by J. J. McAvoy
He is the one who started it.
“What don’t you—”
I was cut off by the ringing of his phone. The moment he saw it, he got up, his bloody hand shaking once more.
“If you all had just fucking trusted me. Trusted that I wasn’t a fool. Trusted that I did not need you to protect me, my wife was doing that already; maybe I could have done this differently,” he muttered, moving to the door.
“Ethan, wait—”
“No, I can’t wait, my daughter needs me. Why? She is in tears because she woke up and heard the news that someone tried to murder her mother. Now she is having a breakdown. What a beautiful gift from her grandparents. Oh right, the other thing you didn’t figure out,” he snapped at me and pointed to the dead body of Fiorello. “That man—no pig—wasn’t Calliope’s grandfather.”
“I know she isn’t blood-related to him because her mother was—”
“Was raped, yes. But who do you think did it? Let me stop asking questions. You all are shit when it comes to figuring things out. Him. Fiorello Orsini raped her mother,” Ethan said, and I froze.
“What?” Liam gasped out more, shocked than me.
“Again, with the what? Let me repeat. That is not her grandfather. He is her father. She lied when she said she wasn’t a real Orsini. She is, and she’s wanted to kill Fiorello for years. She just couldn’t until she took down the rest of their organization, or at the least crippled it. Calliope worked every day to get him to trust her so she would know just as many people as he had working under him. A pig like that doesn’t even trust his children. Yes, I said children.” He nodded. “Dino, Vinnie, Italo…all his by different women. I wasn’t just letting her pick the people who protected this family for no reason. There were clues; she left them all along the way. But again, you just thought you were right and I was a weak child under a woman’s control. Had you waited one more day, just one more day, I would have told you all of this and asked you to help me finish the job. Now…seeing as how this family no longer trusts me, seeing as all of you but Nana betrayed me, you all can go fuck yourselves twice over. You aren’t my family anymore. None of you. I deal with Siena and the rest alone as always.”
And just like that, Ethan walked out.
I shook my head, rising from my seat to the body, unzipping the bag, I made sure it really was that old bastard. Taking my knife, I slit his throat; the blood was dark as it poured out. It was really him. This wasn’t some lie or trick, it really was him, and that girl really had shot him dead.
I thought back to that little girl at seven.
“You’re like a queen,” she said.
“Sure, I’ll take that,” I said.
“Then, I’ll become a queen, too.”
“There is only one queen of this kingdom, little one, and her last name will always be Callahan.”
“I’ll be that then.”
“I doubt it. My son can’t marry someone so weak she’d cry because someone made fun of her mother.”
“I’m not crying, though.”
That little girl wanted to protect her mother but also wanted power. I had wondered why they hadn’t just given the girl up for adoption after her mother’s rape. How could her husband stand by and let that girl live with him? How could he stand by and let her be abused, either? Now it was clear. He didn’t give her away because he couldn’t. Fiorello raped his son’s wife and forced his son to keep the daughter…why? Why? The man was a pig, but why do that your own child.
To punish him. The answer came to my mind.
He was the one who was supposed to get revenge for his brothers, but he had refused. He was supposed to do what Calliope was trained to do—build a family, blend in, and then strike. However, he became accustomed to having a happy, peaceful life outside of the family feuds. So, his father punished him for it…punished his wife for it.
Calliope.
He couldn’t get rid of her and did not stop his wife from hurting her because he hated her, too…his half-sister hidden as his daughter.
But how did Calliope find out?
I didn’t know. But it didn’t matter…she had found out. Which meant she knew the greatest enemy, the person who destroyed her life, was also the one who gave her life. If she wanted revenge, the person she would go after wasn’t the Callahans at all. It would be her father.
She played along. She made us all believe she was out to destroy us to convince one person. She did it so well it worked, and he came to trust her because she acted so loyal.
“Fuck, she used us.” I gasped, holding on to the steel bar hanging by my head. “She had us clear the field so she could fire her shot at her father, without retribution from the people who worked for him…that way…”
“That way, she gets everything,” Liam said, limping up beside me, holding his wound. “She rises to power, she avenges her mother—or herself really—and no longer has any ties to her former life as an assassin.”
“Three birds one stone.” I nodded.
“And Ethan let her do this.”
I looked at Wyatt, who stared at me with…with panic on his face. “He let her do this because it was in the best interest of the family to get rid of the Orsinis and anyone else who might be working through them to get revenge. There was no way we could have fought them all if they came at once like they came after you all. Last year our family was already stressed due to the issues with the Italian and Irish families. If we had to deal with her family, too, we would have been taken out instantly. He sat back and let her stone the birds because he needs the birds dead, too, without dragging the family anymore into it. He also wanted you all out of his hair so he could rule the family. They spent the last year regrouping, rebuilding family connections to the city and the families, strengthening the business while you all fought.”
I nodded as I saw the picture unfold in front of me. “So, when her grandfather—I mean father asked for a body, to prove her loyalty, she chose a family member she knew was dying but hid that to trick her father. Cora’s death earned Calliope her father’s trust and our distrust. From there, all she had to do was tell him we were trying to attack her, and her father would protect her because he believed she was his puppet.”
