Chapter 1 #2
I don’t listen to whatever his reply is, nor Cassian’s frustrated crying. The only thing I can do to keep myself from turning around and hauling Cassian’s scrawny body out of the same window the shooter escape from is to storm down the hallway.
“What’s going on? Is he alive?” Tommaso asks me as he’s coming in from the wide-open front door. The cold wind rushes through the entry way. I step over and slam the door closed. The paintings on the wall rattle.
“No, and you’re in here without the head of his killer,” I snap at him.
He looks back at me angrily, but shoves past me to where I had come from.
“You’ll only find the same thing everyone else is!” I yell, putting my arms out wide. “His dead fucking body!” I grab the vase on the small table beside the door, and hold it in my hand, staring at my reflection in the pale blue crystal.
“Goddamnit!” I squeeze it so hard that it starts to crack against my palm and then throw it across the room, hitting the banister of the spiral staircase to the second floor with it. It shatters in a million pieces that go flying through the air like ice crystals.
The family room is so warm and glows with the light of the fireplace.
A Christmas tree sits in the corner of the room, decorated in vintage blubs whose glitter and shine has dulled in the last two decades since they were purchased.
Small bobbles made of wood and yarn hang between branches, each crafted by small hands that worked so diligently only to end up with something only a mother could love.
The string lights glare in my burning eyes.
A mother.
The only mother I ever had, the only mother Alessio and I ever knew. Not that we got to know her for very long. In a life where we could live until tomorrow or eighty years old… thirteen years with a mother will never be enough.
She would have loved the way this room looks.
Inviting and comfortable. My mother always loved Christmas.
She said it was the time of year when Italy was the most beautiful…
second only to the summer solstice. Tessari, the city she’d grown in, met my father in, and birthed her two sons in… it lit up like no other.
My eyes go blurry with heavy tears as I continue to stare at the tree. A growl escapes from deep in my chest and in just a few long strides I’m standing in front of that decorated pine. I grab it with my bloody hands and feel the needles stab at my already aching skin.
“Carmine, what are y—” a voice from behind me. I don’t know who, and I don’t care. Before they can get their words out, I yank the nine-foot tree from its bronze pedestal and hoist it over my head.
“None of this matters anymore!” I yell. The tree goes crashing to the ground in front of me in a cloud of clattering ornaments and dusty tinsel. Sparks fly from the wall along the hidden cords of the string lights as the plug is ripped from the wall.
“Fuck you, fuck, you!” I stomp down limbs of the tree and feel the cracking of bulbs and glass underneath my wingtips. Pieces of the tree and its decorators fly into the fireplace popping and crackling.
“Carmine, what the fuck is wrong with you?!” Tommaso yells at me from across the room. “You think this is what he’d want?”
Tears stream down my face. I pull one of the branches off the tree haphazardly.
Leaving the end a messy, jagged but dull point.
“I don’t care what he’d want! None of it matters anymore!
” I throw the branch at my brother who narrowly escapes it.
Before he can say anything else, I’m stomping my way over the tree and out of the room.
He grabs at my back but I shake him off.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” I shove him into the wall so hard that I hear his head crack against the wall.
Alessio comes barreling down the hallway at me. “You need to get outta here before you do something you can’t take back,” he hisses at me.
“I’ll do it now,” I insist. “Where’s Cassian!?” I try to get past him to go down the hallway toward my father’s—now-dead father’s—office.
“Back up, Carmine,” Alessio warns me. “You’re not in the right mind right now. Go to your room.”
I snort in aggravation. “Go to my room? What am I, twelve? I’m older than you, dickhead. Whatever… none of this…none…nothing matters. It’s over.” I throw my hands in the air.
“Go.” Alessio stares at me, jaw tight, and I stare back at him for just a moment.
He looks the most like our mother of the two of us.
His pale green eyes, just like hers. Perhaps that’s why I don’t rip his head off right here and now.
He might be bigger than me, but the way I’m feeling right now… I could destroy this whole place.
Instead, I huff and make my way upstairs to my bedroom.
Covered in blood, sweat, and tears. I slam the door behind me and don’t bother to turn on a light.
My room is completely devoid of any shiny decorations that shout at me to celebrate the holiday…
But a twinkle of something silver still catches my sore eyes.
I walk over to my dresser as I pull my button up shirt off.
I use the delicate fabric to wipe as much blood and pine sap off my hands as possible…
it’s already ruined anyway, before tossing it to the floor.
A silver cross sits on my dresser. It glints in what little light shines through the curtains behind it. My father’s necklace.
The one that had been on him as he died. Someone had brought it up here to my room. It’s been wiped and washed of blood, though in better light I might be able to see tinges of red caught in the creases of the metal.
I grab it by the chain and dangle it in front of me as I swallow hard.
“Damnit,” I mumble. My throat and jaw almost painfully tight.
I’m not sure how long I’ve been staring at it. The ornate crucifix that I’ve never seen my father without.
I slowly put the chain around my neck and clasp it before letting the cross fall to my neck and down between my collarbones. The metal is practically ice cold against my burning skin.
With a sigh, my shoulders fall away from my ears.
I look down and pull open the top drawer of my dresser, grabbing a half empty bottle of scotch and carrying it over to my bed.
“I’ll keep my promise,” I whisper as I sit down on the edge of the mattress. “…tomorrow.”
I crack open the bottle and put it to my lips, taking not just a heavy drink but a chug of the alcohol. It burns down my throat, but I’m used to it. I gasp for air when I’m done, and scotch drips down my chin and to my chest. Onto the necklace.
I chuckle bitterly. “Cheers, Papa.” I take another drink and pull my legs up onto the bed. “I’ll kill those fuckers. Whoever did this, their days are numbered. I promise that too.”
On my bedside table there’s a bottle of pills. I haven’t needed them for a few weeks since I took a bullet to the same leg where I’m pretty sure there’s one now.
I reach over with my free hand and grab it, using my teeth and fingers to take the cap off and dump a few into my mouth.
Anything to get me through the night will do. I just need to make it to tomorrow morning. Maybe then I’ll be able to handle this shit.
My already fuzzy head starts to grow heavier.
The ache in my chest numbing along with everything else.
I don’t care about the cuts and shards of glass in my hands or the sick scent of blood that still permeates me.
The sterile scent of alcohol replaces it all.
The pills start to settle in, and the room is spinning.
I have to close my eyes or I feel nauseous.
It’s hard to keep them open anyway. So, I tilt my head back against the headboard and just ride the slow decent into darkness.
One drink after another until the bottle is empty, and so is my head.