Page 1 of In My Blood
PROLOGUE
RAFE
The tinge of copper in the air surrounded me once again. It was a scent I was much too familiar with already, and one I knew I would be surrounded with for the rest of my life. It was what I had been born to, and there was no question of me ever taking any other path in life. I was the eldest son of Marcello De Santis, and I would be his heir. There was no question of choice. According to my father, that was my destiny, and no one ever crossed my father.
That was why I was there, placed very deliberately at his right side, where he always expected me to be on these little training exercises he had been bringing me on since I turned thirteen years old.
Enzo, one of my father’s trusted men was before us, his meaty fists covered with the same blood that dripped from the half-naked body hanging before him from a chain, attached to the ceiling. We stood in one of my father’s warehouses outside of the city, hidden deep within a well secured yard, far away from prying eyes.
Of course, even if the police did happen upon us and discover the massacre occurring before me, they would never manage to charge us for anything. My father was a cold, ruthless, violentman, but he was also incredibly intelligent. Ever since he took over the family business - as he liked to call it – he had worked hard to make allies of important people, in all of the right places. Police, judges, local counsellors, members of parliament. Even celebrities who were well connected. Anyone and anything he needed was always at his finger tips thanks to his connections. If anyone ever tried to deny him, he had the extortion, bribery, and other nefarious means, which he was always ready and willing to use if needed, in order to keep his supposed allies on his side. There was no low the man would not stoop to in order to protect him, his men, and the ‘family business’ from any trouble they found themselves ensnared in.
Mafia. That’s what the family business had boiled down to when my grandfather ran it. He came over from Italy as a young man and immediately found a lucrative opportunity for himself as an extortionist, taking money from innocent business owners and offering them protection in return. If they refused, he’d make them pay. Over time he built a crew of young guys who worked for him. By the time he passed away and handed everything down to his son – my father – he was a millionaire, living a life of luxury from the proceeds of his various crimes and basking in the blood of the countless people he had killed, or ordered to be killed, in his pursuit of wealth.
My father had continued the family business as it always had been, even branching out from dealing drugs and guns, into prostitution, human trafficking, and a whole host of other criminal activities I was sure I was, as yet. not privy to. The only change was that word – Mafia. No one called us that anymore. It was a word that called too much attention to the business, especially from law enforcement. So we weren’t a mafia family anymore. Though the man hanging from the ceiling, bleedingout onto the cold, stone floor below, and pleading for his life seemed to suggest differently.
“Tell me who it was!” Enzo demanded before hitting out twice more, landing two hits to Luca Mancini’s gut. Blood was already gushing from deep incisions across his torso, which, mercifully, had been inflicted before my father and I walked in.
I wasn’t like my father. I wasn’t a violent man, and I didn’t enjoy watching blood being spilled. My life so far had made me hard and cold, but that…the scene that I was watching and was so familiar with – it was sick and twisted. I wanted no part in it, and the idea of one day taking my father’s place and having to become him – it terrified and disgusted me.
Luca Mancini worked for one of my father’s rivals, and he was high up in the hierarchy of that organization too. He was in his early forties, and I knew he had a wife and kids, because I’d been the one holding them back as the three of them were screaming as Enzo dragged Luca from his bed the night before. Capturing the man, so he could be tortured for information, had just been another training exercise I had been sent on. I had done what I had to, knowing showing weakness wasn’t an option, but it had torn me apart to stand in a room with a gun pointed at two terrified young children and a woman who was sobbing and fighting with everything in her to protect them both.
“I don’t know anything!” Luca cried desperately. I didn’t know how long Enzo had been beating and torturing him, but I was pretty sure he’d be dead soon. “It w-wasn’t us! We didn’t touch that shipment!”
