by J. J. McAvoy
“I made many different mistakes. I never found out which he had forgiven and which he still held a grudge over. He was petty like that. But I like to think, in the end, he trusted me. My biggest regret, though, was not doing more for him because I was so conflicted about who I was supposed to be. Don’t overthink it. You’re lucky in that you are much smarter than I was. So, just support him better next time.”
I nodded, but I couldn’t help but wonder how many more years it would be before Ethan and I got on the same page.
“So, just don’t try to kill his wife or die before the next time. You’d only be remembered as an idiot.”
I glanced over my shoulder to see him grinning at me. “You were doing better with the pep, and then you ruined it!”
He laughed at me.
And in the silence, I found myself feeling the guilt.
I had no words.
Just guilt.
So, I wondered what my parents felt.
They said nothing to me. Just told me to go back home, like I was a damn puppy. Now that I had finished playing their game, I was to go sit in the corner while they figured out what to do next.
Which was worse? Being my parents’ puppet or being my brother’s enemy?
Finishing off the rest of my drink, I set the glass on the side table before getting up. “I’ll leave you to your reading—
“Take this to my car; let my grandmother know in the morning.”
Hearing Ethan’s voice, I slid open the door to find him almost right outside of it, and beside him was O’Phelan. Ethan held his sleeping daughter in his arms. One of the guards was taking two bags out to his car. Ethan glanced over at me, and I wished he looked at me in anger, but it was if he looked right through me before he faced O’Phelan again.
“Tell her that I left her all the information she’ll need,” he said to him.
O’Phelan nodded and moved to do as my brother ordered. When he did, Ethan moved to leave as well.
“Ethan—”
He ignored me stepping outside. Following, I watched as he opened the door to the backseat to put his daughter inside.
“Ethan. I made a mistake.”
He didn’t speak, carefully making sure to buckle Gigi in her seatbelt.
“I made a mistake, a big one, and I’m so sorry—”
He shut the door of the car and grabbed my throat, slamming me up against the hood of the car, grabbing the gun from behind his back he held it directly at my head.
“This is a gun, Dr. Callahan. When you fire a gun, a bullet comes out. You can’t take that shit back with an ‘I’m sorry!’” he hollered, nearly spitting in my face; instead, he let go of my neck and pushed me to the side. “If I knew this was how it was going to go, I would have left your useless ass in Boston.”
“But, you didn’t,” I said, rubbing my neck. “You came for me. You did all of this for family because you care about family, right? You can’t abandon me, Ethan. No matter how many times I fuck up. I’m still your little brother.”
“You are dead to me,” he said, getting into his car and pulling out, nearly running me over.
His words…A bullet would have kinder.
“And history repeats itself with the next Callahan brothers,” my Uncle Neal said from the door.
“Uncle, don’t you have anything else to be doing right now, instead of witnessing one of my greatest fall-on-my-face moments?”
“Nope.”
Fuck the last twenty-four hours of my life. Just fuck it!
LIAM
“We’re back to this shit again?” I asked her when I entered the private hospital kitchen to find her on the floor, drinking straight vodka. We were on the level right below Ethan’s, waiting in one of the VIP rooms. I was sure he knew we were there. He just didn’t give fuck now.
“On this episode of Las pasiones de Melody, my son….my son turns on me because of me.” Her voice cracked for a moment; however, to hide that, she poured liquor into her shot glass and then threw back the clear liquid like water. “Plot twist!”
“How many seasons of this soap opera are there?” I asked holding my side with my left arm since my right shoulder was busted, and I eased myself down onto the cold kitchen floor beside her.
“My gut told me there was something wrong with that family,” she said, pouring again into her glass. “I knew that little girl would come back stronger.”
“And you were right.”
“Then how did I get it so wrong?” she spat out in anger and threw the drink down her throat. “If I knew that, how did I get it that wrong?”
“By refusing to stop looking at Ethan as your mio bel leoncino,” I replied, taking the vodka bottle for myself and drinking from it.
I could feel the glare of her eyes on me.
“Don’t start. You wanted to kill him! You kept saying you weren’t going to let him destroy this family, I was trying to—”
“Save him. Because he is your mio bel leoncino,” I repeated, drinking again before she snatched the bottle from me.
“What should I have done? If I—”
“Put aside the fact that he is our son and see him as just an enemy; then you would have listened when I said Ethan was going to defend her with everything he had no matter what. You kill her; he kills you.”
“I heard you the fucking first time. How does that matter now? How was seeing that going to change anything now?”
“It doesn’t! Nothing changes now! I just want to fucking blame you so I don’t have fucking deal with my own mistakes! Fuck, Melody! Fuck!”
I was so ready to kill them both. I was so sure that Ethan was going to ruin everything because of that woman. Despite that, in the back of my mind, I should have known. I should have believed in him.
Like my father believed in me.
I was blaming her, but there was a lot of blame for me, too. Even if she didn’t trust Calliope, she still had faith in Ethan. She still wanted to save him, while I, I… was ready to kill him.
