“You’re not my brother,” I spat at him, my eyes holding his. My stomach lurched because I was nervous, but I didn’t back down.

Monsters like Angelo fed on other people’s fear. I was done crying, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of feeding on mine.

“Trust me, I’d rather not have the offspring of a whore like yourself as my sister.” He took a swig of his scotch. “But somethings can’t be changed.”

“My mother was no whore.”

He horse laughed, then his eyes turned darker as he narrowed them on me. “Hear the story and judge for yourself, will you?”

He tossed his cigarette on the ashtray, took out an entire pack from his drawer and slid it between his lips. He lit the end, and it blossomed red as he inhaled it and threw the silver lighter on his mahogany desk.

“My parents got married when my mother was just eighteen. My father was an asshole, beat her to a pulp whenever business was going bad. Still, she loved him enough to get pregnant for him. Twice.”

He stopped for another drag of his cigar and continued. “He came back home one day, and he was pretty pissed, calling my mother names and yelling how she didn’t deserve him. He beat her and when I tried to stop him, he hit me too. I was twenty and my sister, Giulia, was only fifteen. He never hit her though, he loved her too much for that.”

I anchored my attention on him as he spoke.

“He was going to kill my mother that night and I couldn’t let him, so I fought him. Alone. Guilia stood at the door behind you, smirking and doing nothing. I grabbed a knife I’d just killed a man that evening, determined to end him and save my mother. I wasn’t very lucky though, so I ended up slashing the knife through his face. He lived with that scar all his life. It was pretty ugly.”

His expression faltered into a sad one for a flicker of a moment before the darkness returned to his gaze.

A strange feeling of pity gripped me. “Your father was a monster, so you became one too.”

He chuckled, a twisted grin forming on his face. “I’m my father’s son, Giselle. I’ve always been a monster. The only exception to my sadistic nature was my mother.”

And just like that, whatever pity I felt for him died a quick death. “Why are you desperate to get revenge if you hated your father that much? And why do you think I’m your sister?”

“My father killed my mother that night and exiled me from the Cosa Nostra.” He swallowed his drink in one gulp and slammed the empty glass on his table. “I was angry, looking for a weakness to bring him down. While I was looking into his activities, I found your mother. Pretty young. The same age as me. She was pregnant by a man who didn’t give a shit about her.”

I dragged my feet to my chest and wrapped my arms around myself. “You were watching my mother?”

“For a while,” he admitted. “I left Chicago shortly after and joined the Cosa Nostra in New York, only returning after my father died three years ago. I’d been plotting revenge ever since. No one was left out”

“My mother is dead. You can’t hurt her even if you’re dying to.”

He smirked. “We’ll get to that. You ask why I want revenge for my father? Because your husband and his brothers took away my right to get revenge. It was my bullet that should have been buried with my father, not Sergey’s.”

“You’re sick.”

My eyes bulged with fright. “You’re sick.” I’d have understood it if he was seeking revenge because he loved his father, but his reason—craving for revenge because he was stripped of the opportunity to kill his father—that was something only a psychopath would do.

He chuckled and poured himself another finger of drink. “I never said I wasn’t. No one in a world like ours is sane. Not even your husband, sister.”

My brain misfired. I loathed it when he called me that. “I’m not your sister.”

He drove his fist into his desk all of a sudden and I screamed, startled by his sudden violent outburst. “You are my sister, and you will die as my sister.” He got to his feet and stalked towards me.

I recoiled, shuffling backward on my ass until I was wedged between the wall and a monster. “Don’t come closer.”

“What will you do?” The gentleness in his voice strangled air from my lungs. “Your mother paid for her sins, it’s about time you pay for yours.”

I broke eye contact, fixing my gaze on my quivering hand. “What do you mean?”

“Did you really think your mother died from heartbreak?” He knelt in front of me and laughed at the shock in my face. “She was an easy target. Drunk, heartbroken and weak. She didn’t struggle even try to struggle. She just took the poison and her heart slowed as she watched the rain.”

He shook his head. “Fuck me, I should have kept a video as souvenir for this moment. I’m sure you would have enjoyed watching as life slipped away from her eyes.”

I whipped my head to him, my eyes wide with horror. “You killed my mother?”