Page 84 of Hateful Vows
My brother is alive.
He’s alive and he’s here, in front of me, like only time has separated us, not years of pain and loss and missing him like a cut limb.
“Gio? Ah yes, that was my name, wasn't it?” he says to himself with an edge of apathy that wakes a fear I didn’t know still lived inside the boy he’s awakening back in me. I’m not a Don in the face of my twin facing me, I’m a boy who lost his brother, who wasn’t allowed to grieve, who sheltered his mother and withstanded his father’s harshness.
More tears pool and fall on the sides of my face. “You’re here. You’re alive. Why are you doing this?” My voice cracks at the question. I’m unable to hold the pain inside even if I tried.
He frowns like my question puzzles him.
“You wanted to take my place. I’m here to show you where you belong,fratello.”
“What are you talking about? I lost you.”
“Lost me?” His chuckle is dark and edged with a promise of pain.
He straightens up while I’m prostrated at his feet. His tongue clicks. I’m an unruly child. It doesn’t matter that he seems willing to cut me to pieces, my ignorance as to why he made me prisoner is an inconvenience to him.
“Must I really spell it out for you, Dante? As a Don, you know exactly why you’re here.” His tone turns dark and low, as if his only desire is to see me annihilated.
“I thought you were dead,” I cry out.
“And how convenient for you.”
“What are you talking about?” I repeat. “Please, Gio. I… I missed you so much.”
“Missed me? Missed me?” His mad cackle sends a shiver of dread up my spine. The man before me isn’t my brother. Gio and I were always inseparable. This… this person in front of meerases everything I thought I knew about my brother, and my heart breaks all over again, the grief more potent in my blood than the day of his burial. We buried an empty coffin, thinking all we could retrieve of my twin was his ashes. Ashes I scattered in my mother’s garden while holding her hand as she wailed.
Gio fishes something in his pocket and jerks it at my eyes with unrestrained anger. “I know what you did!” he yells.
With tentative fingers, I take the photograph from his hand. It’s grainy but shows an image of my father and me, standing in the manor’s garden. We’re both wearing the suits my mother had picked for Gio’s funeral.
And we’re smiling.
From my perspective, these are sad smiles. I remember the moment like it was yesterday. After the ceremony and the burial, family and dignitaries from our allies had gathered at the manor. But my father had taken me to the back of the garden. We had sat on the old wooden bench. After a bout of silence, he’d asked me, “Tell me what’s the most outrageous thing you and Gio did behind my back. I won’t get mad. I need to… I need to hear what a lively young man he was.”
Remembering the pain of the recent loss, I had hiccupped through a memory. Gio and I had stolen my father’s favourite gun directly from his safe. Gio had spied on him to find what the code was nights before. Then, we’d slipped through the night to play with it and practice-shoot, exactly where we had been seated. But none of us had expected the recoil, nor the very loud sound it would make. When lights had turned on in the manor and Father had shouted that we were under attack, we had buried the gun under a bed of flowers and taken a mad dash towards our bedroom. We thought our father would know immediately we were responsible when he found the gun missing from his safe but apparently he never even noticed. We never found the culprit of the mysterious shot. Until I admittedit all to my father. His laugh had lit up my whole face into the smile on the photograph Gio was using now to… to what exactly?
“This was the day of your funeral,” I tell him.
“Exactly. You organised my death and laughed with our father once you thought you had scattered the ashes.”
“What?”
My jaw hinges open with the mad story Gio told himself.
“That’s not what this photo was,” I argue. “We grieved for you. I cried every night for months. I?—”
He backhands me and my head whips out to the side. I bite the inside of my cheek and taste blood.
“Enough. Misha already explained everything. You wanted to be kingpin. And you were. You replaced me.” He throws pictures of me at different ages, all with Tino. My best friend. The man he killed in cold blood. “And now you’ll be my little pet for as long as I deem necessary.”
“Misha? Misha Petrov? He’s a liar! He trades in people, Gio.”
“Oh I know,” he chuckles darkly and nausea rises inside my stomach. “What do you think I did for him andallof his friends for years?”
The weight of his confession has me heaving, a deep-rooted sense of failure taking over me, changing me at a cellular level. Gio never died. My happy, care-free twin, the one I missed everyday, was taken to serve the desires of sick men.
I don’t deserve to get out of here. I may have felt pain, grief, hurt, but I lived. I’ve lived a comfortable life, I had friends, and for a short time I had a wife I loved and a paramour I adored.