Drinking, I wondered. How would I have reacted if my father had only partially stepped back? If he had done things behind my back, what would I have done?
My father trusted me, and I didn’t trust my son. My father was there for me until his last breath, and I had abandoned my child. I knew I’d never be as good a father as my own was to me. It just sucked seeing it so fucking clearly, now.
“I don’t know what else to say,” I whispered to her as I drank. “I’ve never felt so defeated before.” Lazily I looked over to her. “So, what now?”
“We drink,” she said, taking a long gulp, before taking a deep breath. “And we pray that girl doesn’t die.” Then she handed the bottle back to me.
“How good was your shot?” I asked her.
She rubbed her wrist, stretching out her fingers. She’d been shooting since she was a child. Fighting since she was a child. It made her expert in my mind, but how many years could a body take damage and still function flawlessly? I could feel my body ache even now, worse than I ever remembered just years ago. My knees cracked when I got out of bed; my wrist hurt when it got cold, even I could see my fingers had gotten fatter and slower. Years of punching men in the face, punching walls, getting shot, or fucking stabbed, were all stealing years off my fucking life. I felt closer to seventy or eighty on the inside, than sixty. It was so hard for any one of us to meet an old age in this life. Fucking running around twenty years and shit, I swear they trained these kids younger and younger with each goddamn year.
“We are lucky I wasn’t ten or fifteen years younger, Liam, or she would have been in the morgue,” Melody whispered, obviously thinking the same thing I was thinking.
And if she had been in the morgue, there would have been no stopping Ethan from killing us. Ethan had already stabbed me for having the audacity to shoot her…if she died, then he would track us down then and there for revenge, or worse, gone after Wyatt to draw us out.
“Wyatt.” I sighed, hanging my head as I thought about ho
w we had dragged him into this.
“Ugh...I can’t.” She reached for the vodka and drank, not wanting to think about it.
The dream we had of them working side by side burned in front us…and we had lit the match.
What would my father do?
Was it too late to ask?
“Liam.”
“Hmm?”
“I think we’ve become the old people who don’t know when to quit.”
“We are old, but not that old.”
She stared back at me with a knowing look in her eyes and then drank.
Fuck.
Were we really that old now?
9
“What makes you go to war?”
~Leo Tolstoy
ETHAN
“How is she?” I asked the moment I got off the elevator with Gigi in my arms.
“Stable now,” Vinnie said, still dressed in his suit from the ball. “They said so long as she gets through the rest of the day without any other hiccups, she’ll recover.”
“Of course, she will—she has no choice.” She promised me. I thought the last part while walking into her room.
There Dino and Italo sat, waiting. Italo at the door. Dino at her bedside. She was all wrapped up in bandages, with wires sticking out of her left and right. The only sound coming from the machines that seemed to be keeping her alive.
Vinnie didn’t come inside; instead, he stood guard at the door.
Walking to the couch, I set Gigi down gently, placing the pillow under her head. She muttered before rolling onto her side. When she searched for another pillow to hug, I moved to get the bag I brought. Dino already seemed to know and pulled out the stuffed dolphin, handing it to me. I stared at his hand, noticing the birthmark on his forefinger. It was the same as Calliope’s, as was the scar that was there. He handed me a blanket as well.
“She’s my only niece,” he said.
It was the first time any of them admitted it. That was how you kept a fucking secret. Taking the blanket, I put it over Gigi before rising to stand and face Dino.
“Not all uncles are so loyal,” I replied.
“Not all uncles started from where we started,” he shot back, and Italo nodded from behind him.
“Is this the beginning of story time now?” I asked, walking to Calliope’s bedside, taking off my coat and sitting down, watching her fight this battle on her own. “What is it that brought you sorry children together?”
“I’m not good at stories.” Dino shot back. “Italo? Share with the boss.”
He snickered. “How does Calli like to do it again?”
“Once upon a time,” Vinnie's voice came in from the other side of the door.
Calliope was right. Out of the three of them, he had the best hearing. That was why he was supposed to be our eyes and ears among the city’s elite.
“Oh right, she loves clichés…once upon a time, a very skillful, talented—”
“Oh God, here we go,” Dino muttered, shaking his head as he moved to the other end of the room.
I said nothing. I had nowhere else to be, so however long they needed to get this story out, I would hear it. Just because I knew the end, didn’t mean I didn’t want to know the beginning.
“A kind young painter was admitted into the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo. He had all the makings to become a great artist,” Italo said as if he hadn’t heard Dino. “Then, one day, while minding my own business, a video was sent to me. I didn’t know by who or what it was. So, I just deleted it, thinking it was spam. But the next day, I got the video again, and so I clicked it…only to see the battered, freckled face of an older woman I didn’t know. I watched as she was beaten over and over again before being dragged out of a room filled with other women I didn’t know. The message that came after said, ‘That was the last image I could find of your mother.’ Strange because that was not my mother. My mother didn’t have a freckled face like me,” he said.
“You were adopted by another one,” I said, understanding.
