Cassio
It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve visited my late wife’s grave, the feeling never changes. Despair radiates through me like heat, sinking in through my skin and infecting my blood with ease. I don’t just see dirt and earth covering the bodies of my infant son and his mother, I see the day they died—in exact detail.
It’s a sick and twisted movie that I can’t turn off, playing on a loop in my mind. It haunts me, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I still hear her screams during the labor and the impossible quiet that followed. The way an eerie sense of dread filled the birthing room before she turned pale white.
But not even the memories of that vile day can keep me away from their burial site. The need to see them is a compulsion I have no power to fight. The need to talk to them is impossible to avoid, even when they can’t reply. It’s not healthy, and I’ve known that for a long time.
“Hey, Bels,” I whisper, sitting down and leaning against the side of her gravestone. “It’s been a crazy couple of fucking days.”
Lost for words, I pull out a small silver case, popping it open with a soft click. The faint smell of clove melts into the cool air as I pluck a single cigarette from within. Popping it between my lips, I trade the case for a light.
Rolling the lighter with my thumb, a bright orange flame flickers wildly. It burns, crackling quietly against the cig, and smoke fills my mouth swiftly.
Taking a long drag, I sigh and exhale the familiar taste, savoring the bit of warmth that the action brings. “I’m getting married.” I say the words, hardly believing them to be true. “My sister’s friend… Ana. She needs someone, and I’m going to be that someone.”
Some people think it’s crazy—talking to the dead. But I have to believe that she hears me. I couldn’t survive if I thought I was truly just talking to the wind and the earth.
“I gotta say, I feel like I’m fucking betraying you right now, and I’ve hardly even talked to the girl,” I admit with a grimace.
Blowing out another long breath of smoke, I shake my head. It’s like I can see her face, and hear her disagreeing with me.
“I know you always said you’d want me to find someone else if I lost you. I hated that shit, you know I did. When you’d talk about me hypothetically losing you—shit, I wanted to rage. I kept telling you it would never fucking happen. It was me and you ’til the goddamn end.”
It was supposed to be.
“You brought it up far too much for my liking and I just—” My throat clogs up, emotions running high.
“Did you know?” I demand, suddenly getting angry. “Did you have some sixth fucking sense that I’d have to live my life without you, Bels? It still eats me up inside, you know? Remembering everything you told me that you’d want.”
Her funeral, her deathbed wishes, her plans for me. Just in case, she’d say. Nobody prepares for accidents, and I’m prepared for everything, she’d boast.
One of her most firm demands was always that I move on. She told me how angry she would be in the afterlife if I wallowed in my grief for too long. I couldn’t understand the concept. I wouldn’t want her to be with another man, the thought made me sick to my stomach. But Isobel always was more selfless than me. She cared about people so deeply, me more than anyone else.
Despite her wishes, moving on is a concept that feels like it will never be fulfilled… and still, progress is necessary. If I continue to exist like this, I won’t continue to exist at all.
Throwing myself into the firing line to save my sister months ago wasn’t just a brotherly sacrifice that any Moretti would make. I hoped I would take a bullet to the chest. I desperately wanted the sweet fucking relief of death because if I weren’t breathing, maybe I would have my Isobel again. Just fucking maybe we’d be at peace with our son on some inhuman plane of existence and I could feel whole again.
Thinking like that… I can’t afford to do it any longer. My uncle took the bullets meant for me, and dying now that he’s gone would be a mistake. Squandering his sacrifice isn’t something anyone would forgive me for, least of all myself.
My family isn’t just the brothers I grew up with anymore—it’s Jade, too, the sister whose life I missed for nearly two decades. It’s her son and daughter, the latter of whom she named after my deceased wife. There’s too many people who would mourn me unnecessarily. There’s two little babies who need all of the Moretti protection they can get.
So, no, I can’t say it’s time to move on, because I doubt I can. But it’s time to move forward. And there’s no way I can do that if I’m living in this house. At least not for a little while. I need a responsibility, something to make me progress.
At the sound of footsteps, slightly muffled by the thick lawn, I look up from my hands and find my brother —my future capo.
He speaks and I blink, trying to shake myself out of my mood.
“She picked me?” I double check despite hearing Apollo clearly as he informed me of Ana’s decision. A decision I was sure she would make.
She’s too young, and too hurt to marry Apollo and give him an heir. And marrying my father seemed out of the question. I couldn’t see her making that choice, knowing how it would affect her life in the future.
“She did,” he confirms simply. Eyeing the clove cigarette between my fingers, he scrunches his nose in disgust. “She might change her mind if she notices that filthy habit, though.”
