Page 72 of Brutal Vows

Shrugging a shoulder, I nonchalantly raise the gun and point it at our mother in the crowd. The woman freezes, eyes wider than before she caught my gaze, but Antonia doesn’t even blink. Just what I thought.

The fucking gun isn’t loaded.

So I pull the trigger.

The crowd screams, and my mother closes her eyes, bracing for the impact, but the gun simply clicks. It’s empty. Exactly as I predicted.

“Oops.” I smirk cruelly as I stare up at my sister.

Her jaw hangs loose, the bottom lip trembling like a frightened animal, caught in the headlamps of imminent danger. Momentarily locked in place by invisible chains of shock, her features draw back slowly to form a wide O—a gasping fish out of water, consuming horror with every breathless gulp.

“You would have shot her?” her whisper is laced with sadness and vulnerability, a soft tremor in her voice betraying her inner turmoil. This is the little girl I remember, the one who wore her emotions openly, like a delicate veil for all to see. Her eyes glisten with unshed tears, reflecting a deep, unguarded sorrow. Antonia had always been a beacon of love and light, exuding a carefree spirit that embraced life with both compassion and tenderness.

“I knew it wasn’t loaded, Toni.” The nickname flows easily off my tongue as if it hasn’t been decades since I last uttered it. “Don’t play games you can’t win.” I repeat our father’s advice.

“Kill him, Antonia.” My mother’s voice cuts through the room like a serrated blade, piercing the air with its shrillness. The words she hurls are laced with venom and vitriol, each one dripping with anger and resentment. “He will only betray you as he always has.” Her tone reverberates off the walls, leaving an almost palpable tension in its wake.

“The only one who has betrayed her is you,cara madre,” I sneer at the woman who birthed me. Dropping the empty gun to the floor, I groan as I stand. I’m done kneeling to anyone who isn’t my beautiful wife. “She betrayed all of us. Including the man we called our father.”

“He’s lying to you.” Our mother steps out from the fringe of the crowd. Her face is drawn in a scowl, turning her features ugly.

“I’m not,” I tell my sister. “And I can prove it.” Antonia’s eyes dart between my calm collectedness and our mother’s dark fury that is nothing more than a mask to cover her fear at being discovered. Adrian was right when he asked if I was ready to face the truth that my mother may not be on my side.

“How?” Antonia’s voice is full of skepticism.

“Do you have my phone?”

Antonia’s eyes flick to the guard standing silently behind me. It is the very same man who had struck the side of my head with his gun just yesterday when I had rushed to my wife’s defense. With a deliberate motion, he slides his hand into his back pocket and retrieves my phone, handing it over to me. I take it, thanking whatever god is bothering to listen, that it is still charged.

I begin scrolling through the surveillance footage we’d captured on Megumi, my thumb pausing as I spot the exact clip I need. The screen comes alive with her tense voice; “I don’t have a lot of time,” intones Kenzo’s mother, her words echoing in the charged, silent space between us. “I barely managed to escape,” she continues, the urgency in her tone seeping through every pause. A heavy tension hangs in the air as Megumi’s desperate message is met with silence. “Are you there?” her voice demands, brittle and fearful.

“You are a foolish woman.” Antonia recoils slightly, her face drawn in shock as our mother’s cold, cutting words spill over the speaker. “You didn’t escape. They let you leave.”

The accusation hangs in the air like a dark cloud. But Megumi’s voice is resolute, laced with an unwavering calm amid chaos. “No. No,” she insists softly. “They weren’t even there. I haven’t been followed, and I’ve had the men check me for a device. There is nothing.”

A sneer crackles through the speaker in response. “Do you honestly expect me to believe that?” Our mother’s voice drips with contempt. “They aren’t simpering idiots like my current husband. They are careful and ruthless.”

Megumi presses on confidently, almost defiantly, “And soon they will be dead. Everything is in place.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a knowing glance exchanged between Kenzo and Adrian. A silentacknowledgment that the bombing of the warehouse had indeed been orchestrated entirely by Megumi as we had suspected all along.

“Good,” our mother finally declares, a sinister delight threading through her voice that twists my heart with a bitter chill. “We need to make sure that Vitali never makes it to Rome. I’ve worked too diligently to crown Antonia and place her on the throne, only to have everything ruined by him and his reckless friends. Plans for ridding myself of Salvatore are already in motion.”

A faint gasp escapes Megumi’s lips, barely perceptible, yet loud enough to cut through the tense silence. “Is that wise?” she ventures, her voice laced with incredulity and disbelief over the line.

A weighty sigh carries across the connection before our mother responds. “Salvatore has been pressuring me to tell the truth. By now, Vitali knows who Salvatore really is. It is why he needs to die. Hell will freeze over before I allow Antonia to uncover the truth. To her, Aurelio was their father, and that perception will remain unaltered. She will never know about my affair with Salvatore.”

“If you think that is best,” Megumi murmurs uncertainly.

“It is,” our mother assures with steely finality. “And so is this.”

An explosion rumbles ominously in the background, its detonation rattling the air, and in an instant, the line goes dead.

Disbelief glows brightly in Antonia’s wide eyes, a cross between incredulity and horror that furrows a crease deep between her brows as the recording ends. Her lips part, as if poised to utter soundless accusations, yet she is frozen.

“Tell me this isn’t true,madre,” she whispers, horror coating her words. “This can’t be…”

Our mother remains silent, but her lips curl into a malicious smile, her dark eyes flickering with a sinister gleam as she looks back and forth between us. Who is this woman? She is not the nurturing figure who raised me, that’s for damn sure. The woman who brought me up, whom I call mother, was gentle and compassionate, her kindness like a warm embrace. None of those qualities are present in the person who stands before me now, her presence as cold and unyielding as a winter storm.

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