“By an aunt.” He smiled, though it was not the smile of a man in his right mind. “Of course, I didn’t know she was my aunt. Everyone said she had a sister who hung out with the wrong type of people long ago, just like my father’s younger brother, Giuseppe. One day, I was dropped off at their place. They only had two daughters, a son—it was nice. They raised me as if I was their child. They didn’t know the story. My adoptive mother didn’t know my birth mother was kidnapped and trafficked all across Europe like a limited-edition toy. She became older and sick, so they killed her. Do you know who kidnapped her?”
“Fiorello.”
“Wrong but good guess,” Dino added.
“Siena Orsini had my mother kidnapped,” Italo said, and at that, I looked at him. Noticing my surprise, he nodded. “Yeah, they couldn’t build or fund i Libitinarii overnight. Not even with all the money they had earned in their past. You need capital to build something like that, and the fastest way to build capital is drugs.”
“But another family ran that so they would have noticed,” I replied, putting that piece of the puzzle in place. “The next best thing to do is traffic women.”
“And that they did. Fiorello took a liking to how my mother fought back even with whatever Siena put in her, so he took it upon himself to break her in.” His jaw clenched, and he looked to the floor, flexing his hand. “He apparently enjoyed it so much that he did it often, and here I am. You would have thought they would abort me, but no, Siena and Fiorello were playing a game. And I had a connection to the Callahan family, even if it was very distant. So, they dropped me off with my aunt and used me to make sure my mother stayed in line. They didn’t want to waste precious young girls. They used me to break her. Siena and Fiorello said they were going to come back for me anyway. But there was a little girl already at their side, watching, learning, growing. They found my information recorded in some folder. Calli found me, and knew one day I’d most likely end up a guard or something for the Callahan family, and a mole for the Orsinis. She sent me that video and other videos after that. And eventually, we spoke. She told me to enlist in the military as she had a package she needed me to deliver to someone else inside.”
“That someone else being me,” Dino replied from behind me. “Whose mother uprooted and moved to Italy, all for the lover who abused her. But the money was so much better than my father’s. I don’t know if I was lucky that she wasn’t one of the ones Fiorello had to break in, or stupid for allowing herself to become his mistress. Either way, Fiorello knew who I was, and I knew him. I watched him hurt her over and over. But I couldn’t do anything. My mother would tell me not to worry about it, then buy me something. I grew enraged with no place to put it, so I enlisted. Then one day, pretty boy came to me with a package, and in that package were DNA results. Surprise, the person who brought you this letter is your brother.”
Surprise. That sounded like Calliope, without a doubt. “You ended up leaving the military because he came into it, not because your mother had a stroke. And Vinnie, his mother was a prostitute, in the city, and I’m sure Fiorello was a customer.”
They all nodded, though I was sure Vinnie had heard and simply chose not to speak on it. I leaned back against the chair. Staring at Calliope’s face. She brought them into the fold all at different times, but she could do that because Fiorello also planned to use them as well. The man was sloppy and a pig who only thought with his cock. Why? Because emasculated men could only find pleasure in fighting those who were weaker than them. He wanted to be the boss, but my grandfather, Orlando, held him at bay with his power. He accepted that, until his sons died. I doubt he cared about those sons. He had children left and right; they were an excuse for him. They were martyrs for him. He could go around to those unhappy with the Irish and Italian union, brought by my parents. He could say Orlando was disloyal, and gain a following of support. But he wasn’t smart enough to do it all on his own. He was the face of everything; meanwhile, in the background, Siena,
who truly did mourn her children, ran the show. That also must have annoyed him. Going from bowing to Orlando to bowing to his wife, who was barely acceptable during my mother’s time. His wife emasculated him, too, but he needed her mind to keep his business afloat. So, he took that rage out on other women. How many other kids did he have out there? Did Calliope know?
“Calliope said Siena has Alzheimer's.”
“I’ve never met the nutty woman,” Dino replied.
“Neither have I,” Italo added. “But Calliope said once, that she only took the children who were young enough and were especially broken. Who wanted more than anything to have—”
“A mother,” I finished for him nodding.
Calliope had told me the same, not as explicitly, but last year, the look in her eyes after her father had brought Gigi…I knew.
ETHAN—LAST YEAR
I stood under the shower, washing my hands through my hair when I felt cold air across my back. Turning, I watched as Calliope stepped inside naked. She stood under the water, but she didn’t enjoy it. She took a deep breath.
“He took my daughter without telling me,” she whispered, taking the washcloth and the soap, washing my chest slowly. “I told him I was coming, but he took her anyway. I do my best to always be there when he is around. Siena, as well as Luca, are the only two who watch over Gigi when I am away. I know they won’t do anything to her.”
Grabbing the shampoo, I poured it onto her hair. “There is no way we can hide her?”
“She exists because they want to use her to control me. If I hide her from them, they will know. We’ve risked her since the beginning. I knew that. But never used her against me. They never took her anywhere without me.”
“Until you came back to my side,” I said, scrubbing into her hair. “They wanted to remind you that you aren’t free here.”
“Ethan…” Her hand stilled on my chest.
“Hmm.” I kept scrubbing her scalp.
“If I ever fall…”