Chapter Ten #3
“Take your own car. I’m not a taxi service,” Carlo muttered, trying to make it sound like the potential for inconvenience was the reason he didn’t want to be in a vehicle with Jovi.
Not the more practical concern, which was that Jovi could easily overpower him and be rid of him in short order. They both knew it.
Maybe, Jovi realized now, this had always been a power struggle that he’d never bothered to play.
Maybe he’d hoped his cousin would do something about it, because whatever happened would have been fine with the Jovi who felt nothing at all but cold.
But that Jovi was gone now.
“I will follow you there,” he assured his cousin. “I might even beat you.”
Carlo obviously took that as a challenge, wheeling around and taking off toward his car.
Jovi almost turned back to take one last look in Rux’s direction, but he couldn’t let himself do it. It was time to be finished with this, once and for all.
Looking at her would only make it impossible to do what needed to be done.
He followed his cousin out at a far more measured pace, swinging into his car and noting the clouds of dust his cousin had kicked up behind him in his haste to win over Jovi in the only meaningless way he could. As if that mattered.
As if any part of this corrupt life mattered.
Jovi took his time driving through Palermo, accepting as he did that it was very unlikely he would ever see it again. The wild mountains, the ancient ruins. The hardy, independent people who had made him who he was.
He was proud he’d lived as long as he had a Sicilian to his core.
Antonio’s house was on the other side of the city, a seemingly modest affair at the end of a cracked and barely paved road.
If, that was, a visitor ignored the views of the bay and the sea beyond.
Or was unaware that all the buildings a person could see from his uncle’s front door were, in fact, also his.
Outbuildings, warehouses, and sometimes even a place to visit a mistress or two.
Antonio did precisely what he wished, when he wished it, as his father had before him.
When Jovi pulled up to the house, he saw that Carlo’s car was already parked haphazardly near the fountain in front.
Instead of walking in the front door, he left his car near one of the garages and ducked around the side, nodding at the guards he saw along the way, and then letting himself in one of the doors near the back of the house.
It was always best to disrupt any potential ambush scenarios.
He made his way through the kitchen, which was quiet this time of night. And he found himself near the back room where his uncle had stashed him years ago. Jovi paused, then followed an urge that he could barely fathom to push open that door.
The room was empty. It was more of a closet than a room, to his eye. It still had a mattress on the floor, which was all he’d been allowed, and what barely passed for a window cut high in the wall—more of a vent, really.
This was where his uncle and aunt had kept him. This was where they had thrown food in through the door and made him do his business in a pail in the corner that he’d had to clean out himself.
The memories came back at him like gunfire. A hail of bullets, each one slamming into him hard.
The things they’d made him do, because it amused them to debase him.
Things he had learned to handle with that blankness, that ice.
Because, deep down, he knew that it was the only weapon he really had. The only one that got to them. It was what had convinced his uncle to let him live.
But only because Antonio had imagined he could control it.
Jovi shook off the memories, though his chest felt as if he’d been riddled with bullets. He could feel the agony of it like a blaze—but that wasn’t a bad thing.
Pain, he’d learned right here in this room, was clarifying. It brought the world into sharp focus. It made sense of things that otherwise seemed fuzzy and confusing.
The pain of what had happened here to the boy he’d been fueled him. It protected him.
It allowed him to step back out into the hall and make his way into the main part of the house.
Where he could hear his cousin’s voice, shouting already.
Jovi thought that boded well. It meant he’d succeeded in getting into Carlo’s head.
He made his way down the hall, inclined his head at the guard that stood outside his uncle’s study, and didn’t argue when the man indicated that he had to be searched. He submitted to the brisk pat down impassively. It was standard procedure if anyone wanted to get to see Don Antonio.
If he’d been anyone but Antonio’s nephew, he wouldn’t have walked into the house so easily. They would have taken him down before he made it up the drive and asked questions later.
When he was pronounced clean, Jovi let himself inside.
“I could hear you yelling all the way down the hall,” he said to his cousin, sounding something almost like pleasant. He looked at his uncle. “As ever, I congratulate you on your coolheaded successor.”
Carlo looked as if he wanted to lunge at Jovi. Or use the weapon he didn’t have to relinquish, because he was the sotto capo.
But he didn’t. Because he was only and ever a coward where it counted.
Antonio, on the other hand, merely studied Jovi, all cold assessment. “Interesting approach,” he said after a moment, and it wasn’t a compliment. Because while he often complained about his son, it was a risk for anyone else to insult him by doing the same. “What happened to that girl in Prague?”
Jovi stared back at this man who had been a shadow over his whole life. The man who had literally kicked Jovi while he was down. Repeatedly.
