have the rest of my life to go, to function in the same vein, to follow in the illustrious footsteps carved out by past generations of Pellegrini men.
Bit by bit, I’m becoming my father’s second in command. Sergio and Emilio are both computer whizzes—must be all those video games they played in their teens; it’s almost like girls didn’t exist for them—and as such, they’re the perfect team for running the security firms. Tristan is still in college, and we’re keeping the baby of the family as far away from this clusterfuck as possible. How long we’ll be able to, I have no idea, but at least for now, he’s protected, literally and figuratively, from the darkness and violence of our world.
I step into the house and head to my father’s study. A whiff of flowery perfume tickles my nostrils, and I frown. Only one person leaves a sillage of Ana?s, Ana?s in her wake everywhere she goes. I knock, open the door, and step in, not surprised to find my grandmother sitting on the leather couch with a snifter of Cognac in her hand.
I close the door then make a beeline for her, dropping a soft kiss on the paper-thin skin of her cheek. “ Nonna Valeria. It’s good to see you.”
“ Buongiorno, fligliolo ,” she greets me with her free hand patting my shoulder.
I can’t help but feel her hand is lingering a bit today, pressing into the fabric of my suit jacket. It’s strange because her touch is light as air usually.
Something’s wrong. I can feel it in my gut first, then in the air like a cloak of doom closing in on me.
I turn to my father. “What happened?”
He nods at the couch. “Sit down.”
There’s something in his tone, a dead ring that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
I undo the buttons on my suit jacket and sit down carefully next to my grandmother.
My father stares at me with narrowed eyes for long seconds. I want to squirm, but I keep myself in check. I’m his second in command—one day, I’ll be the Don in his stead. I have to control myself, appear aloof and unmoved externally, and for this, the storm inside me must be kept in check.
He takes a sip of the whiskey in his glass then sighs.
“What I’ll tell you right now stays in this room between us forever.” His eyes narrow even more. “Promise me.”
I swallow, dread curling inside me. This is important, possibly life-changing.
“I promise you, Padre .”
“Good. Because you just made a promise to a dying man, and that’s binding.”
I jump to my feet with surprise and outrage. “What’s going on? Who did this to you? I swear, I will kill—”
My father chuckles. “Take that up with the Good Lord, my son.”
I blink and shake my head. “What?”
“I just told your nonna , felt she had to know first. You’re the only other person who needs to be made aware.”
“Aware of what?”
“I have frontotemporal dementia.”
It’s like a bomb explodes in the room, the blast cutting the muscles and tendons holding me upright. I fall in a heap on the couch, the breath stunned out of me.
I’m locked in a bubble where my senses go haywire as much as they stop existing. Sounds are distorted at the same time silence stings my ears. My hands can feel the warmth from the fire in the grate, yet they’re also numb and unresponsive.
Then reality slams into me.
My father’s gonna die.
I knew this was going to happen. One day. Someday. Maybe in another thirty years, at least. Look at Nonna Valeria, strong as an ox even in her mid-eighties. My grandfather took a stray bullet in a shootout fifty years ago; he didn’t die of natural causes.
I don’t know how a sense of calm—numbing, calming, competent—comes over me as I stare at him.
“How long?” I ask.
“How long have I known? Or how long do I have to live?”
“Both,” I reply.
“I noticed the tremors a few weeks ago. I might have five, six years left, though I don’t know in what state I’ll be by then. At least, aphasia doesn’t seem to have struck.” He must’ve caught my frown because he goes on to explain. “Aphasia is when you start having trouble communicating, finding words, speaking them aloud. Like after a stroke.”
He’s so matter-of-fact about it, it rattles me. Has he already made his peace with it? Nonna seems to have, as well. She’s never been a basket case of nerves and tears, but she’s in check, too. Well, except for the deeper press on my shoulder earlier.
It dawns on me then. “You have something planned.”
He sighs. “Let’s make my death count for something.”
I narrow my eyes on him. “How do you plan to do that?”
“You killed Ardian Abrashi.”
His words make me pause. I remain silent, though. He can’t know this. It was all made to look like an accident.
A fleeting smile touches his lips. He knows, and he’s playing with me.
“That’s what I’ll tell the syndicate, anyway.”
