Page 42 of Bleed
“None.” He says weakly, motioning for me to come closer to him with a wrinkled and pale hand. “You have always been a man of your word.” He continues, licking his dry and cracked lips with an equally dry tongue. “I’ve…I’ve followed your career for year…” His voice trails off as the machine blows another breath into his lungs.
“Why me?” I ask, leaning over him, towering above, making him appear so small and frailer than he already is.
“You need to protect her.”
“Protect her? You put a hit on her.” I say, almost growling at the man who, in my eyes, wanted his daughter dead.
“No.” He says on a wheeze. “I…I knew…you’d never let that happen.”
“So put a price on her head to draw me out? But why? And through the Carlucci’s?”
Lifting his bony hand again, he points to a dresser on the other side of the room. On it sits a large, brown, leather bound book, and nothing else.
“Book. Get that book.” He forces himself to say, his face scrunching up in pain before he’s wracked with a heavy cough that could easily break his ribs with as broken as he already is. “Cancer’s a bitch.”
With each sentence spoken he’s growing weaker, and I leave him in the bed to fetch the book, making sure to keep an eye on him as I do, not fully turning my back on him. He may be almost dead, but in his prime he was a ruthless leader and killer. I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him.
“Yeah, I hear it can be. What kind do you have?” I ask him, keeping him talking and weak.
“Pancreatic at first. Now…everywhere.”
“Fuck man, sorry.” I say to him, and I really do mean it. No one deserves to go out like that. Not even an asshole like him. “Why didn’t you just off yourself before it came to this?”
I watch as the wheels turn in his head while I return with the big book in my hands and the gun left in its place. It’s heavy, way heavier than I think he could hold in his condition. He could easily have afforded the best treatments, and when they failed, he could have had any of his men put him out of his misery if he couldn’t stomach to do it to himself.
“Pull up a chair. You need to see something in there.” He says, meekly motioning to an arm chair in the corner. “Bring it here, sit, so I can show you. Then you off me.”
“You want me to kill you? Gladly.” I snicker as I grab the chair and drag it over by its scrolled, wooden arm, setting it down next to his bed, and taking a seat on it with the book in my lap. “Now, what am I looking at?”
His hand reaches out slowly and touches the cover, his IV line catching on the corner of it, making him wince, and in a moment of mercy, I unhook it and pat his hand. Why? I have no fucking clue, maybe because he’s human and shit.
“In here. Read.” He says, his head lolling over, his eyelids fluttering in his exhaustion.
With my hackles raised because I’m not sure if any more goons are gonna come bursting in the room, I go over and grab the rifle, setting it in my lap when I sit back down, then crack open the book, hearing the old leather spine actually crack from the usage it hasn’t seen in probably quite some time.
The pages are yellowed with age, and crinkle dryly as I turn them gently. They’re mostly written in a very neat, script penmanship with black ink. Whoever wrote this, and I’m assuming it’s him, took the time to make sure everything in it was perfectly legible and understandable.
It's a personal journal, full of page after page of the brutally honest confessions of a killer and mafia warlord, and would make amazing bedtime reading, but there’s one page that grabs my attention, and when he looks over and sees me staring at it, he gives me a half-cocked and weak smile.
“That.” He says, then his eyes close again and he drifts off into sleep as I look at the intricate drawing of a family tree.
With a big sigh, I scan over the five generations detailed in it, with the last one having his children, including Danielle, Valentino, and Alison.
“What the fuck?” I gasp, tracing my finger up the page, following the lineage. “This can’t be.”
The vines that link the generations can’t be real; this all has to be a figment of my imagination, or another really real, fucked up nightmare.
There’s no way. Absolutely not. Fuck no.
“Carmelia? What the hell?” I say out loud, following the lines from her to Salvatore, to Michael. “Ewww.”
I’m no genealogy expert, but looking at everything, it seems that Salvatore and Michael are brothers who both had affairs with the same woman, the one Salvatore eventually married, but never had children with. But she was the mother of all of Michael’s children, all three of them.
“Michael, wake up.” I say, tapping him on the shoulder. “Come on, you need to explain this.”
He grunts and stirs, and barely opens his eyes, except cracking one ever so slightly.
“Salvatore is my brother…we loved the same woman and fought over her so many times…it’s…it’s why I took my mother’s last name.” He says between breaths being pushed in by the tube in his neck. “We didn’t want to be related to each other…even though we are by blood.” He struggles to say, his head slowly moving back and forth as he remembers the past and the woman he loved.
