Page 86 of Vow of Silence

“Punishment for what?” Dion folds his arms over his chest, regarding me with a slight tilt of his head. “Is that why you never said anything? You thought you fuckingdeservedit?”

Didn’t I?

Dion’s expression softens, shoulders dropping as he sighs. “Fuck, brother.” He sets a hand on my upper arm and asks, “Why the fuck would you think that?”

I pinch the bridge of my nose and drop my chin. Rage pulses through my veins as I type, screaming for an outlet.

For daring to love someone more than the family.

My brother stays quiet, hand sliding from my arm as he turns to stare down the length of our grandiose driveway. I see it: the war as it crosses his face. Love is what anchors us in this violent life, and yet, coveting somebody outside of the Family so highly is wrong.

Nothingcomes before blood. No-one.

“You’ve given him exactly what he wanted all these years. You realize that?”Don’t say it.“You stayed quiet, Benito. You stayed loyal to the Family.”

He fucking said it.

And I died in the process.

I leave my phone in his hand and kick stones across the driveway, pacing half a dozen steps to expel tension before I turn to face my brother again.

“You’re not dead, Benny.” He says the words softly, handing me my line of communication. “You’re just… different to what you could have been. But you know what?” A sad smile graces hislips. “We all are. We all changed the day they wrote De Santis on our birth certificate.”

I lift my eyebrows in acknowledgment. He means well, but it still hurts. It hurts to know that he still doesn’t get it. That what happened to me—that trauma—fucked me up worse than anything I’ve done since. Than any life I’ve taken. Any blood I’ve spilled.

The blood that changed me the most was my own.

“Well?” He folds his arms, a shit-stirring grin twisting his mouth. “What do we do next, lover boy?”

I throw my arms toward the sky, letting them hit my side with a slap. Why does he think I’m here and not with my goddamn hands wrapped around my uncle’s neck? I’ve fantasized about this goddamn revenge for close to a decade, not because I was too afraid to exact it or lacked the confidence to do so. But because it has to beperfect.Everything I do has to operate within the rules and restrictions of our fucking family code. Not our morals. Fuck no. Those things sailed ship a long time ago. The only thing we have left to hold our organization together is a bunch of mandated rules dictated decades ago by some guy that’s more legend than truth at this point.

And it’s those fucking rules that will be the thing that prove my uncle’s guilt. Not the stump in my mouth or how eloquently I recall that night.

No. It’ll be whether I can prove he broke the fucking code by taking my tongue.

Whether I can prove he did it without my grandfather’s knowledge—Don Giovi.

Fuck tradition—it’s bullshit. Tradition is the predefined idea of success that inhibits the growth of future generations. It’s living life by somebody else’s rules. Taking the playbook of some guy who made it big back before mobile phones, computers, andfucking cars that could drive faster than twenty miles per hour were invented, and thinking it still applies in our modern world.

Tradition is what destroys dynasties such as ours. Tradition is the tinder that sets fire to the kingdoms of fearful men. Men too afraid to break from the mold in case they should fail. Be exiled. Outcast. Laughed at.

Ridiculed and emasculated.

Fuck that. When the day comes for my body to return to the earth, all I’ll have left is my name. And it’s not the combination of letters spelled out on my fucking birth certificate that matters. It’s the emotions that my name provokes in people when they hear it spoken aloud. It’s how people feel when they think of me. Of what I do.

Of what Idid.

I lift my phone for the last fucking time before I get behind the wheel of my car and smack out my answer for Dion. He wants to know what I’ll do next; then I’ll fucking spell it out for him in black and white.

You want to know what I’ll do?

I shove the device toward his face.

I’ll get to the bottom of this before I kill that traitorous motherfucker, and then I’ll make sure this kind of shit never happens again.

“And how will you do that?” The fire in Dion’s eyes fuels my own.

I lift my lip in a sneer and smile.

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