Page 8 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure. Listen, Dad, I have to go. I’ve got class in an hour and I still have to shower.”

“Okay,” he says. “I love you,lubimaya.”

“I love you too, Dad. Tell Mom I said bye.”

I hang up the phone and turn to the bodyguards, who have been standing at attention a respectful distance away while I talked on the phone. “Let’s go, Tweedledee and Tweedledumbass.”

Dad’s voice echoes in my head the whole way home.I can handle anything you need …he said. I shudder again.

I know just how seriously he means that.

2

Vito

I fucking hate this picture.

I look at it every single day.

It is like torturing myself. Why do I do it again and again? I cannot stop. It is an addiction. It is breaking me. I cannot stop.

If I were a lesser man, a weaker man, I would feel something when I pull the photo from its resting place in the false drawer hidden within my bedside table. I would feel regret, perhaps, for the things I did not or could not do back then. Sadness, for what it shows that I no longer have.

I am not a weak man though. So mostly, I feel nothing. Nothing but the same cold rage that has driven me for as long as I can remember. I wake up with it. I go to sleep with it. I feel it all the hours in between.

Only when I dream am I free of it.

I close my eyes and rest my head against the headboard of my bed. The wood is cold to the touch. Our home, the Bianci Castle, is always cold. It is an ancient structure high in the hills of Southern California. The sun seems to fail to reach here. Even now, when I look out my window, I do not see the breezy palms and crystalline skies that most people think of when they imagine Los Angeles. It is like we are in a realm removed from the world around us.

I prefer it that way.

We have high iron gates and thick stone walls to keep the rabble out. I stay here as often as I can. I only descend into the city when my work demands it of me.

As it will tonight.

I know what my father will ask of us at the council meeting tonight. Already, I dread it. It is wrongheaded and foolish. Rash. Once upon a time, my father would have known better than to let blind anger guide his decision-making. That time has long since passed though. The feared leader of the Bianci Mafia has devolved into little more than a lunatic, frothing at the mouth as he denounces his enemies.

Few fear him anymore.

But I have feared my father since the second my life began. That is no accident. He cultivates fear. Brandishes it like a weapon. Fear is equal to power, in his eyes. Even his children were taught to fear him. His moods roil like hurricane clouds. There is no telling when and where he will lash out.

“It shouldn’t have been you,” I murmur under my breath as I pass my thumb over the face of the girl in the picture. If I had a heart, it would be aching. But my heart has been beaten out of me by thirty-two years as my father’s son.

“If you are to ever inherit my throne,”he has hissed at me countless times,“then you cannot be a slave to your pitiful fucking weaknesses. Either they perish, or you do. There are no other options.”

I remember the six-year-old Vito hearing those things from his father’s mouth for the first time. I remember him crushing a butterfly before my eyes, just to show me that beauty cannot last. I remember how, when the family dog died, he locked me in a room with its corpse.

Love nothing. Want nothing. Keep nothing.

The mantra of a broken man.

But I cannot deny that we have what we have because of him. This castle, our riches, our legions of loyal soldiers—they follow the Bianci flag because they know that the man who holds it will do whatever it takes to get what he wants.

He has taught each of his sons that. As the oldest, I took the brunt of his wrath. He wanted to download his essence into me. Maybe he hopes to live longer in that way. As if he can consume me entirely and in doing so, save himself from death.

I don’t fucking know. I’ve spent a lifetime analyzing the man. The depths of his sins are still a mystery to me in so many ways.

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