27. Saverio
27
SAVERIO
T hree days crawl by with no fresh updates from Raffaele following the unsettling stalker incident. Lucia maintains her routine, departing for work each morning with barely a word and returning in the evenings with the same eerie silence. She retreats to her bedroom, the click of multiple locks echoing through the stillness as she barricades herself inside. Her presence is as faint as a whisper, her movements as cautious as a field mouse tiptoeing through a house of sleeping cats. I find myself oddly relieved by her near-invisibility, preferring this ghostly coexistence to any potential confrontation. The less I hear of her outings, the safer she is.
I’m hunched over my desk at Konza Elite, poring through a stack of paperwork that seems to grow taller by the minute. My eyes ache from the strain of deciphering tiny print and convoluted legal jargon. Suddenly, my phone buzzes on the desk, the vibration amplified in the quiet office. Ordinarily, I would ignore it—my work phone is the proper channel for urgent matters, and personal calls can wait until after hours. But something in the back of my head tells me to look and see who’s calling.
As I look over, frustrated by the interruption, the screen flashes Mick’s name.
“Hey,” I answer, keeping my voice steady. “What have you got?”
Mick’s voice crackles through the line, businesslike and to the point. “I’m emailing over the findings on Kristopher Tate. But before you get into it, you should know—I’m digging into all your half-siblings now.”
I lean back in my chair, narrowing my eyes. “Why?”
“Because of what I found on Kristopher.” His tone becomes grim, a note of unease creeping into his usually composed voice. “I didn’t find anything interesting during the first background check because I was looking for Kristopher Tate. But a more thorough investigation shows that your brother wasn’t going by that name after college. Instead, he was going by the name Kris Castiglione.”
Mick pauses, letting the weight of this revelation sink in. “It’s not just a simple alias, either. He seemed to have fully embraced this identity for a while, complete with documentation and a paper trail that’s proving difficult to unravel.”
The name hits me like a punch to the gut, leaving me momentarily disoriented. Kristopher is not a Castiglione. He can’t be. My father specifically paid all his goumadas handsomely to keep them quiet and compliant. He didn’t want them or their offspring to have the Castiglione name because, in his eyes, they were bastards born of passion and fleeting desire, not legitimate children born out of duty and obligation.
“Kris Castiglione,” I repeat, my voice low as I test the weight of my brother’s lies on my tongue.
“Yeah,” Mick confirms, his expression grim. “During that time, he was involved with some seriously shady individuals. I’m talking about the kind of stuff that would make your skin crawl, Saverio. He did some gun running and drug peddling for the Destroyers. They’re a notorious motorcycle gang with tentacles in every dirty business you can imagine. We’re talking about a group that makes most street gangs look like Boy Scouts in comparison?—“
“I know who they are,” I cut him off. I’m shocked that Kristopher had any connection to the Destroyers in the first place, let alone dabbled in drugs and illegal firearms.
Mick continues, his voice low and urgent. “There’s also an unexplained gap in his history that’s been driving me crazy. For two years after college, there’s no trace of him. I’m talking a complete vanishing act. I spent countless hours trying to figure out what happened, but after graduation, it’s like he fell off the face of the earth. Then, out of nowhere, he popped up as Kris Castiglione, a cashier at some no-name convenience store in Topeka. He stuck around for a few months, worked for the Destroyers on the side, then disappeared into thin air again.”
Kristopher was in Topeka? That doesn’t make any sense.
“A couple of months after that, he reemerges as Kristopher Tate, buys a bar, and the rest is history.”
My grip tightens around the phone. This doesn’t add up at all. “Lucia said Kristopher seemed familiar, but they’d never met,” I say, more to myself than to Mick. The words taste wrong on my tongue, like a lie I’m telling myself. But I still can’t make the numbers add up, no matter how I crunch them. “But he was in Topeka around the time she started at Whitson. And he knew she worked at Whitson even though I didn’t tell him,” I mumble. The coincidence is too glaring to ignore.
“Exactly,” Mick says. “I’ll keep digging into him and the other siblings, but I thought this was something you would want to know about right away.”
I nod, feeling like I’m having an out-of-body experience. “Thanks, Mick. I’ll read the report.”
I hang up, my pulse thrumming with a mix of anger and suspicion. My hands shake slightly as I set the phone on my desk. A few seconds later, my email pings with a new message from Mick. I take a deep breath, steeling myself for what I’m about to see, then click it open and scan the findings. The more I read, the deeper the pit in my stomach grows. Each new detail feels like another blow, confirming my worst fears and raising even more questions.
Kris Castiglione wasn’t just some alias; it was a whole other life. A life intricately woven into the fabric of the Destroyers, a notorious motorcycle gang I am uncomfortably familiar with. Kris’s life was a tapestry of illicit activities, primarily focused on selling drugs and running guns—two realms of criminality I have steadfastly avoided throughout my career. But it’s the unexplained gap where he seemingly vanished for two years that gnaws at me more than anything else. That prolonged absence is like a black hole in his history, swallowing up any semblance of explanation and leaving behind nothing but unsettling questions. What happened during those missing years? And, more importantly, how does it connect to everything else?
I don’t understand how he vanished into thin air—Kristopher Tate or Kris Castiglione, whichever name he was using at the time. And even weirder, after that inexplicable absence, he returned to Manhattan like nothing happened, bought a rundown bar in the heart of the city, and then started playing the role of the charming, good-natured younger brother who looked up to me. It was a complete transformation, a 180-degree turn. The way he seamlessly slipped into this new persona, all smiles and easy laughter, made me wonder if I’d ever really known him at all.
I slam the laptop shut with enough force to make the desk rattle, anger boiling up inside me like a pot left too long on the stove. Worst of all, the timing doesn’t sit right with me. Kristopher was in Topeka during the exact months that Lucia thought someone was stalking her. Could it have been him all along, playing some sick game? Or is this just an eerie coincidence? The possibility makes my stomach churn, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something crucial, something that’s been right in front of me this whole time.
The nagging voice in the back of my mind reminds me that coincidences are rarely what they seem on the surface. A series of events or circumstances, especially ones as troubling as these, almost never occur without some hidden causal connection, even if that’s what people desperately want to believe. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced there’s an underlying thread tying all of this together.
If Kristopher changed his name and got into some shady business with the Destroyers, who’s to say he wasn’t Lucia’s stalker? And if he was indeed Lucia’s stalker, what were his motives? Was it a sick obsession or something more calculated? And more importantly, when Kristopher came back to Manhattan with enough money to buy a bar and transform it into Tate’s, did it have anything to do with Lucia? The timing seems too convenient to be mere happenstance. Could her stalker and his sudden influx of cash be connected?
My head swims with theories. Who the hell have I gone into business with? Kristopher has been lying to me this whole time, pretending to be someone he’s not. And for what purpose? What could be so dire, so crucial, that it necessitated such an elaborate charade? How much of what I thought I knew about him was genuine, and how much was carefully crafted fiction?
It doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t add up.
Who is Kristopher Tate? And why does it feel like answering that question will open a Pandora’s box of secrets I was never meant to find out?