Chapter 2
GABI
Brothers?
But I’m an only child?
I stare at her, dumbstruck. Through the gaps in the roof tiles, children’s laughter drifts over.
They’re being called inside. Soon, it’s going to be time for Vespers.
All the rituals I love to hate and couldn’t participate in while stuck in limbo—at last something to thank God for.
Mother Lucia was still figuring out our next steps, preparing a new identity for me, finding a new convent for us to go to.
Chiara, on her side, had promised to come for me as soon as she could, but now—
This wasn’t the plan.
I need to disappear. This is the only way forward for me.
I home in to where she’s clutching The Princess and Six Princess tight, hiding the title’s beautiful gold embossing I’d done by hand. Those princes, they exist supposedly. Then where the hell were they all this time? “Is this true?”
“Yes. One more night, cara. We need to keep you safe one more night, and then Dominic Scalera is fetching you. Your brother, the third of six. He’s here, and he’s coming for you in the morning, but I’ll vet him first. We need to stick to the plan.
Nobody can know you’re here. Life has to go on as normal. Nothing we do can give away—”
She doesn’t need to explain. In convents, eyes are everywhere, and they look, consume, digest, and then shit out details to people who should never know a thing in the first place.
This is why we’ve been on the run for years because usually, by six to eight months at a new place, rumors start to drift along the cloisters and corridors of the convent: Mafioso. Daughter. Randazzo.
And I’d sense Randazzo on the hunt, sniffing around where we’d moved to.
His fixation on me meant unwanted eyes on the convent—a religious sanctuary where evil should be ousted and a much safer place if I would leave.
What a laugh. I’ve learned even the holiest of ground harbors evil as if it’s a beloved lapdog.
This cat and mouse game has gone on long enough, with Randazzo and the deal he made with that tattooed Russian I plan to never see again. For a man who wasn’t even my real father, Randazzo had my life in a chokehold.
Now I have a brother fetching me. To take me to America. Is that even far enough? It doesn’t get farther than that. How can anyone protect anyone from the Mafia? Unless…unless they are Mafia themselves. Princes of darkness, cut from the same cloth as me.
“It’s been my life’s work, keeping you safe,” Mother Lucia murmurs. “I knew they’d come, but I always thought it would be sooner.”
Exactly my point. Where have they been all this time, when we could have been spared all this running?
It’s a stretch to imagine they were also living in a tower.
Or kept hostage by a vile dragon. A laugh wants to bubble up.
They are men, whoever they are… Wait, the princes have names in my book: Matteo, Alessandro, Dominic, Stephano, Luca, Benedict—all good Catholic names. Dominic is the third.
Surely, that’s pure coincidence.
Can’t be.
It’s hardly evidence.
“How do we even know he’s my real brother?”
“Because of the letters. The photos.”
“And that’s akin to DNA?” I can’t help the bitterness in my tone.
Mother Lucia leans in, pushing my fairy tale back into my hand.
“Read the letters. We will know when we see him. And I will let you go. I must. You’ll finally be safe, cara.
” She chokes up. “You will finally be safe.” She leans in to hug me so tightly, I can hardly breathe.
“Vespers. I can’t be late. Don’t worry, everything will go smoothly. ”
Then she’s gone. I don’t hear her retreating footsteps, the keys that lock me in. I stare down at the letters and photos in my hand—reality. In my other hand, I hold fiction, a silly fairy tale I illustrated, clinging to some childish dream. Now also reality. I can’t buy into it.
I take the first letter and start reading, trying to find the bridge linking the two.
With every sentence, with every new letter, the truth strikes harder.
These were my real mom’s words, in her handwriting, with slanted upward slopes that echo mine, and elegant curves flowing with an artist’s touch.
A few letters back, I learned she loved to paint oil landscapes and watercolors.
It was as if I found this puzzle piece of myself lost for decades. My real mamma. Bianca Randazzo.
A cold fever washes through my body as I drop the letter and reach for my Bible. The one Randazzo gave to me and I held on to because it’s too beautiful to destroy. I flip to the first pages and my breathing stalls. To Bianca, signed Emilio Randazzo.
My jaw drops. The clue was here, all these years. I was too blind to see it. Too ignorant to ask Mother Lucia who Bianca was, too traumatized to think this Bible was a link to my true family. Tears slip from my eyes but I wipe at them, now even more invested in her letters.
She writes about my brothers. Matteo, Alessandro, Dominic, Stephano, Luca, Benedict. Their names send a chill down my spine because they are no coincidence. Mother Lucia planted these names in my mind ages ago, when she first started telling me this story, as if it’s always been their names.
Brave princes, all of them, in my eyes. But our mother’s fears for her six sons, her intense love for them, run thick between the lines. My biological father proved to be as vile as Randazzo. A horrid, horrid man who should never have even asked her to have another baby but forced her to have me.
There are only a few photos. A spike of fear spears me as I hold one of my parents’ wedding day.
My mom, a carbon copy of me, looks too young to be married to a man I’ve come to hate.
Randazzo looks so much younger than the day I met him, but that awful diamond earring and the notch in the shell of his ear were already there.
Tears drip and I wipe at them. Wasted tears because, without a doubt, all these people are dead.
Why else would my estranged brothers come for me?
It's funny how I’ve accepted the idea of them with every word in these old letters. The anger is gone. In its place a void needing, craving, to be filled with their presence. Sangre chiama sangre, as they say. Blood calls to blood.
There’s a photo of my brothers when they were young, all in a row like little organ pipes. Twins. Two of my brothers are identical twins. If I weren’t so wrecked with all this new knowledge and nerves, I would be giddy with happiness. Don’t boys—brothers—grow up to be men and protect their sisters?
In my experience, men only destroy. I’ve seen firsthand the things men can do to women.
I haven’t lived it, but I’ve seen it, a core memory that still haunts me.
It’s fifteen years ago now, and I’ve grown up, I’ve changed, but some fears are so ingrained, only the deepest need could push them to the side.
It’s dark when I fold the last letter back into its envelope. I remember some of my life growing up in America, but for my real family, the story stops abruptly. There are no more letters because my mom died giving birth to me.
From what I’ve read between the lines, my brothers’ lives would have been hell after her death. Born into the Mafia, to a man with such vile ambition, he ousted Randazzo from the States. There are too many puzzle pieces here, and I can’t even guess the picture it would make.
With this new information, my life’s storybook has been ripped in two parts. The first part I can’t change, having lived it already. Now, a stack of blank pages got glued to the first half, replacing the future I thought was written in blood and set in stone.
I suddenly have options. Brothers. What if they’re cruel like Don Giuliano Scalera, our father? But maybe they’re not…
They won’t know about Randazzo and the deal he made with the Russian. If I go to America, I can sidestep the promised arranged marriage. I can gain freedom from this religious institution that’s been nothing but a prison to me.
Freedom. The American dream.
I have no idea what life in America would be like for me, but it’s a risk I could take.
They say better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, but I’ve seen the devil, stared into his glassy blue eyes, felt his hands on me, unwillingly received his little starter pack, and have been running ever since.
A soft scratch at my door startles me and my heart starts pounding. I listen closer. Another one and then a long one, followed by three soft taps. No…it can’t be…
Chiara.