Page 36 of Immaculate Corruption (Romanoff Bratva)

“I don’t know if you’re aware or not, but we aren’t your parents. How much blood have you lost? Are you going to die on me?”

“It’s not a happy story,” Ennio continues as if he didn’t hear me. “No happily-ever-after for them.”

“With a pussy like you for a son, I’d imagine not.”

Ennio actually laughs at that, but I assume it’s for my benefit. If he thinks flattery will soften me, he’s sorely mistaken.

“My parents were in love once. A long time ago. Mamma was an idealist, a dreamer. She imagined she could take my rough, violent father and soften him. She thought he would calm down once he was older and had a family.”

“Let me guess: it didn’t work that way.”

He looks up at me, one eyebrow raised. “Do assassins like you usually target nice, quiet, suburban fathers? No, Papa never changed. Mamma put up with it for a long time, but then she started pushing back. She didn’t want this life for me or my sisters. She didn’t want us to be in danger.”

“Too late for that.”

Ennio lets out a breathy laugh and then sighs. “They fought about it all the time. Mamma wanted Papa to retire and hand the business over to his brother or his second, but Papa refused. So Mamma threatened to leave him.”

“How did that work out for her?” I have a creeping feeling that I already know the answer.

Ennio looks down at his bloody knee and shakes his head. “She never got the chance. Just before she was going to take us back with her to see family in Italy—one-way tickets—she had a bad fall down the stairs. She broke her neck. Died instantly.”

I whistle. “You weren’t kidding. That’s not a happy story at all.”

“It’s even worse when you grow up with the rumors of what really happened,” he says. “Papa made it so there was no investigation into the accident. He cremated Mamma’s body. Buried her quickly. He wept at the funeral. And then he never shed another tear again. It was as if Mamma never existed.”

“People deal with grief differently.”

“People deal with murder differently.”

I suspected as much, but I’m surprised to hear Ennio say it so bluntly. “You think he did it?”

Ennio shrugs. “I think Papa helped the accident along. How would it have looked if his wife and his heirs ran away from him? A don must be able to control his family just like he controls his business. Papa couldn’t control Mamma, so he did what he felt he needed to do.”

The events of the day seem to catch up with me all at once. I feel the urge to sit down, but this is not the time. It’s an interrogation, not a confession. I shake my head slightly and grip the tire iron tighter.

“If your father is as bad as he sounds, why don’t you tell me where he is? Some would say it’s karma.”

“Some would say it’s patricide,” he snaps back. “I have hopes to be better than my father. Not just like him.”

I groan. “Every son wants to be better than his father. None of us are. Apples, trees. It’s nature.”

“You think I’m a murderer?”

“I think you’d murder me,” I suggest, “if you had the chance. If it came down to just one of us, you’d kill me just as easily as I’d kill you.”

Ennio’s dark brows pinch together. “That’s self-defense. I’d never break into your place of business, kill your guards, and attack you. That makes me better than you.”

“It makes you weaker,” I say simply. “It means that between the two of us, I’m the one willing to do what needs to be done. No matter what.”

He raises his brows and leans his head back against the wall. “Like my father.”

Suddenly, the ease that had settled over me shatters. Anger, burning hot, floods my chest and sends pinpricks of energy to my hands and legs.

“I am not your fucking father,mudak.”

Ennio doesn’t seem to understand the danger he is in. Either that or he no longer cares. He shrugs. “I see it differently. My father was also willing to do whatever needed to be done to protect himself, his image, his position. He didn’t let my mother take everything from him. Some say it makes him a monster. Others say it makes him strong. Who gets to decide which one of those is right?”

I’m tempted to hit him upside the head with the tire iron just to be done with this conversation. “There are other ways to deal with the people we love.”

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