“Then you’re no use to us, are you?” Enzo said, in the deadly cold tone of voice I had been threatened with multiple times before– every time I tried to fight or refuse my father’s demands. He didn’t threaten my life. I wouldn’t much have cared if he did. When my choice was between becoming the monster who fathered me, or death, I chose death. But my father knew that. That was why he had Enzo threaten the only light in my life – my two younger sisters – Cara and Gianna. The two of them were the threat my father needed to keep me in line, but they were also the one thing I knew I had to go on living for. Cara was eight, and Gianna - or Gia, as we called her – was five. They were pure and innocent, protected, as much as they possibly could be, from the evil they lived in the midst of, and the monsters who surrounded them.
Our mother had no interest in raising any of us. She had been married off to our father at sixteen years old and she made no secret of the fact that she hated the man. I was pretty sure myself and my two siblings were the result of the old bastard forcing himself on her, and I was pretty sure that was why she looked to all of us with nothing but disdain when she saw us. Not that she was around much. Most of the time she sequestered herself to her rooms in the lavish home we lived in. She survived on single malt and a cocktail of illegal drugs from what I knew, but I stayed away from her as much as I could. She had a wicked tongue and liked to lash out when she was drunk, so it was easier to forget she existed, and definitely safer for my sisters to be kept well away from her.
Instead Cara and Gia had a nanny, Louise. She was a kind and gentle young woman. Skilled at her job, but also wonderfully warm in how she went about it. My sisters loved her like the older sister they didn’t have. She’d been working for us since the day Cara was born, hired by the only other woman I had in my life that I could trust – our housekeeper - Terza. Louise took careof both girls when I couldn’t be there, and she knew the score too, so she always kept them away from our parents as much as possible.
I spent as much time with them as I could, but I had to be careful. My father knew I loved them, but I never wanted him to realize how very important the two of them were to me. If he did, he’d have hurt them instead of just threatening them in order to make sure he got what he wanted. They didn’t mean anything to him. The only reason he had continued getting our mother pregnant was because he wanted another son, finding me somewhat of a disappointment. When the girls arrived, they were each dismissed and quickly forgotten.
“NO! PLEASE!” I lifted my head at the panicked shouts and saw Enzo holding a sharp knife against Luca’s throat now. He‘d obviously decided he wasn’t going to get the information he wanted from him. I didn’t even know what the shipment had contained that had been ambushed and stolen, but that was what the kidnap and torture had been about – some stolen goods.
“Then tell me something to keep yourself alive, Luca,” Enzo demanded.
“I…I can’t. I don’t know about th-the shipment, but I…there’s something else. Something De Santis will want to know!” Luca cried desperately.
“Start fucking talking!” Enzo pushed the glinting blade against Luca’s neck until blood started to trickle.
“His kid!” Luca all but screamed at the top of his hoarse voice.
I froze at that and my heart started to pound hard in my chest. Which kid? What the hell was this man about to say? Panic consumed me inside for my sisters, but on the outside I didn’t allow even a micro expression to cross my face. I’d learned well to never show my emotions in front of my father, or any one I didn’t trust absolutely.
“I’m getting bored here, Luca. I suggest you hurry the fuck up before I let my hand slip,” Enzo taunted.
“The girl…the older girl….she’s not his….not De Santis’s! She…his wife…she was sleeping with the boss. I used to drive him to meet her at this hotel every week for months. He c-called it off when she told him she was pregnant, but after…wh-when the kid was born, she showed up at the office…t-told him the baby was his. I was there. Sh-she thought the kid would make him help her…”
“Help her what?” my father snapped coldly as he stepped forward out of the shadows.
“Mr. De Santis! Please…Let me go. I….I didn’t have anyth….”
“Help my wife what?!” my father’s voice boomed, cutting off Luca’s pleading.
“Escape! She wanted to leave…wanted to be with the boss. She thought…with the baby…but he threw her out! He didn’t want anything to do with her o-or the kid.”
I was already backing out of the warehouse, keeping half an eye on my father and the two men who were with him as I stealthily moved towards the door. I already knew what my father would demand next and I had to get to Cara before he or any of his mendid. Luckily, I knew where my sister would be right then, and my father did not.
My father was irate, roaring questions at Luca and creating quite the distraction for me as I slipped out of the warehouse and got into my car. I checked the rearview mirror as I raced out of the parking area, but no one seemed to be coming after me.
