Chapter One #2
Sometimes Jovi walked through the crowded squares of Palermo or drove past the beaches in summer.
They were always teeming with people having their coffees and their harder drinks.
Talking loudly, waving their hands in the air.
Clustered together over tiny tables in public spaces or flung about in abandon on the sand, entirely unaware of their surroundings or what sort of monsters might be waiting there, watching.
Looking for a chance to strike.
He could not understand it.
Yet Jovi knew his cousin not only understood these things, but enjoyed them.
Carlo maintained his never-ending stream of mistresses despite the carefully selected bride from a Calabrian family he’d married so ostentatiously in the cathedral in Palermo.
Despite the vows Jovi had heard him make with his own duplicitous mouth.
And the babies his dutiful wife, raised by men just like the one she married, had already provided him—three sons and counting.
Jovi did not make vows. He kept promises.
And he was not given to acts of sadism the way his cousin was.
He was Antonio’s favorite form of detached and dispassionate justice, meted out in the face of betrayal, a broken word, or a disrespect too great to be ignored.
Or sometimes simply because Don Antonio felt like serving it to his enemies, with impunity.
Jovi was the final solution to problems that torturers and deviants like his cousin failed to solve.
Carlo knew as well as Jovi did that even Don Antonio took care to aim his best weapon carefully.
What mattered was that Jovi was loyal. The son of a known traitor had to demonstrate his honor and devotion, without fail, forever.
Even more so than the rest of the family.
When he was young, Jovi had done what was asked of him—whatever was asked of him—because he’d had no choice if he wanted to live.
These days, everyone was aware that Don Antonio’s orders to Jovi were a lot more polite than they had been. Or than they were to anyone else.
That was the trouble with crafting a perfect weapon. There was always the worry that it could be aimed back at oneself.
Most of the time, Jovi simply waited, letting the ice in him grow thicker by the day, feeling nothing at all.
This was not to say that he was a saint or a monk. He fucked. A lot.
There was no shortage of women who were drawn to him as surely as reckless moths to an indifferent flame. He took what he was given, left them in pieces, and never took the time to learn their names or commit their faces to memory.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he would dream of the boy he barely remembered, a creature of heat and need, flesh and yearning.
He dreamed of a bright, wild, intense boy who had delighted his father and made his mother laugh as she pretended to look to the heavens for the intercession of the saints.
But thinking of these things in the light of day was like telling himself fairy tales, anodyne little ditties about obedience, and Jovi could not relate to them. They were not the memories he allowed himself.
Because there was nothing in him that burned. He breathed destruction and delivered pain.
There was not one part of him that was not cold.
Even Carlo, who claimed he feared no man and was the scourge of many, was always wary in Jovi’s presence.
Perhaps more than simply wary, Jovi thought.
Clearly disliking the quiet, Carlo outlined the situation that his father had sent him to share.
It was no different from every other task Jovi had been set over the years.
The particulars changed, but the outcome was always more or less the same.
There were many men who played these games, who waged these wars in the dark shadows where fallen men created their empires, ripped down others, and were kings in all but name.
There were many men who preened in their own power, little realizing that power, like any other commodity, could be bought and sold.
Because there was always more power. There was always someone more desperate to claim it. A circle without end.
These same men never understood that they as good as signed their own death warrants the moment they started throwing their weight around, because there were always higher bidders with deeper pockets. There were always new markets with more motivated sellers.
It was only a matter of time until they were all worth more dead than alive.
“We want him to hurt,” Carlo said of the man in question today, some or other arms dealer in Eastern Europe.
It didn’t matter who he was, only that he’d decided he was more powerful than Il Serpente and could dictate his terms. “Eventually, he’ll pay the price for his disrespect but first, a little pain. ”
Carlo carried himself as if he was a man of supreme beauty, though it was difficult to tell if his mistresses cared at all about his supposed good looks when his wallet was so well-upholstered and infinitely deep.
He was not afraid to fight with his own hands—and, indeed, preferred it—a rarity at his level in an organization like theirs.
See again: sadist.
Accordingly, he kept himself in shape as if he anticipated that fight occurring at any time, despite his exalted position as his father’s right-hand man.
It had been a long time since Jovi had heard his cousin complain to the rest of their cousins that it was difficult to keep up with his fitness when he was Sicilian, and there were too many delicacies forever on offer.
Many a man had fallen into softness thanks to the preferred cuisine around the family tables and the local cafés, called bars.
The most dangerous men in the world are fat and round, Carlo had told Jovi once, his eyes dark with shame, when Jovi had effortlessly outperformed him in the gym.
Then they are not as dangerous as they think, Jovi had replied with his typical equanimity. The men who fear them are the dangerous ones. The ones who do their bidding and could therefore do someone else’s, too.
Sometimes, like now, he thought his cousin remembered that conversation.
There was something about the way Carlo refused to look at him sometimes that assured him it was something Carlo kept close.