The older man had gotten rounder as the years had gone by. Gravity had not been kind to his face. Or his spine, though Jovi accepted the possibility that he was the one who had grown tall. Maybe his uncle had always been much smaller than he acted.
Not that his size did anything to dilute the depraved power that emanated from Antonio.
“What do you think happened to that girl?” he asked him. He kept his back to the door and fixed his gaze on his uncle. “Am I normally in the habit of disobeying you, Ziu?”
“I hope not,” Antonio said with that laugh of his that made many a man’s bowels fail him. He didn’t have to infuse his voice with any further threat.
The threat was him. The threat was this house. The threat was Jovi’s entire life up to this moment.
But Jovi felt all those bullets, all those memories, and stood tall.
“Yet you question my work?” Jovi asked. He looked at his uncle as he said it, then swung his gaze to his cousin. “Do you, Carlo?”
Carlo looked as if he wanted to start shouting, raging, brandishing his weapon—but he didn’t. Antonio merely studied his nephew some more. Longer than was comfortable.
And after a while, he nodded his head toward the door. “Get out,” he told Carlo. “And calm yourself down while you’re at it. You’re turning red like a picciriddu.”
The look Carlo threw Jovi was murderous, not that Jovi cared. His cousin was acting like a baby boy. He only wondered why his uncle made it sound as if that was something other than business as usual where Carlo was concerned.
Jovi stepped out of the way as Carlo barreled toward him, and for a moment he thought his cousin was going to try to tackle him—
But at the very last moment, Carlo thought better of it.
What a shock, Jovi thought, and was certain the sentiment showed on his face.
When the door closed behind him, louder than it should have, Antonio waved to the seat near his preferred armchair, where he liked to lounge like he was a king on a throne.
Here in Sicily, he was.
But Jovi shook his head.
“What is this?” his uncle asked quietly.
Dangerously.
Jovi looked at Antonio for a long while. He remembered the boy he had been, scared and grieving—and beaten for both. He remembered the grim years spent under this roof, the man he’d had to make himself into to survive it, and what it had cost him to become the version of himself he was now.
Or had been, before Rux had turned all that heat and light of hers upon him, and melted all his ice away.
Year after year, his uncle had stripped Jovi down and built him back up into exactly the kind of monster he needed to do his dirtiest work.
Until he was so deep in the ice it was as if his veins were frozen solid, too, because that was the only possible way to survive.
But now he could feel the blood in him, the heat.
He could hear his own heartbeat, even here in the most dangerous place he’d ever been—the place he’d first learned, long ago, to hide it and anything else that made him human.
He looked at his uncle and tried to see if it was visible on his face.
If there was any clue to the brutality this man could dish out without a second thought.
This man who had murdered his own brother and his brother’s wife and young daughters.
This man who had brought his own son along and treated a bloodbath like a party.
This man who had then made sure that the only survivor of that night paid for his father’s sins by becoming a creature who would have been Donatello’s worst nightmare.
Because that was the real reason Antonio had kept him alive.
Donatello had been too gentle for this life, too academic. He’d been horrified by the violence and the sadistic pleasure Antonio took in it.
So Antonio had not only killed him, he’d stolen his son’s soul, too.
Simply because he could.
And that was only a little glimpse into the horrors that Antonio D’Amato had visited upon the world.
That was only what Jovi’s uncle had done to him. It barely scratched the surface of the things Antonio was capable of. It would hardly register on the laundry list of offenses the police likely attributed to him.
“Do you remember my sister Alessia?” he asked his uncle.
“Have you lost your mind?” Antonio asked with that laugh of his, his eyes cold. “You want to get into ancient history?”
“Either one of my sisters, actually. Alessia or Isabella.” Jovi watched his uncle’s face. “I can barely remember them myself. They were so little. But then, I don’t really remember my mother, either.”
Though he did, now. He remembered her voice that night, defying Antonio’s orders and calling him exactly what he was. A daring act that had cost her dearly, but she’d done it.
“Your mother was a whore,” Antonio told him, with obvious relish. “Does that clear it up? Can we get back to business now?”
What Jovi knew about his mother was that she’d been from Rome. Educated and artistic, she’d never really fit in with the family. Uppity, his aunt had sneered. Jovi remembered her art. Her dancing in a pretty dress.
Maybe he was protecting himself from all the other things he couldn’t bear to remember.
But one thing he was sure of was that his mother was no whore.
So what Jovi did in the face of such slander was smile.
And he saw that when he did, he managed to disconcert his uncle more than any flash of temper might have. Antonio understood temper. He banked on it. He liked to force others into violent displays because it made it easier to then take what he wanted.
He’d never known what to do with the monster he’d made, a creature of ice instead of fury.
It was time, Jovi thought, that he found out.