by Bethany-Kris
Copyright © 2019 by Bethany-Kris.
All Rights Reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, corporations, locales and so forth are a product of the author’s imagination, or if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to a person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted material is illegal and punishable by law. No parts of this work may be reproduced, copied, used, or printed without expressed written consent from the publisher/author. Exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in reviews.
www.bethanykris.com
Editor: Elizabeth Peters
Proofreaders: Tracy A., Mia B., Tori W. and Felicia F.
Cover Design © Under Cover Designs
Interior Design: Under Cover Designs
ISBN: 978-1-989658-02-4
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY BETHANY-KRIS
“What do you mean, you’re not sure?”
Vanna Falco had rules. She followed them no matter what. Her number one rule? When her father became loud, she stayed quiet and got out of his way. Not that Adam ever yelled at her because he certainly didn’t. He also never imposed his very large presence on her in such a way that would intimidate her like he did with nearly everyone else around them.
Still, she stayed true to that rule.
One of many, honestly.
Through the Bluetooth speakers in the car, the man her father had been conversing with during the drive tried to reply to Adam with, “This plan of yours, that’s all I am saying. It won’t work the way you think it will. You’re going to get us all kill—”
“Or you’re afraid.”
“I’m not afraid! It won’t work.”
“It will. Just do what you were told.”
“You’re delusional, Adam, and if you didn’t force my hand here, I would have handed your ass over to the boss for this … scheme.”
“Except you can’t,” Adam replied coldly, “not without outing the fact I knew you were stealing to fund your wife’s gambling habit. So, either way, whether you help or hurt me here, you’re still fucked. Remember that the next time you want to back out.”
A beep sounded through the car speakers, saying the call cut off. The silence crawled on, a lot like their vehicle in downtown Toronto traffic.
The passing city streets, and the phone in her hands where she scrolled through her social media feed, held her attention up until the moment Adam spoke again from the front seat. Although, this time he talked to her, and not someone through the Bluetooth. He navigated the inner-city traffic with ease, and patience—driving relaxes me, he would say.
“Do you know what we Italians respect the most, Vanna?”
When her father spoke, Vanna always listened. Her friends, the few she did make at her private high school, never understood why she preferred spending time with her father instead of doing something with them.
“Do you?” he asked again, dark eyes darting to the Mercedes rearview mirror to meet her stare in the back seat.
“God.”
He smiled. “And?”
“Family.”
Adam tilted his head to the side. “That depends on—”
“Their loyalty to the clan.”
If her father thought he would trip her up with that question, she had a surprise for him. Fifteen years of her life spent under his feet taught her a great many things—the most prominent, and constant, lessons had been about their ways; their rules.
The Camorra way.
The mafia life.
“Good, good. But no, those aren’t the things I mean.”
Vanna frowned, chewing over her thoughts as she tried to pinpoint the lesson her father hinted at with his question. He smiled briefly, the strong line of his jaw softening when she glanced at his profile; it told her that he did, in fact, know he managed to make her hesitate with an answer.
“Maybe I posed the question wrong,” her father mused.
“Maybe?”
He chuckled. “If we hold God and family closest to our hearts, then what would we hold even closer, hmm?”
Ah.
Now she understood.
Their life in a nutshell.
Her father talked.
She listened.
Adam was all she had, after all. Her blood relatives were long gone. Her grandfather, Gabriel Canali, murdered, and her aunt—Elena, her father’s half-sister—had committed suicide shortly after, leaving Adam alone as the bastard son of a dead Camorra boss, with a criminal organization in ruins, and the clan in shambles. Shunned by his father before his murder, as his now-dead mother did her best to keep him away from the life, Adam was lower than dirt and treated the same for years after.
All because of one family.
One man.
Gian Guzzi.
He’d married her aunt, killed their grandfather, which caused Elena’s suicide, or so she had always been told, and ruined the Canali name forever. It might have happened decades ago, but to them … to Vanna and her father, who lived with the knowledge of what transpired way back then, and suffered the consequences of it long after, well, they simply couldn’t forget.
They couldn’t afford to.
It didn’t matter they were Falcos—using the last name given to Adam by his mother—because they were still Camorra. And this was their way.
“Well?” her father asked, bringing her back to the present with a bang. “Do you have an answer for me?”
She did.
“Vendettas,” Vanna replied, parroting the only appropriate answer. “Our vendettas are most important.”
That smile graced Adam’s lips again.
Faint as it was.
