Chapter 1
Aurora – (Twenty Years Later)~
There was no dignity in death; nature didn’t allow it. Oh, you could act as brave as you wanted to, and you could even die a hero if the occasion called for it, but to die with dignity?
Yeah, no.
Upon death, muscles relaxed, your skin began to sag, blood drained to give you that pale look, the body cooled, and the sphincter released, causing quite the mess.
Shortly after that, your blood pooled, giving you that bruised look, then rigor mortis began to set in.
However, that wasn’t the end of it. Hours later, your muscles began to stiffen, giving you that bent look, but then everything came full circle when the body began to relax again.
So, while dying a valiant death sounded noble and all, the unpreventable stages of death left your corpse an undignified mess, and the smell of human demise was not a pleasant one. In fact, it stuck with you long after you took a shower and scrubbed yourself clean.
Nonetheless, death didn’t bother me. As I watched Petru Aldea’s blood swirling down the drain, I couldn’t remember the last time that the sight of blood had bothered me, and that was saying something when you considered that I had a photographic memory, something that benefitted my family greatly.
Fortunately or unfortunately-depending on who you asked-I was the youngest child of Roman and Rosemary Marchetti, and my father was the Don of the Marchetti Crime Family, the largest Mafia syndicate in the entire state of Illinois.
Of course, there were other crime families around, but the closest to us in numbers were the Russians while the Romanians, Germans, and Chinese weren’t even a factor when it came to territory.
At any rate, unlike most Mafia princesses, I hadn’t been raised to become the perfect Italian wife.
I hadn’t been raised to keep my head in the sand, feigning ignorance to everything around me.
Even though my mother had given my father an heir and a spare, he hadn’t left me to my own devices.
Instead, he had raised me alongside my brothers, and gender had no significance when it came to family business, something that was obvious from the way that I was washing the blood off my hands now.
As for the family’s dynamics, even though my father was already sixty-years-old, he was just as cutthroat and relentless as he’d been in his younger years.
He ran the family like an iron-disciplined general, and he’d been raising his children to be just like him from the days of our first steps.
Now, while a lot of people would accuse him of being too hard on us, he’d been teaching us how to survive this life, and like my brothers, I was very grateful to him for being the hands-on father that he’d been and still was.
Of course, predictably, my mother was a different story.
Her marriage to my father had been an arrangement for more power, and if she loved him, you’d never know it by the way that they led separate lives.
Oh, they lived in the same house, slept in the same bed, and showed up to all the important functions arm-in-arm, but there was no love lost between my parents, but not all marriages were destined to be great love stories.
Some were business opportunities for the greater good, and while my parents might not be madly in love with one another, the respect that they had for each other was quite obvious to anyone with a pair of working eyes.
Now, having done her duty, my eldest brother was thirty-five, and not only had he been raised to follow in my father’s footsteps, but Santino was also the spitting image of Roman Marchetti.
He was six-foot-two, had dark brown hair and eyes, and he was the Marchetti Underboss, and a very good one.
If anything untoward were to ever happen to my father, Santino would be able to take over the family without a single hiccup, and that was very impressive for a thirty-five-year-old.
As for my youngest brother, Stefano, with the exception of being an inch shorter than Santino, he was more of the same Marchetti heritage.
At thirty-three, Stefano was also the spitting image of my father, but because the hierarchy in our family was what it was, he was a Capo and second in line to take over if anything were to ever happen to my father and Santino.
However, like Santino, Stefano could take over without any hesitation until my nephew was of age, and that’s how dedicated my father was to the survival of our family’s legacy.
In fact, that’s where I came in.
Unlike my brothers, I would never become Don, something that still rubbed me wrong.
As a little girl, I could remember being so insistent on becoming the Marchetti Boss one day, but it hadn’t taken long before the writing on the wall would be shoved in my face.
I’d been fifteen when my father had finally crushed my dreams, but he hadn’t done it unkindly.
In fact, I knew that my dedication to the family had made him proud, and it still did.
