Page 108 of Of Grief And Gratitude

My father nodded once, and it was maybe the only thing we’d ever agreed on. “Were you working with the agent?”

“You know he was my informant,” my uncle rasped. My father walked behind the chair and my uncle’s scream stabbed my ears as a finger dropped to the plastic tarp covering the floor.

“Shall we try again?” my father asked congenially. “Was he working for you?”

“Yes,” my uncle gritted out.

“Did he take my wife to the bakery that day?”

“No. He met her there,” my uncle answered, blood dripping steadily behind him.

“Then what?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I had to hear the truth.

Giuseppe glanced around. “He distracted her guard while the Russian placed the explosives. Didn’t get out in time.”

“Fuck,” Niccolò hissed, glancing at me.

“You plotted against this family. Against me.” My father’s voice was quiet and deadly. “You killed my wife. Then you came after my son.”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Giuseppe spat. “You wouldn’t have missed him.”

The words shouldn’t have hurt, but they did. Because I agreed. I thought my father had sent the men. That I could believe it was a testament to how much my father disliked me. He was more offended that my uncle would dare step out of line than he was that I’d been in danger.

“What about your son, Giuseppe?” My father said, his words smooth and plying. “Do you know where Luca is?”

Giuseppe growled and pulled at his restraints. “Leave him the fuck out of this!”

“I don’t think I can, brother,” my father replied, shaking his head. “It’s awfully coincidental that he’s disappeared now that your plot has been exposed. One might think he’s just as guilty as you are. Just as traitorous. Blood tells, after all, and yours is tainted black.”

I pulled out my phone, looking through the text messages for anything from Luca. He’d only texted me a couple of times while I’d been at the cabin, but nothing since. I would have expected something, given what happened. But I couldn’t see my cousin turning against me. He wasn’t like his father, just as I wasn’t like mine.

My father leaned down, whispering Italian in my uncle’s ear, before standing in front of him again.

“You bastard!” Giuseppe screamed, trying to stand but collapsing when his knees wouldn’t hold his weight. “I’ll fucking take you down with me! Fuck you!”

My father appeared to move in slow motion, drawing his gun and pointing it at his brother’s head. “Let dead dogs lie. Fratello.”

He fired, and I covered my ears at the sound as a hole appeared in my uncle’s forehead, a single trickle of blood flowing between his eyes and dripping off his nose.

We stood there in stunned silence. My father was unpredictable, yes. But it was the first time I’d seen him kill somebody he was related to by blood—our uncle.

My father finally moved, spitting on my uncle’s corpse. “Spero tu marcisca all'inferno.”

I suddenly felt bone-weary. It wasn’t how I saw my Mamma or Riona receiving justice, but there it was. Done.

Seeing my uncle like that took some of the intensity out of my anger. He’d been pathetic in life and was a shriveled embarrassment in death. If there were a just God, he would put Giuseppe’s feet in the fires of hell for eternity.

“I need to get back to Riona,” I said to nobody in particular.

My father turned, approaching me and patting me firmly on the shoulder. I tensed, the paternal expression unfamiliar. “I see how you are with her. You’ve changed.”

I didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t give me a chance. “It took me… time. For me to accept it. You’re marrying her?”

“I plan on it,” I said confidently. I didn’t give a fuck what my father said about it. I wouldn’t submit to one of his arranged marriages, like Bianca and Niccolò.

“Good.”

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