It was a plan within a plan within another plan.
I knew he wasn’t so weak. I knew it but…still. For him to go this far.
“I fucking hate these two.” Liam groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Who the fuck thinks of something like this? How many years does it take to do this?... Actually, hold on. Why did they draw this out over so long? Just so she could figure out how many people worked for her fucked-in-the-head father?”
I stared down at Fiorello; something was still missing here.
“Wait, but who is Siena?” Wyatt asked, and that was it.
“Siena—Calliope’s grandmother—no stepmother.” That was what I was missing. The sons who died weren’t just Fiorello’s; they were Siena’s. She was in this revenge game, too.
“All this time, the family war, wasn’t between Callahans…it was between Orsinis.” Liam shook his head.
“I thought she just liked repeating her name over and over again. But she’s been telling us from the start…she is Calliope Seraphina Orsini.”
“So, what you are telling me is,” Wyatt spoke up again, “we just tried to assassinate a member of our own team, as the team of assassins you didn’t finish off comes to kill us, over two boys who died before we were fucking born! Are you telling me Mom, that Ethan’s right? That I didn’t save my brother but actually fucking betrayed him and may have just helped kill my niece's mother?”
I tried to reach out to him. “Wyatt, there was no way we could have—”
“Oh my God.” He placed his hands to his face. “Mom! Dad! Do you know what we have done? If Calliope dies, this family will not make it.”
I knew but wanted to calm him down. “This family has made it through worse—”
“Worse is not what Ethan will be if Calliope dies. We didn�
��t fucking save him. We cut every single tie that binds us to him. It is one thing to kill her for betraying us. It is another thing to kill her for helping us. If not for her, how big would this group of assassins be, who come to kill us all? He was loyal to the family, and then that family killed his wife. How do you think that story ends up?”
Liam licked his bottom lip and glanced at me, but in all honesty, I was exhausted.
Today was supposed to be it.
It was only now that her voice came back to mind, “Do you even know what game you are playing?”
I worked so hard to get rid of this one fucking problem, and in the end, there were now at least three more.
A son who very well may go off the deep end with grief, one with guilt, and more motherfucking assassins.
Liam was right…I was getting too old for this shit.
8
“Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
~Robert Louis Stevenson
ETHAN
I had always been good with puzzles.
Dona was good at them, too, but she found them boring and could never sit down long enough to finish one when she started.
Then there was Wyatt. He would point to the box and say, “Why do I need to make it when I know what it looks like already?” He thought it was stupid to sit around and piece images together. So, he never even bothered; instead, he’d go outside and play. He did wonder why I liked them, and I told him it was because I got to see each piece up close, then find where they fit.
I liked that it was such a simple task, but it was calming, and in the end, the picture was always three times bigger than the box. So, I would catch Wyatt coming back later to my puzzle to look at the picture when it was finished. When I caught him, he’d huff and say, “It doesn’t look the same as it did on the box.”
That shit annoyed me. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t do anything. I figured that eventually Wyatt would help with the puzzles—he didn’t. He did stop going straight outside to play, though. He’d watch TV, and then, every few minutes or an hour, he’d walk past me while eating a bag of chips or ice cream or yogurt and ask me if I was done.
That shit annoyed me more, so I stopped doing puzzles around him or anyone else. I’d quietly do them alone in my room when I had the free time. I told myself that one day he’d grow up, but the truth was I thought our personalities were set in stone by then, both for him and for me. We were two different people, and we would never be able to get close to one another. How could we? No matter how much I tried, he would look at the picture on the box while I pieced together the puzzle.
That was precisely what happened in our lives now.
If he were like me, he would have asked the questions I asked.
If he couldn’t have figured out the big questions, what was her end game? Who was she truly working for? Then he should have asked the simpler ones first. And the simplest question was—why did she push so hard to have Dino, Vinnie, and Italo? Why were they so loyal to Calliope? In our world, those who worked for our family did so because they either needed money, power, and protection, or they felt they owed us for one reason or another. When I asked Dino this, he said none of the above. That was impossible. So, either was he lying, or I was missing something. And so, I looked closer. The only thing that could make someone so loyal was love. If it were just one of them, I could understand, but all three men loving her? And working side by side to protect her? That was a different type of affection.
That was family.
It wasn’t hard to get their DNA. They weren’t exactly hiding. So, when I tested it and saw they were half-siblings, I remembered what Calliope had said years ago to me. “My family is fucking messy.” Her family was messier than mine.
Calliope had dropped puzzle pieces for me throughout our time together. But she also lied a lot, adding false pieces to the puzzle to throw me off. But her lies were often mixed in with the truth. I learned them last year after the death of my aunt when she told me everything.
Why had she lied right after she’d given birth to Gigi? She had told me she wasn’t a real Orsini, and back then, the way her voice and tone changed was off to me. I thought then that it might have been because it was a painful story. However, she explained she wanted to give birth to Gigi in Chicago; she had wanted me to be there.
