Page 1 of Ruins
Chapter 1
Santo
Twelve Years Ago
Itwasmymother’shand.
Over a week ago, my father, brother, and I all received pieces of my mother’s mutilated body.
I received her hand.
The one that held mine for seventeen years, that scuffled my hair when I was happy and wiped my tears when I scraped a knee. There it laid, severed from her body, with her wedding ring still glittering on her finger.
My father gave it to her when he proposed and declared that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Their love, in this kind of life, belonged in the books I read growing up, a love fit for fairytales rather than the nightmare it has become.
I spend the night hacking every surveillance camera in the area for an inkling of which one of our enemies did this to her.
That’s my job now.
It’s my time to join Cosa Nostra, work for my father, the Don, and find my mother’s murderer.
My stomach threatens to push up bile as I envision the torture she must have gone through, the fear she must have felt.
The computer pings, I found it.
I found surveillance from a traffic camera of the men in question; I send off the footage to my father’s email and I continue to search for anything closer to her home.
Herhome.
That was his biggest mistake.
If the great Marcello Amato made any mistake in his life, it was separating my mother, from our family home. In his fear for her safety, he did the one thing that caused her demise.
Another ping thrills through the computer as it pulls up footage from the broken camera I salvaged from the front of her estate, but I can’t watch it.
Iwon’twatch it.
I refuse to watch as they take my mother from the front steps of her home.
Instead, I send the footage to my father.
I blow up their images from the traffic camera and put them through the facial recognition software I created last year.
Grabbing what’s left of my energy drink, I chug it down as I wait.
I should start Stanford next week; I graduated high school early and I’m ready to get away from this shit. I don’t want to be a consigliere, or an underboss, or a soldier. I want to invent; I want to make my genius ideas tangible and help people. I don’t want to kill, fight, steal or maim.
I want to be me. I want to read; I want to build. I want to be the son that makes my mother proud whether or not she’s here.
The computer pings.
I got a hit.
The screen pulls up two photos of the men who took her. Their names… they’re Armenian.
That doesn’t make sense.