He grew quiet, and so she turned her attention back to the phone in her hands. Traffic crawled on, but soon they would arrive at the restaurant where her father intended to make his next move to take over the Camorra clan. A goal of his, he made clear, that he had worked on since it was ripped from his hands after his father’s murder.
That was two decades ago.
Finally, he had the chance to take his rightful place again heading the clan. Rome didn’t get built in a day, Adam said, and I won’t take over in one, either. He talked a lot, and she thought he said these things to her because she was all he had, too.
“Vanna?”
“Hmm?”
“I need you to remember that … about our vendettas—always.”
She glanced up from the screen of her phone, meeting her father’s stare in the rearview once more. It also allowed her the chance to see where they currently were in the city. A couple of blocks away from her school where he dropped her off every morning before going about his day and business, only to be right there at three PM sharp to pick her up. No excuses.
He listened to her day.
She listened to his.
People didn’t understand why she never disobeyed her father—always his good girl, following every rule set out for her. She never wondered why. He nursed her when she was sick,
read her bedtime story after bedtime story, and he was all she knew.
Her mother, a transient, neglectful thing, hadn’t been in her life since before she could remember. She resented Rose for that the most, and while anyone who had known her mother often said Vanna took after the woman in appearance, she had no memories of her. Her dainty features made up of a button nose, delicate cheekbones, dark brown eyes the same shade as her wild hair, and heart-shaped lips didn’t match her father at all, so she knew it had to come from her mother.
And yet, she still found a better sense of familiarity looking at her father than she did staring into a mirror at herself. She blamed her mother for that, but at least she had her dad.
She loved him.
He loved her.
“And someday,” Adam said, bringing their vehicle to a crawl behind the car in front of theirs that slowed for a yellow light up ahead, “we will finally be able to fulfill our vendetta, won’t we?”
“Of course, Papa.”
“Why is that?”
The words that he repeated to her for years slipped out of her mouth without her even needing to think about it, really. “Because they took from us.”
“Yes.”
“They almost ruined us.”
“But not quite.”
Vanna nodded. “And so, they have to answer for it.”
“Exactly, my girl. Exactly. We’re the only ones who care what the Guzzi family did to us all those years ago, but we also won’t ever forget. It’s our way—our life. An eye for an eye. They took from us, and we will take from them, no matter what.”
Familiar buildings passed them by.
Silence stretched on.
“You can’t forget the vendetta, Vanna,” he said quietly.
“I won’t.”
“Promise me.”
She didn’t understand why he demanded that promise at all. She would do anything for her father—her one constant; a hero in her mind’s eye. Out of love, and little else, her loyalties would forever be with him.
“I promise,” Vanna said.
Adam let out a heavy stream of air, his fingers tightening rhythmically around the leather-wrapped steering wheel. “That’s what I want to hear.”
“Papa?”
“Yes?”
“Everything is okay, right?”
He took a second to answer.
She didn’t like that.
Today would be huge for him, if the move he planned against the current Camorra boss of their clan went off the way he said it would. All the shame of being the son of a man who had nearly allowed their clan to be run into the ground because of his dealings with Gian Guzzi would go away.
They would be great again.
It just had to go right.
“It’s fine,” Adam murmured, “I promise, but you still have to remember what I told you. All of it, Vanna.”
She would.
And her father lied.
It was not fine.
In a week, he would be dead. She buried him on her sixteenth birthday. Vanna never forgot about the vendetta, though.
She couldn’t.
He made her promise.
Didn’t she owe him that?
There’s a moment where a person meets their reflection, and they smile. No one really knows why, and it doesn’t have to be a huge smile, either. Sometimes, it’s done with the lips lifting at the corners, and other times, it’s all in the eyes. A glow that just says happiness.
Benedetto Guzzi always thought one smiled at their reflection because they felt fondness in familiarity. Seeing something he recognized every single inch of, like his face, was comforting. More so than something strange and unknown.
It used to be that way with his twin, too. Identical in every sense of the very word, Bene never failed to smile when he looked at Beni’s face. Except lately, that wasn’t the case at all, and it was getting harder to hide it.
Not that it was Beni’s fault.
Or anyone else’s.
This was all on Bene.
Speaking of which …
“You good?”
“Yeah, of course,” Bene replied.
“You sure?” his brother prodded. “Because you spent two minutes staring at the wall instead of knotting your tie.”
God.
Why did Beni have to know him so well?
“A lot on my mind, that’s all.”
In the mirror, Beni arched a brow. He wished he could say his identical features did the same, but since Bene had fallen into this pit of hell within his own mind these last few months, all the strange similarities and quirks he shared with his brother slowed to a stop. Beni’s continued, sure, like he hadn’t changed at all, but Bene?