Taking a small drag and blowing out a puff of smoke, I shake my head. “Pretty sure if the widow thing didn’t scare her away, this won’t either.”
It’s not even a habit. I hardly smoke, just on the hardest days. I don’t think I’ve smoked a whole pack in under a month or so since… I can’t even remember how long.
“Besides, this is my last. I doubt I’ll need them when I’m away from this place.” Too many fucking memories here.
“Not to mention the grieving bride you’ll have to take care of and the syndicate you’ll have to run. Where would you find the time?” he drones, snark dripping from his every word.
Apollo isn’t the sort of man to coddle. He doesn’t treat me like a man sitting by his dead wife’s grave, smoking while feeling sorry for himself. He treats me like his little brother who is sulking. I think if he were any other way, I wouldn’t know how to react. Being the oldest, he’s meant to keep us all in order. He can’t do that if he manages the lot of us with kid gloves.
“Tell me about her,” I request, stubbing my smoke out into the ground, growing tired of it before it’s even finished.
My brother chuckles. “We’re pretending like you don’t already know everything about her? She’s our little sister’s best friend, among other things. You even knew she’d pick you.”
“Of course, I did,” I grunt.
And of course Apollo picked up on the fact that I came out here to bid Isobel goodbye. We’re the perceptive siblings after all. We need to be. With him as our future capo and me as his lifelong advisor, we’re trained to be as assessing as possible.
“Haven’t you heard? I know everything.”
He snorts, knowing that I’m citing our youngest brother. Matteo seems to think I can hear through sound-proof walls and predict the future. I don’t have the heart to tell him that he’s just the most easy to read person on the planet. He wears every emotion on his face. In a lot of ways, Matteo is the most human of us all.
Needing to hear whatever information my brother has gathered, I sigh irritably. “Just tell me, Apollo.”
“Ana Knight,” he starts, vocalizing her name with an air of boredom. “Nineteen years old, twenty in a couple of months. Stepdaughter to Bron Knight, and until yesterday, girlfriend to Cole Knight.”
“So, they were dating?”
“Not publicly, but Jade confirmed it.”
“Continue.”
Apollo rolls his eyes. “Ana is a society type, playing the dutiful mafia daughter as if she was born into the role. She attends fundraisers and events and no one has a bad word to say about her, at least that they’ll say out loud.”
I figured as much. Why anyone would put her through the horror of yesterday when no one seems to hate the girl, I have no idea.
“Most of her free time she spends volunteering at the orphanage twenty minutes from her Penthouse on the upper west side of Manhattan. She’s a black belt in Judo, despite her acting like she can hardly throw a punch in her Empire training classes.”
Now that’s something I wasn’t aware of.
“Keep going.”
“Ana hates cooking. She thinks that food always tastes better when someone else makes it for you. She doesn’t like bugs or dirt or clutter, which is why the Knights employ a housekeeper who cooks.”
“Name?”
“Agnes. She’s a fifty-eight-year-old widow who is grouchy but has an apparent soft spot for your fiancée and her now deceased mother.”
“Great, I’m sure she’ll love me,” I grumble sarcastically.
“Ana Knight also has an eidetic memory,” he drones on. “She appears to be able to disassociate to some degree, a skill I’m sure Cole was helping her with.”
My cold dead heart gives a painful beat at the information. Sympathy for the poor girl, I’m sure. Ana Knight is never going to be able to forget that day, because Ana never forgets anything.
And now she’s stuck with me.
“Armani and Colton have decided to go to New York with the pair of you. They’ll live in the same building and watch your backs. Ana doesn’t have a developed friendship with either of them, but I’m sure they’ll be helpful in warming her up eventually. She’ll need a friend, and obviously Jade can’t go. She and Dmitri won’t risk the twin’s safety.”
“I wouldn’t want them to,” I agree quickly. “Neither would Ana.”
I think.
“We’ve made positive contact with Gerard, and he’s firmly on our side. Whatever we need to keep Ana alive, he’ll back us. He wants to confirm her safety, so he’ll speak with her before the contract is signed.”
“That’s fine.” It’s not like Ana is going to say anything concerning to him. She’s agreed to this.
“We’ll do the wedding here, tomorrow evening. No need to waste time. The depression is going to hit her hard and soon, I can see it in her eyes. She’s waiting to fall apart, and the sooner she does—”
“The sooner we put her back together,” I finish.
My father has always told me that I’m the kind of man that needs to be needed, just like him. I thrive when people rely on me. It’s the only thing that fills me with a sense of pride and purpose.
Ana Knight needs someone more than anyone else in my life has needed me in a long time, so I volunteered to marry her. And she chose me.
If anyone can get her through tremendous grief, it’s me.