No doubt dreaming of the day that he would rule this family and give Jovi orders.
Or better yet, get rid of Jovi altogether.
Jovi did not bother to inform his cousin that his loyalty was not transferable. He did not need to remind his cousin that his skills far outstripped Carlo’s sick little games.
A day of reckoning would come, that was certain. These lessons could wait until then.
“Boris Ardelean is a collection of former Russian nationalities,” Carlo told him in that sullen way of his, never quite able to look Jovi in the eye. “A mutt. A Czech national who should shut the fuck up, learn his place, and sell his guns. Instead…”
He shrugged. There were some who would see a shrug like that and lose control of their bowels. A shrug like that, from a man like him, had death written all over it.
Jovi was unaffected.
Carlo continued. “Instead, he thinks he can play games. He thinks he can dictate terms. He thinks he can go around the family to make his own name for himself. But… Lu rispettu è misuratu, cu lu porta l’avi purtato.”
“Respect is measured.” Jovi agreed with the proverb his cousin was quoting. It was how they all lived. Or in Carlo’s case, pretended he lived. “Whoever respects others will be respected in turn.”
His cousin nodded. “Don Antonio likes his own name.” The meaning was clear. This arms dealer needed a lesson. “Killing him would be too easy. How would he learn? How would he fully understand the depth of his disrespect?”
These were not questions that required an answer.
He stayed where he was, sitting still in his chair and watching as Carlo paced a little, as unable to stand still as he’d been when they’d both been small boys. Five and six and allowed to run wild while all the old women in black smiled at them and called them angels.
Only the fallen kind of angels, Jovi thought now. Fallen deep and hard, lost somewhere far beneath the surface of any lake of fire.
If he was an angel, it was the angel of death.
“This Boris has a daughter,” Carlo was telling him. “He’s been putting out feelers, seeing if he can marry her off in the old style to create an alliance. My father thinks Boris’s only alliance should be with us.”
Jovi inclined his head. “I understand.”
For a moment, Carlo still stood there, staring down at Jovi, with that same wary look on his face that he often wore in his cousin’s presence. To cover his uneasiness and fear, Jovi was certain.
“Other men might ask if she’s pretty,” Carlo pointed out. “If they might have a little fun, a little pleasure with their work. But not you.”
“I do not believe in pleasure,” Jovi replied. He didn’t even bother to shrug. “In my work or anywhere else. It has no purpose.”
Sex, killing—it was all the same to him. Women or men, it made no difference. Sometimes there was set dressing, the better to send a message. Sometimes mementos were required, whether before or after the death depended entirely on the reasons for the death.
He felt nothing about any of these things. He did his job.
Ice was ice wherever it was cold enough.
He could see that Carlo was holding back a sneer. That his cousin dearly wished he could speak frankly to him, though Carlo would never dare. Jovi even knew what he would say, as he’d said as much to others who had foolishly relayed it, imagining Jovi was the sort of man who would make alliances.
He’s a freak, Carlo liked to tell the rest of the family. Him and his freak father. If it was up to me, I never would have let him live.
“I’m not the one who fears death, cousin,” Jovi told him now. “I don’t have to dress it up and make it a game.”
If he was anyone else, he thought Carlo would have lunged at him. He could see the loathing in his cousin’s gaze. But then, of course, Carlo did nothing.
Because, at heart, he was a coward.
He showed this to Jovi every time they came face-to-face. Every single time.
And well did Carlo know it. Because he said nothing further. He only swallowed back whatever he wanted to say—no doubt thinking better of it and hating himself for it—and then turned around again to storm back into the house.
Jovi heard a crash from inside and assumed that Carlo was expressing his displeasure the way he often did, because he ran hot. And if asked, could claim any damage was an accident.
Jovi, obviously, had never asked.
Carlo was a coward, but he was also dangerous. He was sick in the way many men in their profession were sick. Pain was a game to them, not a means to an end—and because of this, they would be their own undoing.
It was written all over them.
It was what made Carlo who he was. His life was a preview of how he would die.
Jovi supposed his was, too. Ice unto ice, frozen into nothing.
This was as inevitable as the death of the daughter of a fool named Boris who thought he could play games with the likes of Antonio D’Amato.
Theirs was a world with very strict rules. They were always the same rules. Death stalked them all, and none of them could escape it. None of them would.
Especially not if it came for them in the form of Jovi, Il Serpente’s coldest flame.
He sat still for a while longer, until the sounds of his cousin faded away. Until the roar of Carlo’s engine was swallowed up once more by the sunshine and the breeze. The careless birds wheeling overhead.
Only then did he rise and head into the villa filled with ghosts and the shattered remains of whatever glasses Carlo had thrown against the wall, so that Jovi could begin planning the most expedient way to do the thing he did best.
Because unlike his traitor of a father, when Jovi had promised his body, soul, and eternal loyalty to his uncle right here in this villa on the night of the great brotherly reckoning when Jovi had been eight years old—he’d meant it.