Nonetheless, since both of my brothers were married with their heirs firmly secured, only a complete obliteration of their families would ever put me in line to inherit the title of the coveted position of Marchetti Boss.
Since Santino had two sons, and Stefano had three, ruling the Marchetti Syndicate would never fall on my shoulders, something that was pretty much guaranteed.
However, that hadn’t stopped me from begging my father for a chance to prove myself, and what had started out as a harmless ‘audition’ had turned into something that no one in the family had seen coming.
While my brothers were smart, cunning, ruthless, and deadly, neither had any special gifts or talents, and that’s what made me stick out among the family.
At eighteen-years-old, I had begged my father for a chance to work for the family, and in an attempt to humor me, he had sent me on a job with Santino, confident that my brother would take care of me should things go south.
We’d been ordered to collect a gambling debt, and while it should have been an easy transaction, Roddy Carpenter had been high as a kite, choosing to turn a simple meeting into a bloodbath of unexpected proportions since he’d had crackheads crashing with him at his apartment.
Luckily, with my photographic memory being something that never turned off, I’d been able to get us out of there, leaving no evidence of us having ever been on that side of town.
When we’d gotten back to the house, I had mapped out our route and any stores in the area that might have had cameras.
At first, my father and brothers had both been shocked to learn of my hidden talent, but then it hadn’t taken them long to recognize how my gift could contribute greatly to the family’s success.
So, thirteen years later, Santino handled the artillery side of the business, Stefano handled the narcotics side of the business, and I was in charge of the gambling portion of our empire.
With my memory being what it was, our financial journals were flawless, and there wasn’t a soul on the planet that could bullshit me.
Still, that wasn’t where my contributions to the family ended.
With my determination to be the best at an unhealthy level, I had spent my early twenties proving that I had what it took to lead this family if the need were ever to arise.
Though it’d taken my father a long time to finally trust that I knew what I was doing, he had eventually taken off the reins, and at the age of thirty-one, I had a respectable number of kills under my belt, and I was the only one who killed high-profile enemies.
In fact, at the age of twenty-five, because of my rapidly rising kill count, Stefano had gotten to calling me Astaroth, which had started out as a brother teasing his sister, but all these years later, the name was spoken with respect and a touch of fear, depending on who was speaking it.
Now, for anyone unfamiliar with the name or demonic hierarchy, scholars referred to Astaroth as the First Prince of Thrones and the Treasurer of Hell.
So, for obvious reasons, with the both of us having dominion over math and all of my kills destined for Hell, Stefano had found it apt and funny to saddle me with the moniker.
At any rate, after years of killing with precision and leaving no evidence behind, the name Astaroth was whispered regularly on the streets of St. Moran, but only my father and brothers knew that I was Astaroth.
In fact, not even my mother knew what all I did for the family, and it was safer for me to keep it that way.
Truth be told, according to my father, it was only out of necessity that Santino and Stefano knew about the kills that I carried out.
As I scrubbed the blood from beneath my nails, it was hard not to think about the quiet hum in the pit of my stomach.
Something was coming, and I’d been feeling it in the air for a while now.
So, when I caught Petru Aldea hovering just inside our lands, I hadn’t hesitated in killing him.
The Romanians had no business this close to Marchetti territory, and while the smart thing would have been to capture and question him, I hadn’t that kind of time.
Plus, since none of it had been planned, killing him quickly and quietly proved less problematic had I tried to drag him off somewhere.
Nonetheless, the Romanians occupied territory just west of the Russians, and it wasn’t very often that we came across any of them. If anything, we had run-ins with the Chinese more than we did anyone else, and even that was a pain in the ass.
Once my hands were as clean as I could get them, I grabbed my phone from my purse, then dialed my father. Even though I technically reported to Santino, he never gave me a hard time whenever I went directly to our father.
“Aurora,” he greeted after the second ring.
“Papa, I think I’m overdo for a manicure,” I said, letting him know all that he needed to know.
“A girl can always do with a bit of pampering,” he replied easily, not missing a beat.
“Yes, she can.”