Page 30 of Spiteful Heart

I didn’t want to see him, that much should’ve been clear. If Sylvester wanted to talk to him, to see if he knew anything or could help us, he could’ve gone on his own easily. But no. He just had to drag me along for this stupid fucking family reunion. I would’ve rather him tied me up to a chair and tortured me to the point where I lost consciousness.

As far as I was concerned, my father was dead to me. Fucking dead to me. Just dead. I mean, who the fuck just left their kids when a fucking war was going on? Honestly, our father had always been stupidly idealistic, but I never once imagined he’d give up and run away and leave someone else the mess to clean up.

But that’s exactly what he did, and I’d never forget that.

When we got to the town, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at it all. The small town feel. The one-way streets. This place’s downtown was like a fucking drop on a map, barely big enough to be labeled. One grocery store. One gas station. A few little eateries but nothing with a name you’d recognize.

It was all so dreary and boring. I didn’t understand how anyone could like living here. I mean, I guess if you grew up knowing this sort of life, you might be fine with it when you were older, but I’d much rather live in the city alleyways than this dump of a town—and I meant full offense to everyone who liked places like this.

“When we see him,” Sylvester was busy saying, not for the first time during this whole drive, “be nice. Don’t be a dick. He’s still our father, Maddox.” He made a right-hand turn, taking us away from the so-called town and out into the true boonies. You know, where there were no sidewalks and you couldn’t see your neighbor’s house from your front door.

The middle of fucking nowhere. Again, I didn’t know why anyone liked living here.

“Yeah, yeah,” I huffed. “I get it. For the thousandth time, I fucking get it.” If I sounded pissed off, that’s because I was. Everything about this trip pissed me the fuck off. The prospect of seeing our father for the first time in what felt like forever was not one I was looking forward to.

It hadn’t even been that long. That’s the thing. Not that much time had passed, and yet… yet it felt like the man had cut all ties with us. Like he wanted to become a stranger. Like Sylvester and I were just reminders to him of everything he’d lost.

Mario. Our mother. His empire. The hope he used to have that the families would come together after he married Angelina DeLuca.

But it was never true peace. Carl might’ve held off his men from outright war for years, but behind the scenes, Bianca had always stirred the pot because she wanted to take over and run it herself.

Didn’t the asshole know that he wasn’t the only one who’d lost people he loved? Didn’t our father know that we lost them, too? We lost our mother years ago… then we lost our brother. And then, after Bianca made her move, we lost our father, too.

Sylvester looked at me, narrowing his blue-eyed stare. Dark eyes ran in my family; the cerulean hue of his eyes, along with his blond locks, were a constant reminder that he wasn’t a brother by blood. We shared a last name, but he wasn’t a true Luciano.

I was.

And I was the only one left, since our father was dead to me.

I guess, technically, I was the only DeLuca left, too, a fact that no one wanted to admit to themselves anymore. As far as Bianca had been concerned, I was a Luciano, even though half of my blood had come from her family, from her sister.

“I mean it,” my brother told me. “He’s probably not going to want to see us, let alone talk to us, if him not answering his phone is any indication, so you’ve got to swallow your piss-poor attitude down for now. You can be ticked on the way home.”

“I still don’t know why I had to come,” I muttered. “Why couldn’t you just come by yourself?”

Sylvester made another turn, this time down an uneven street that definitely needed a new layer of pavement. “I thought he might be more receptive to talking if he sees us both. It’s harder to turn away two people than it is one.”

“And what if he’s not even there? What if he packed what little shit he had and left again?” Our father had told us the cabins were a safehouse of sorts, but what if a part of him had always wanted to abandon our city and our life of crime? If our mother had told him she’d run away with him… was this where they would’ve gone?

I didn’t like thinking about that.

It took my brother a while to say, “Then I guess we turn the car around and go back home.” As if it was simple. As if, by not saying it, neither of us would have to face the reality of what it meant if our father wasn’t at this cabin.

What was the reality? Let me fucking tell you.

If he wasn’t there, if he packed up and left without telling us where he was going… it meant he was gone. Just gone. It meant he was nothing but a memory for us both, that we’d more than likely never see his ass again.

At this point, I was fine with that. Ignoring the unbearably long car ride here, which was torture in and of itself, I’d be fine with never seeing our father again. As far as I was concerned, I’d saidsayo-fucking-narathe moment he decided to stay and not come back to the city with us.

I didn’t say anything more to Sylvester. It didn’t take us much longer to find the end of the driveway that led to our destination. Most of the trees around here were thick with pine needles, the air cooler here than it was back home. I imagined they got a lot of snow here, which must suck some major ass. You probably had to have your house packed with shit, just in case. Food, extra blankets, all the shit you’d need if you were locked in your house because your car was stuck under three feet of snow.

Can you see what I mean when I asked why the fuck would anyone want to live here?

The cabin our father was staying at was actually one of two. Two cabins that were pretty much exactly the same sat on the property, the driveway splitting at the end to lead up to both. They weren’t too far from each other, but they weren’t built twenty feet apart. Only one of the cabins looked to be inhabited, and as we pulled up, my brother and I exchanged glances.

So the asshole was here still, after all. Lucky us.

Sylvester pulled the car up to the garage door. It sat open, our father’s car plainly visible inside. The cabin had one attached garage door, the house built up on wood so it wasn’t directly on the ground. We got out of the car, and together, we headed up the wooden steps to the front door.

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