Page 24 of Fire and Silk
“Please!” I scream, chasing them.
But they vanish before I get there. Right in front of me.
Gone.
I drop to my knees. The sand is hot now. Sticky. My fingers dig deep, but there’s nothing beneath it. Nothing but more sand. And the empty echo of their warmth.
“Why?” My voice is a whisper, shredded by grief.
“Why do you all leave me?”
There’s no answer.
Just wind.
And the tide, still humming.
Chapter Four - Severo
In Transit – Route 7, Heading South to the Marazzi Estate
Matteo drives like a soldier— silent, always watching the mirrors.
I whistle something low and careless from the back seat. An old Neapolitan tune that always made my mother wince and my father groan. The kind of thing you hum when you’ve just won and want the world to know it.
From the front seat, Matteo’s eyes flick toward the rearview. “Is it really a good idea to visit your family now?”
He says it carefully, like someone trying not to step on a landmine that’s already blinking red.
“You just finished a meeting,” he adds.
I grin and lean back, adjusting the cuff of my shirt. “Areally successfulmeeting, you forget to add, my good friend. When best to visit your enemies than after a win?”
He exhales through his nose. “Still. Maksim barged in this morning like a rabid dog. Wasn’t exactly subtle about his mood.”
“Ah, Maksim.” I smile wider, looking out the tinted window as eucalyptus trees streak by. “He’s got all the charm of a wet matchbox and none of the fire.”
Matteo doesn’t laugh. He rarely does.
I rest my head against the seat and let the rhythm of the road rock me, just slightly.
Family.
What a delightful mess.
My father married Maksim and Mina’s mother, Elena Marazzi when he was barely out of his twenties. She was a brutal beauty—cold, commanding, the kind of woman who made secretaries cry and boardrooms shiver.
Together, they had twins: Maksim and Mina. Perfect Aryan children with sharp eyes and sharper tongues. They were raised with iron spines and tailored clothes, fluent in violence before they hit puberty.
And then their mother died.
A car bombing, wrapped up in the kind of tragic poetry the old dons always whispered about. Burned through the heart of Dante's legacy. My father never recovered. He softened in strange ways. Got religious. Grew nostalgic.
Then he met my mother. A woman no one expected.
She was younger, stubborn, not from wealth but with enough rage in her eyes to match his. I was their only child. Ten years younger than the twins. A gap large enough to drown in.
I didn’t grow upwiththem.