A different story.
One he didn’t know how to tell.
That was part of the problem—for so long, it had been just the two of them. Bene and Beni. The twins. Stuck together, if you asked anyone who knew them. The same soul, if you asked people who were really close to the twins.
Except they weren’t those things. Oh, sure. They looked alike and acted the same. They spent their entire childhood, teenage years, and even the first bit of their adulthood together, being extensions of one another, but it just … changed.
All at once.
Bene blinked, and that was over.
In the end, they still came out being two entirely different men. Beni was ready to be the man he knew he could be without his twin to hold him up on his own two feet, and Bene didn’t know what in the fuck he was doing anymore. He still needed to figure that out somehow, and he used to do shit like that with his brother. Now, he would have to do it alone, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
Not at all.
“I’m worried about you, huh?”
Bene cleared his throat and shook his head. Forcing a smile on his face so his brother would see it, and not think something was up. Today wasn’t the day for the dark shit in his mind, and surely he could suck up his emotions for a few hours so that his brother could have his moment.
Right?
Right, he told himself.
He’d probably need to say it a few more times before the day was out. So was his goddamn life lately. A whole fucking joke, it seemed.
“I’m good,” Bene said, clapping his brother on the shoulder and keeping that same smile firmly in place. He could tell by the way his brother’s lips drew down at the corners that Beni didn’t believe him, but he probably wouldn’t call him out on his shit. “Besides,” he added, checking the watch on his wrist, “we’ve got twenty more minutes before I need to have you downstairs, and ready to get married. Are we wasting time talking about our feelings, or are we getting you married?”
Beni laughed. “Prick.”
“What?”
“Say married with a little less … disgust, yeah?”
Bene shrugged. “I just don’t see the appeal, that’s all.”
It wasn’t who his brother chose to marry, either. August Rivera was a great chick—smart as fuck, looked good on his twin’s arm, and could hold her own against the rest of them. She never took any of Bene’s nonsense when she first started hanging around with Beni, and even now, she was usually the first one to call him out on something when he had one of his days. Their mother adored her. Their father thought August was everything good for Beni.
And she was.
Bene wouldn’t deny that.
He liked August.
It was just … marriage. In general. He wasn’t scared to get married—didn’t fear falling in love. He couldn’t when his mother and father gave their five sons the best example of love and marriage for their entire lives. He simply didn’t understand how a person could get married at their age, twenty-two, like they didn’t have their best years ahead of them. That was all.
Then again, Beni found her, right?
That’s what his father said.
His brothers, too.
And when a Guzzi found that woman, he didn’t care about h
is best years yet to come, or whatever else. He only cared about her.
Beni found August.
Bene was still alone.
Great.
Now he was back to that shit.
Perfect.
“Seriously,” Bene said, doing his best to hide the gruffness in his voice, “are we getting you married, or talking about me? Because if Ma comes in here and sees that you’re still not dressed, she’s going to blame me.”
“But you are good, aren’t you?”
“I’m fine.”
And that was the last time he would say it, too.
Bene glanced away at the sight of his brother meeting his gaze in the reflection of the tall mirror the two of them used to get ready. For the wedding. Beni’s wedding. After today, his twin would no longer be just one room over in their shared penthouse. Although, to be fair, Beni hadn’t been living with Bene for a while now.
Still, this felt permanent.
More, in a way, because of the whole marriage thing. His twin would head back to Chicago—a place Bene hated—to live with his new wife. For good. Whatever hope Bene held that his brother would come back to Toronto to live again was basically gone now. Beni found something he wanted in Chicago, and he didn’t mind staying there to keep it.
And where did that leave Bene?
He’d learned a lot of things in the past few months, but the most prominent thing was that he didn’t know anything. Not about himself, anyway. Bene didn’t know who he was without Beni. He had no clue who he wanted to be, either, and he didn’t think he was going to figure it out anytime soon. So far, all he managed to do without his brother was drown his troubles in a bottle of liquor or a few hours of high and fun.
What is wrong with you?
Great.
Now, even his own mind was asking that question. Usually, it was one of his other brothers—more often Marcus, than Chris or Corrado—or even his parents daring to ask the question. It seemed like his mind was ready to get in on the fucking party, too.
Bene could do without that.
All of it.
At least, for today.
Just fucking let me get through today, please.
“Hey.”
Bene found his brother still stared at him in the mirror. Shocker. Beni knew when shit was up; hiding it was pointless, but he would still try. What else could he do at this point?