CHAPTER 31 JARED #6
Soon, Gianni starts offering him grapes from the tray on the table and small dried figs as obstacles for the animal figurines.
"Do you want to try some ricotta?" Tony leans toward Tommy. "It’s really delicious cheese. My uncle, Stefano, taught me how to make cheese like this myself."
Since Tommy has both hands occupied, he puts a piece into Tommy’s mouth, and as soon as my son starts chewing, I immediately see that he’s going to become a ricotta fan. He puts the figurines down and reaches out his little hand, grabs the edge of the plate, and pulls it closer to himself.
"Well, I can see we’re going to get along," Tony says with a grin, as Tommy is happily devouring his meal, one bite at a time.
In the meantime, Emilio and Gianni watch me with a certain curiosity, and then Emilio speaks.
"So you’re really staying for good?"
"Well. I’ll stay wherever Mauro is. He’s my True Mate."
Emilio and Gianni exchange smiles.
"We’ve known about it for a long time. Mauro waited for you for years. He believed that Fate would bring you together."
I lower my head, feeling uneasy. For some reason, I have this strange conviction that what happened unfolded exactly as Fate intended, which is kind of funny.
Fate’s Choice?
Coincidence or not, my marriage fell apart because of the scandal surrounding Mark at exactly the same time Mauro escaped from the Ferro family fortress.
It’s quite uncanny that such crucial moments in our lives happened so close together, and then we met again almost exactly when Rocco died, opening up a new path for us.
I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to say about all that to them, so I simply turn my attention to my son and watch him happily eating his ricotta.
Suddenly, Emilio remembers something.
"Damn, the furniture you ordered with my dad arrived yesterday. We moved it into the room, but we haven’t put it together yet…"
He looks a little embarrassed.
"Don’t worry about it," I say. "After all, you didn’t know whether I would even come back. We can put it together tomorrow. I’ll have Tommy sleep with me in the bed tonight anyway because he might be scared. Such a big change for him."
Another wave of guilt washes over me because this is yet another move in Tommy’s life. First Alex’s little house, then Bay’s apartment, and now Renato’s house.
I look at my son, wanting to believe that I’ll finally be able to give him at least a little stability.
"Maybe you’d like something to eat too?" Tony asks.
"Sure, thank you," I reply with a touch of hesitance. "But nothing heavy. My stomach has been… clenched this whole time, you know, a lot… of emotions."
"That’s understandable," Emilio says quietly.
Tony leaves, and silence settles over the room. I feel foolish, like I should keep apologizing. I was stressed, yes, but he lost his parent.
Emilio is grieving, and I can sense it. His energy feels subdued, and his black clothes and pale face speak volumes about how hard his dad’s death has been on him.
Well… or his transformation, I should say.
"Sorry I ran off like that," I blurt out, even though I know I’m repeating myself. I still feel terribly guilty about the way I behaved, leaving them so soon after Silvio was shot. "Everything became too much for me. But if Tommy had been here and Rocco had shown up, it would have been a disaster."
"I understand all of that, Jared. Rocco fully descended into darkness. As a child, he was a sweet, sensitive boy. But Tito destroyed him. He stole his childhood and did something even worse: he made Rocco embrace the sickness he’d been poisoned with.
Before long, there was nothing left of the boy he used to be. "
"A sweet kid? It’s hard for me to believe he was ever different. He was a monster to me."
"Monsters aren’t born, Jared. Monsters are made," Emilio says grimly as he cuts the slice of bread into four smaller pieces and then slides it closer to Tommy.
"This Tito… he was originally supposed to be the capo, right?" I ask.
"Yes. A true degenerate, depraved man, and a murderer."
There’s another moment of silence. I already knew a little about all this from the time of my horrible encounter with Rocco, but yesterday, while scrolling through articles about the mafia, I managed to dig up even more about the Ferro crime family.
But one thing is still a mystery to me.
"Why was Rocco’s upbringing so different from Mauro’s?"
Emilio sighs deeply, then leans toward me slightly and says, "There’s something behind that, something no one in this family talks about, and everyone pushes out of their minds."
He glances at Gianni, who sits quietly, having brought some extra figurines for Tommy.
He’s arranging them in a circle now, while Tommy munches on pieces of bread with one hand and uses the other to make a buck charge at a wooden bear figurine.
