Page 53 of Memento Mori
I looked at Antonio. We already knew the name Grasso, but we needed to confirm that this Salvatore Grasso was Camorra.
My focus shifted back to his mother, and I could see the fear in her eyes. “Organization?”
“Camorra,” she mumbled.
“And Agent Grasso?” I asked.
She nodded. “Camorra.”
Tony walked confidently towards his mother, his arms crossed firmly over his chest. I took a few steps back, giving him some space to say his goodbyes.
“What is done against aCosa NostraDonna, is also done against aCosa NostraDon. You better than anyone should understand that,” he said all trace of love, understanding, or mercy gone from his voice. “Blood in.”
“Please...,” she whispered, her voice trembling with desperation.
I retrieved my weapon from the waistband of my dress slacks, approached her kneeling form, and pressed the cold barrel of the gun against her forehead.
“You have to pay for the sins of the father,” she said.
All the tears had stopped and by the look on her face she was resigned to her fate.
“And you have to pay for the sins against the son. Blood out,” I said, squeezing the trigger.
The silence that followed was both deafening and strangely satisfying. Armed with a name and organization it was time to finish this. We’d take care of Salvatore Grasso and anyone else connected to this plot.
“Luca and Franco, get rid of the body,” Antonio ordered. “And get this cleaned up.”
“Yes, Don,” they replied in unison.
As he pulled me into his arms, I could feel the warmth of his embrace and the tenderness of his kiss on my forehead before he let me go. As he left the study, he reached into his pocket and retrieved his phone. I was sure he was calling Alessandro to let him know that it had been done. What had just happened was a burden on him, regardless of whether he voiced it or not. He just gave a death order to his own mother and his wife was the one who took her life. It had to be a lot to deal with.
Without regret, I watched as they callously wrapped Marianna’s lifeless body in the rug in the study. Chance after chance I gave her to accept me as her daughter-in-law and as her Donna. Now that she was gone, it was time to find and eliminate the last threats to my husband and myself.
Chapter Twenty-One
THE GHOST
Antonio
While sitting, waiting for this meeting to start I could imagine my father sitting at the head of the table right where I was sitting now. As I sat and looked around the room, I couldn’t help but wonder what he thought he could achieve back then, surrounded by the sons of the men my father tried to ally with.
My attention shifted to the breathtaking landscape of Norway. I could see why my father chose this place as one of our safe houses. The place was so remote that it was miles away from the nearest neighbor. And the moment you set foot on the mountain, a serene feeling of tranquility settled within you.
Murmurs and chatter circulated around the large office that held a conference room table able to seat twelve people located in our safe house deep in the mountains of Stavanger, Norway. While I gazed out of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the two storyten-thousand square foot mansion, I couldn’t believe what was happening. Like the accumulating snow on the mountainside, the mountain of problems getting ready to affect everyone in this room was getting larger by the day.
We’d just navigated through the treacherous aftermath of my mother and Dante Messina’s affair. They made an agreement with another organization to eliminate both my wife and me. No matter how much I loathed her, even more after my father’s death, I never thought I could hate the woman. I hadn’t loved her in a long time, due to her treatment of my sister, but I never believed that the love I once had for her would shift to hate.
She was my mother no matter how shitty she was at the job of being one, and I was her son. But none of that mattered to her. To her, I betrayed her when I married Aaliyah. She’d worked against us ever since, deciding neither one of us deserved to live.
She knew my father never loved her, and Aaliyah reminded her of that. To know someone you believed wasn’t fit to lick the bottom of your shoes, held the heart of the man you married until he died, had to be heartbreaking, but not an excuse for her actions. Not an excuse to have my wife killed. Not an excuse to try to destroy me because without Aaliyah, there was no me.
It was fitting Aaliyah pulled the trigger, although I had no problem ending her life myself. She trembled when Aaliyah placed the barrel flush against her forehead as she kneeled before her Don and Donna. But Marianna Rizzo, although scared out of her mind, dried the tears, and stopped all the pleas to be saved. Right before Aaliyah put a bullet in her head, herjustification for her betrayal was a simple statement—You have to pay for the sins of the father.
And she wasn’t the only one to think so.
I looked around the room at everyone gathered. Apparently, it had been a dream of my father’s for this to happen. And through challenging work and a lot of deaths, this moment came to fruition, although under the wrong circumstances.
Years ago, before we were even born, our fathers sat at this very table, minus their significant others, forming a council to benefit each organization, but it crumbled. Now, it was my turn to bring the sons of those men together for a much different reason. Every head of every major criminal organization, and their significant others, were sitting down for this meeting because someone forced our hands.
