Page 87 of Matteo

All we had were nothing but questions until one night, Carmine and I started sparing.

Sweat had beaded on our brows, and was pouring off of us but we couldn’t stop. With our fists raised and our concentration locked in, we’d thrown punch after punch. Carmine had danced out of reach nearly every time.

“Are you even trying?” He’d grinned.

“Fuck you,” I’d thrown back along with a lightning-fast jab connecting with his lip.

“I have been thinking,” my brother had launched himself into a spinning kick making contact that sent waves through my body causing me to stumble backward.

“Jesus, I hope you didn’t hurt yourself,’ I rolled my eyes.

That was when Carmine called time out and I agree, exhausted and wanting one of the beers that he kept in his gym fridge.

“No really,” he murmured out of breath. “I’ve been thinking. Mom could have come back at any time, right? She’s been gone all these years…and why Matteo?”

Leaning into the fridge I grabbed a glass bottle and tossed one to my brother.

“Are you jealous?” I’d asked quirking a brow.

“Bro, get fucking serious for a minute,” Carmine’s exasperation had been apparent so I’d sobered up.

“I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” I shrugged, taking another drink.

Carmine inhaled deeply, his chest rising and falling before he spoke again. “You’ve seen what Matty can do. He’s different, and it's been the elephant in the room ever since he choked the fuck out of me, with his mind.”

“…his Corsican…”

My younger brother took a sip of beer, clearly a little salty about the incident between him and Matteo still before speaking again and finishing my sentence. “Is a dick!”

“He said he was sorry,” I finished off my own beer and tossed it into the recycling bin before grabbing another.

Carmine continued to nurse his. “He wasn’t really sorry…but back to what I was getting at. Mom’s been living a very fucking low-profile life. Do you think Dad even knows she’s alive?”

I groaned. “Maybe they fucking planned it and this is some controlled experiment. Wanting to see how we react to loss and pain or some shit.”

“Which leads me to something else…”

Carmine leaned in closer, his voice a whisper. “Mom was a geneticist, I’d bet you a million dollars she has big brother locked up in a lab somewhere. Someone out there knows something and I think the answer is somewhere in those old files and records I kept stored at the house.”

As I cradled the cool bottle of beer in my hands, I stared at the fizzy yellow liquid and murmured, “Find a missing link.”

“And we find our brother…”

After that, Carmine, Nora, and I meticulously sifted through anything we could find, looking for clues that Alaska Zacharra might have left behind. Her books, worn with time, weredecorated with the symbol she’d worn around her neck which we’d discovered was a symbol for the old lab bankrolled by my father. We’d put together a board in my living room, pinning up pictures and old yellowed documents, even clipping certain passages from the copy of Frankenstein that Matteo had abandoned in the basement of our childhood home.

When I’d leave Sebastian’s house in the evenings, I would head straight home and stare at that board wanting the secrets to spill themselves. Even Nora, with all her abilities to hack networks and find information, was coming up empty.

She’d been sitting up on the granite counters, eating a one-pan pasta dish I’d made when I’d walked in between her legs. She was wearing nothing but sweats and a t-shirt and just as I was about to lean in and kiss her, her eyes had grown wide.”Move!”

“What? What is it?” I whirled around to watch Nora sprinting over to the board staring intently at the documents pinned on the board.

Concern etched into my features, “Nora…”

“Come here,” she waved me over and I joined her. “I can’t believe I never noticed this before.”

“What?”

She reached onto the board and plucked down a photograph of my mother with some people I didn’t know.

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