"You see, my late brother Aldo was an exceptionally beautiful omega. Black curls, dark green eyes. He could almost have rivaled you! When he was nineteen, he wanted to experience life, so he left for Florida, hoping to work as a model, but he fell in with the wrong crowd. The Ring didn’t exist yet in its current form, but there were people who operated in similar ways, and one of them was Tito.
In exchange for a good contract with a famous brand, Aldo agreed to do more than he should have. "
My breathing hitches, and I feel a sudden chill as I realize Aldo did something very similar to what I did…
How well I understand this mindset. I was eighteen, naively believing that the fame and glitter I saw on the surface would be mine, without any of the filth underneath. Apparently, I wasn’t the first to believe that.
Emilio is silent for a moment, staring at his hands.
"My brother was a boy from a small town, sweet and full of dreams, and what he was forced to do drove him to the brink of suicide. One day, Tito brought him to the fortress, and there in the hallway, Tito’s younger brother, Paolo, noticed him."
Another cold shiver runs down my spine because this story is almost a mirror image of my own. Is it some strange joke of Fate that this keeps happening?
Emilio gives a bitter, sad smile.
"Paolo and Aldo knew immediately that they were True Mates… and Paolo rushed to their father, the capo at the time. Angelo wasn’t happy, but he made the right decision.
He forbade Tito from going near Aldo. But Tito was the kind of man who couldn’t easily let something go.
He told Paolo he would leave Aldo alone, but only if Paolo gave him something he had that he didn’t even know he possessed. "
I raise my eyebrows, a bit puzzled.
"Isn’t that one of those popular tricks witches use in fairy tales? You know, a guy goes off to war, meets a sorcerer who helps him, and the sorcerer tells him he has to give him something he doesn’t know he possesses, something waiting for him at home, and it turns out to be a child?"
Emilio makes a sour snort. "Yes, and that’s exactly how it happened. It worked almost like magic."
"So Aldo was pregnant?"
"Yes, and even after it became known, no one suspected the child could be Tito’s. Aldo once confided in me that when Paolo took him to his part of the fortress, Aldo went into heat about three days later, and they spent it together. Rocco was born nine months later, so nothing seemed suspicious."
"Damn, did Aldo and Paolo never… do the math?"
"Well, sperm can survive for up to seven days, and Tito, before Paolo took him away, certainly didn’t hold back with Aldo. But who thinks about stuff like that, right?"
"So how did they eventually find out?"
"They had no idea at first. They raised him as if he were their son, but Tito somehow knew from the start.
Intuition or something. When Paolo and Aldo decided a few years later to permanently leave the mafia, Angelo was furious.
He saw it as a betrayal, but then, unexpectedly, Tito came to their aid.
He stood up for them, but not for free."
"Why am I not surprised," I mutter grimly.
"The price was that Rocco would be trained by him, and that he would eventually take the position of the next capo. He would still mostly live with Aldo and Paolo, but he would also spend days being molded into a perfect mafioso."
"And they couldn’t refuse because that was the… original promise, right?"
"Yes. Tito took Paolo aside and said, ‘You didn’t know about him when you took Aldo, but he already existed back then. Do you want to take a DNA test?’ Paolo had little choice.
If he refused to give Rocco away, they would all have to stay in the mafia and all their kids would be forced into the same training process.
So seven-year-old Rocco became the price they paid for their freedom, handed over to that degenerate. "
I clench my jaw. "That’s… tragic, but it’s not as if we exist like islands, completely unaware of what good and evil are. Rocco could try to resist…"
Emilio shrugs. "Well, I think Rocco didn’t want to feel any weakness, the pain that would have come with knowing he was the disposable child who had been traded for the freedom of his parents and his brothers…
handed over to the monster. He was born from rape, and he must have realized that, in the end, he wasn’t wanted. "
"Do you think Rocco knew that Tito was his father?"
"I think most of the family suspected it, but they absolutely didn’t talk about it, everyone kept it to themselves.
A conspiracy of silence. Out of respect for Aldo, perhaps.
After Aldo and Paolo were murdered by Anzo, bringing something like that up was considered…
in bad taste. But anyone with half a brain could always have guessed by looking at Rocco.
He looked so much like Tito, with the same eyes.
Paolo had light amber eyes, while Aldo’s were green.
But Rocco’s eyes were completely black."
"Just like Ennio’s. Ennio is Tito’s son, right, but with a different dad?"
"Yes."
For a moment, we both fall silent.