“And Mrs. Campisi? How does she fair?” Luca blotted out his cigar and poured himself a healthy glass of wine.
“We left her.” Chase cleared his throat and popped his knuckles. “She’s dead anyway.” His knuckles were caked with blood, but other than that he seemed clean, so he must have been telling the truth. Then again, Chase’s style of killing was cleaner than mine. While I’d rather beat the shit out of someone and torture them until either my name or God’s was the last on their lips, Chase used guns.
He liked guns.
Guns liked him.
They had a good relationship. Chase hated loose ends, and he hated getting his hands dirty when the gun could do the job for him. To each his own, I guess.
Trace placed her hand on my thigh. I reached down and gripped it, each of us waiting for someone to say something that would be helpful.
After taking another sip of wine, Luca spoke. “You were young when you were both chosen. Rare for a boss to fall into power at eighteen, Nixon, even rarer to earn the respect of your elders at fourteen when your own father nearly killed you.” Luca shook his head. “You and your friends were all sons of bosses, important men, too important for us not to initiate you into the family once we deemed you old enough to know what was going on. I thought of it as a brainwashing. What fourteen-year-old doesn’t want to bring pride to his family? Luca swallowed. “And you, Nixon? You did not scream.”
“What?” Trace whispered.
“He didn’t scream.” Luca gave a sad smile. “When his father crushed his skull. Not one single tear either.” He bit down on his bottom lip. “My own men were terrified. They asked, ‘Who is this boy? Where does he find his strength?’ I envied you.”
I winced. “I set off airport security with my metal plate, not much to envy.”
Frank pinched the bridge of his nose as if the violent talk about the Abandonato family was too much for him to take.
“We initiated the four of you that next week.” Luca nodded. “Phoenix followed, as well as Chase and Tex.”
I remembered it all too clearly. The dark room, the metallic smell of blood, and the knives. Never in the family’s history had they initiated mere teenagers. We’d been forced to grow up before our time. Forced to become men, when we should have been playing baseball and going to the movies…
A knife sat to my right, a gun to my left.
“Prick your trigger finger with the knife,” Luca instructed. His voice sounded confident and smooth to my fourteen-year-old ears.
I did as he said, hands shaking the entire time. When the blood pooled around my fingertip, he squeezed until a drop of it fell onto a card he held in his hand. He repeated the process for each of my friends.
“You are now family,” he said in a low voice. “By this blood you are united, by this blood you will die. You live by this very knife.” Luca picked up the knife. “You die by this knife. Do you accept?”
“Yes,” we said in unison, our voices cracking because they’d barely begun to change. I knew the seriousness of what was happening. My father watched from the corner of the room, his smile predatory. It took everything in me not to grab the knife and throw it at his head. I was going to be boss someday, and when I was, the first thing I was going to do was kill the very man who claimed to be my father. I would end his life, and I would smile when his warm blood ran cold through my fingers.
Luca handed me the card with my patron saint, Blessed Saint Antonio Lucci. I held it in my hand, my blood dripped on the card.
Luca lit a candle and then held it out to me. “Repeat after me.” He held the flame beneath the card and spoke in a low voice. “As burns this saint, so burns my soul. I enter alive, and I will have to get out dead.”
I repeated the words, knowing that getting out meant my death. But getting in? That meant my survival. It meant my revenge…
“Sorry.” Tex shook his head. “Not that I mind going down memory lane, but what the hell does this have to do with the fact that Luca looks ready to run for the hills?”
Tex had reasons for hating that memory. When he should have been initiated as a Campisi, he’d been initiated as a made man, initiated into a family who, even though we’d said was his blood, was nothing like it.
Luca looked at the wine in his glass. He swirled it around and sighed. Some liquid dripped off the edge of the glass; it reminded me of blood, of the blood that would continue to spill if we didn’t fix what was happening.
“Each man takes this very oath. Each man is given a saint during the initiation ceremony. Some men may tattoo the symbol somewhere private, or they may build a type of shrine in their home, lighting candles next to the picture of their saint, in thanks for making it through another day without being killed, or worse, becoming marked.
“One man, in particular, made his very own symbol of the saint. He used it as a way to mark people. As a way to remind that person and anyone else who comes into contact with them that they are a marked man, meant for dead, cursed.”
“What does the mark look like?” Mil asked in a small voice.
Luca reached across the table and grabbed her wrist then flipped it over. “This. It looks like this.”
Mil tried to jerk her arm away, but Luca held it captive as his trigger finger traced the outline of the scar. It almost looked like pentagram minus the circle; instead there was a small triangle toward the top and really long sides.
“The Albatross,” Frank whispered, gripping the same hand and flipping it to the side. The scar made an A-shape with an N where the triangle had been. “He’s branded you.”
“My father,” Mil whispered, her lips trembling. “He said I was meant for him.”
“You remember nothing of The Cave, Mil?” Luca asked, a touch of tenderness inflected, as if he actually did give a rat’s ass what she did or didn’t remember.
“It was dark.” Mil shifted in her seat and jerked her arm back. “And there were lots of men.”
“But only one that mattered.” Luca swore. “Did you ever see him?”
“Who is him?” Chase asked slowly.
“The Capo,” Luca said slowly. “Vito Campisi. He is the only one who makes the mark of the Albatross. If you were meant for him, it means only one thing.”
Mil began rocking back and forth in her seat.
“What the hell?” Chase pulled her to his chest as Mil started whimpering nonsense about it being cold.