He won’t confirm or deny. Neither will I.
“But why would you—” I stop, staring at him. “An eye for an eye?” I jump to my feet, incensed, rage coursing through me. “You’re gonna sacrifice yourself to them?”
“It will bring peace, Leo,” my grandmother says.
My father downs his whiskey in a single gulp. “It’ll make my death count for something .”
No! He can’t do this. He’ll be gone—
But that’s exactly it. He will be gone. The dementia will take him from us before death takes his soul away. He’ll end up a shell of a person, a husk of the man he is, the Don he is.
At least this way, he goes on his own terms. Victorious.
“No one else can know about this,” I say softly, recalling his earlier words.
“There will be blowback on you, figlio .”
Because when this happens, everyone will think I’m responsible for the death of Abrashi, for why this war started. Never mind that Bianca Bonucci disappeared—there could’ve been another alliance. The Albanians, another family this time, higher up their echelons, set their sights on Paloma Salvatore, Don Salvatore’s daughter. The Don has refused the match every time he’s been approached, which also led to this state of affairs with those fucking Albanians trying to walk all over us.
But an eye for an eye will also bring a truce. It is an alliance of sorts, too, via death and not marriage.
We can’t keep going on with this war. Too many have been killed already.
I gulp, hard, the sob lodged in my throat not going down. Don Pellegrini told us boys to appear ruthless and untouchable outside our home. Inside these walls, Eduardo Pellegrini, the man and father, told us we could be real men—and real men feel, rage, cry. There’s no shame in that, in private, behind the closed doors of our home.
“If this is your will, it shall be done, Don Pellegrini. Padre ,” I say with my head lowered.
“You’re going to take over, figlio ,” he tells me. “You’ll be Don Pellegrini when I’m gone.”
I can’t believe we’re talking about his death and the aftermath so calmly, in such a rational way. The monster in my blood is raring to be let out, to rage, to shatter something, to kill each and every one of those goddamned Albanians. If I had my way, that’s exactly what I’d do, show them who the boss is on this territory.
Yet, I also recall what my father has always told me. The ruthless, calculated side of me, that ice-cold monster? He said it would come in handy one day. Provided I learned how to channel it, to control the beast in my blood at the same time as I let my colder mind take the reins.
“The syndicate has a lot of rules in place for a Don,” my grandmother says.
I turn to her. “You think I’m not ready for this position?”
I didn’t say this in defiance or anger. I didn’t take it as an attack on my masculinity or the fact I have Pellegrini blood in my veins. It was just a question, a young man asking for wise counsel. My father could’ve kept his diagnosis to himself, at least not shared it with Nonna —her heart must be breaking knowing her son will be dead soon. No parent should ever have to outlive their offspring.
But Nonna Valeria was married to a small-time soldier who became a capo and later a Don . She raised her only son to be one, too, when his father was brutally taken from him when he was still little. Now, my father, my Don, is going to leave my life soon. Who’ll be left? Nonna . She’ll be here for the third generation of Pellegrini men who ascended as Dons.
As such, I value her input, her advice, her opinion.
“You still have some things to learn,” my father says.
I turn to him now. “So teach me, Padre .”
He nods. “So be it.”
There’s no point hiding from the hard questions now. He has a plan, and he’ll implement it when he deems best.
“How long…” I ask, unable to continue, to ask him when he’ll be killed to atone for the sin I committed, when he’ll bring a truce upon this fucked up war.
He swallows, hard. It’s the only sign of emotion I’ve seen from him today.
“Tristan is graduating in May,” he says.
I nod, getting it now. Tristan, the baby, the apple of my father’s eye. I’m his heir, and I know he loves me, as he does the twins. But Tristan, it’s a different story. We all know he has a special place in my father’s heart. We don’t begrudge him for it, though. Lord knows the kid deserves it—he’s the only one of us who doesn’t recall our mother. How could he, when he was barely nine months old when she abandoned him, and us?
“We have some time, then,” I tell him.
Nonna grips my hand and squeezes it tight. I place my other hand over hers and press down, infusing all my courage into her, seeking bravery from her touch simultaneously.
My father nods. “Let’s make it count, okay?”
I nod, too. “Okay, Padre .”