by Bethany-Kris
“Hmm?”
He met his father’s gaze.
Gian smiled. “You know what I promised your mother a long time ago, don’t you? I’ve told you before, son.”
Yeah, he had.
Every time he and Bene went nuts.
“That she wouldn’t bury one of us.”
“You almost made me break that promise.”
“Didn’t mean to, Papa.”
The hard line of his father’s jaw tensed, before that tremor worked its way through. Like his father was holding back his emotions because that’s just not what Gian did. He was always strong—forever in control. Nothing else would do.
“I can’t convince you to move back to Toronto, can I?”
Beni shook his head. “Chicago is better for me.”
“Well, at least sending you here did something right, yes?”
“More than one thing.”
Gian’s gaze drifted to August, and then right back to Beni. “Yes, more than one.”
“Dad?”
“Hmm?”
“Bene is going to be okay, right?”
He left a lot unsaid there.
He’ll be okay with me staying here?
He’ll be fine without me, won’t he?
It’ll get better for him, won’t it?
A sigh answered him back.
Seconds ticked by.
“Eventually,” Gian murmured. “He’s still learning what it’s like to be him without you, Beni, and right now ... I’m not sure he likes who that person is.”
• • •
Four months later ...
“Happy birthday, to you, happy birthday, to you ... happy birthday, Bene and Beni, happy birthday, to you.”
“And to many more,” his mother said, raising a glass to her twins from across the room.
Beni held up his, too.
Bene had already downed his.
Not unusual for his twin lately, if everyone else and what they had to say about Bene was to be trusted. Seemed his brother was partying a lot more, but it was hard for Beni to keep track of what his twin was doing when he was in a whole other country. He got the information from his family because Bene sure as hell wasn’t saying anything was up.
Tonight, though, was not about that.
It was their birthday.
And he had plans.
“Are you doing that now?” his brother asked.
Beni nodded, peeking over his shoulder to search for August in the large foyer of the Guzzi mansion. It doubled as a good party room when his parents didn’t want to open up more of the house to the guests because it gave them access to the sitting room, the dining room, and kitchen. Lots of space to move.
He found his girl holding an almost two-month-old baby girl—happy as could be with the newborn Guzzi in her arms. Unsurprisingly, Corrado and Alessio were not too far away as August rocked the baby and chatted to little Maria at the same time. Ginevra didn’t feel the need to hover over every single person who held her daughter like the baby’s fathers did.
August bent down, letting Maria fix baby Caroline’s big bow on her crown of dark hair. The two shared matching smiles, in love with the baby just like everybody else in their family. Although, to be fair, Maria really adored August. Her Auntie A as she liked to call her.
“Yeah,” Beni said to his twin, “I’m going to do that now.”
“Good. Maybe while everyone is all over you two, I can sneak out and nobody will notice.”
“Bene.”
He was worried about his twin.
Acting out, and shit.
Bene just laughed, and clapped him on the back. “I’m kidding, relax.”
He didn’t believe that.
Not for a second.
Still, tonight was not about Bene.
Or his issues.
They had all the time in the world to fix that.
Right?
“I’ll go steal the baby from her,” Bene said, “since you’re going to need her hands free, and all. Swear it’s like once a chick picks up a baby, they won’t let it go.”
Not a lie.
Beni and August enjoyed the time they spent with their nieces, but they weren’t even at a place yet where they were considering kids of their own. Shit, they were young. They had time to figure that out, even if baby fever, as his mother put it, was thick in the air.
“That would be helpful.”
“It’s what I do.”
Yeah.
That, and a hell of a lot more.
He clapped his twin on the back before Bene made a beeline for August where she had moved across the room with the baby—Caroline’s fathers were close behind, of course—to talk to Cara, and swoon over her little dress, it looked like.
Beni searched for his father, but it didn’t take him long to find Gian in his usual corner. Sitting on what his brothers had affectionately dubbed the throne because of the chair’s high back, and ornate design, his father watched his family and the other guests enjoying the party. As soon as his gaze landed on Beni coming his way, however, his father’s smile softened.
“Is it time?” he asked as Beni neared.
“Now or never, right?”
Gian chuckled, shifting a bit in the chair to dig into his suit pocket. He produced a small, black velvet box for his son to take, saying, “Do you want a good luck or ...?”
“You know what,” Beni said, flipping open the box to stare at the ring he had designed with his father’s jeweler, using gold from one of Gian’s rings, and diamonds from his mother’s, “I think I got this, Papa.”
“I think you do, too.”
August was already looking his way from across the room when he spun around, keeping that velvet box hidden in his palm at his back. She smiled wide, coming in his direction when he took one step toward her.
She was a little different from that first night they met. Her hair was back in braids, but she’d lost the Frankie Zombie jacket, and jeans for a sleek black dress that hugged her curves, and showed off those fantastic legs of hers, and the red-soled heels he’d given to her to match the red choker at her throat.
So, not the same.
And yet, still perfect.
Entirely his.
She met him in the middle of the room.
He was already bending down on one knee, velvet case opened on his palm for her wide eyes to find, and his grin growing deeper at her surprise. She liked that, though; his surprises kept her on her toes, so he planned to keep it up.
“If you’ll take me,” he said quietly, though the room had grown silent around them, “then I would be honored to be yours forever, August, if you’ll be mine, too. Marry me?”
She didn’t even hesitate.
“Yes.”
BENE
The Guzzi Legacy, 5
PROLOGUE
“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 yo
u 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?
1.
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.