Page 1 of The Devil's Secret

PARTI

THE PAST

SIX MONTHS AGO

CHAPTERONE

ENZO

I don’t remembermy parents well. Not anymore. Too many years have gone by without them to see their faces or remember how they walked and talked. But I remember some things—like how my mother would leave notes in my lunch box, reminding me how much she loved me, or how Dad would let me have an extra cupcake when my mom wasn’t looking. He did that shit a lot. I laugh at the memory, hating that they’re gone.

Those memories are what stay. I hope they stay for good. They’re the only things I have left of them. The only pieces of our life the Bianchis couldn’t take from us.

There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think about it—what Faro Bianchi, the don of the Palermo crime family, and his brothers, did to my father and Matteo.

If Dom hadn’t watched them die, if he hadn’t heard Faro threaten to kill us too, we’d all be dead.

I think about that sometimes. Like the fact that we’re even standing here today. The sheer luck it took for Dom to go looking for Dad the day he was killed.

Death. It’s a funny thing. One day you’re here. The next day you’re gone. When it’ll happen. How? No one knows. No one wants to. Some think they do, but they really don’t. The unknown may be scary, but knowing the day your ticket is punched is its own hell.

Did my father know his day was coming? What had him killed? We still don’t know, but we’ll find out. Faro himself will tell us before we rip out his fucking tongue.

After our parents died, we were alone in the world, only having each other. We had no extended family. We hid from the Bianchis, living on the street for a year, stealing, lying, just to survive.

After a year of that, then living at homeless shelters, we thought we’d never make it out, but Dom’s chance encounter with Tomás Smith, a wealthy hotel chain owner, changed our lives.

Right before Tomás died, he made Dom the CEO of his company, and gave Dante and me board positions.

My brothers and I also run our own nightclub chain, but not under the aliases Tomás set up for us when he learned of our past. If the Bianchis were still looking for us, we wanted them to know we were back, to come after us if they dared, to wonder whentheirticket would be punched. After fifteen fucking years, we’re finally going to destroy them once and for all.

They have no idea what we look like. We’re different now. In so many ways.

We’re vengeance. We’re war.

Killers.

Monsters, haunting their dreams before they even get a chance to close their eyes.

For our father’s and brother’s deaths, they will all pay.

With their blood.

Their screams.

It will all be ours.

We may not be able to bring our family back, but we could sure as fuck see their murderers suffer before we slice their throats.

We’ll burn every business they own to the ground—the laundromat, the strip club, Tips and Tricks, run by Faro’s daughter, Chiara—it’ll all blow up into ashes.

I can’t wait to see the look on her daddy’s face when he realizes who we are, that we’re not those little boys anymore. The need for revenge has transformed us into men we never wanted to become. I bet he’ll wish he found us back then and killed us.

Too late now.

The party’s only beginning.

We’ll get the Bianchi brothers soon enough.

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