And the only way she could convince them to allow her to do that was if she made a record of her time at her most fragile moment. They were listening to that conversation, so she’d had to lie. Fiorello didn’t have gray eyes. His mother, however, did, and so did his grandmother. It came from a condition that affected the women in their family. It even affected Gigi. Everything she said added up with what I already knew. All the pieces I had complied with, the Orsini and Affini families finally made a complete puzzle and revealed how big and messy Calliope’s family really was.
The more I dug into her life, her story, the more I found myself in awe at how she had managed it. How had she not gone insane?
She’d been forced to deny who she was. Never allowed to speak about how her stepfather was actually her half-brother. How Fiorello was a disgrace to humankind and fathered kids he didn’t care about unless he could use them as toys. How his wife, Siena, was a snake indulging his worst self for her own personal revenge.
All her life, Calliope had denied who she was, while knowing who she was. Keeping calm and not losing herself even as every last person connected to her abused her, used her, or nearly killed her.
All the lies and secrets finally came together and made sense.
It also exposed how she was even unlucky when it came to having me as a husband. Though I loved her, I hurt and used her, too. She knew it. We were both telling each other half-truths in the beginning. Our own issues and plans muddled our feelings, but we still had those feelings. And no matter what I did, she still remembered to make cupcakes as well as sang horribly for my birthday. Even when I had other women on my arm to distract myself from her and Gigi, she never failed to wait for me each and every year and celebrate.
As Gigi grew old enough to remember faces, Calliope made and forced me to wear disguises so we could celebrate. She didn’t care if I rarely had the chance to celebrate with her then.
That was frustrating—it made me nervous. It made me wonder if it really was what she wanted to do or if she was just acting with me, too? Was I being played by her affections? That crossed my mind until she became pissed at me. And when Calliope was pissed, she shut down and pushed me away, going completely cold, and that terrified me more than the thought of it all being a game. I could take silence from everyone but her and Gigi.
Slowly, piece by piece, over the years, I began to understand parts of her. She was naturally a fun-loving person, that wasn’t fake. She didn’t care about many people because she’d never been taught to. Family was meaningless to her because, well, her family was worthless. She’d use whoever and whatever she could to get ahead or win. But deep down, despite it all, she had hope that one day, she’d have someone. She kept giving herself goals, and those goals gave her hope. That one day, she’d just be Calliope, with all the glitz and glamour of a good life, the life she saw in my mother as a child. It was the childish part of her that almost made me forget she was a cold-blooded killer. The fact that she truly believed one day she’d free and happy.
“I take my broken pieces and make a beautiful mosaic,” she had said to me once, and it fascinated me. She and that world view fascinated me.
I wanted to understand how everyone could be a disappointment to her, how she was never free to speak the full truth, and yet still managed to hold on to it. She did not sink into utter despair. The whole world could hate her, could misunderstand her, and doubt her, and the woman would make a dessert like she didn’t even notice. She was more broken than me, and yet she was so much better at living. She was weird, but I wanted to be that type of weird, too.
I wanted her beside me. I wanted her free of her ol
d family. I wanted her to only belong to me and me alone. Her past and her lies, I didn’t care about. Hurt and abused people had to protect themselves. I understood that. One day I wanted to be the person who made her hopes real. There were just so many obstacles to getting there.
“Papa!”
I had only just entered the hallway toward her room. It was already four in the morning. I stopped to bandage my hand and change my clothes so Gigi didn’t see the blood on me. She ran as fast as she could toward me, but she didn’t hang on to my legs like she normally did. Red faced, cranky, and confused, she grabbed me. “Where is Mommy? I can’t find Mommy!”
Bending down, I did my best to keep calm and smile for her. “Mommy is a little sick right now—”
“The people downstairs said Mommy’s gone!” she yelled, looking around as my grandmother came over. “That’s what they said, Nana, right? You heard, right? Then the TV—” Her face turned red, and she had tears in her eyes. “You were on TV. You were screaming, Papa, I saw! My mommy was hurt! I saw Mommy and…and….”
“Sweetheart, breathe. Gigi, breathe!” I said, quickly grabbing her, but she kept pushing me.
“I want to see Mommy,” she screamed, shoving against me as hard as her little hands could go. “Mommy is hurt!”
“Gigi!” I yelled, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her into my chest. I hugged her as tightly as I could as she hit me and screamed over and over again. Each time it felt as if she were stabbing me, and I couldn’t do anything. She didn’t want to hear anything. She wanted to see her mother, to see for herself.
“Papa…please,” she cried on my shoulder. “Can I go see Mommy?”
“Tesoro,” treasure, “You have to be calm to see her.”
Because she was tired, because she was in my arms and unable to break free, she relaxed a bit. She sniffled as I walked past my grandmother back into Gigi’s room as she held me for dear life. Glancing around, I noticed all the things she’d thrown across the room. The pillows she’d tossed onto the floor, the shoe she’d most likely thrown that had broken her mirror. If Calliope saw this, she’d pull her by the ears, for acting as such. But I understood, sometimes it felt like people couldn’t hear you until you broke things…or people.