Page 97 of Tormented Diamonds
Good question. Unfortunately, there’s no manual for a post-patricide revolution.
“I guess we go home, then wake up tomorrow and figure out how to run this mafia our way. You know, minus the constant threat of death and looking over our shoulders part.”
He chuckles. “Bullshit. Gianni Marchesi will never quit looking over his shoulder.”
He’s not wrong. Letting my guard down in Providence opened the door for a hailstorm of deception. I’ll never allow my walls to be that scalable again. Back then, I had nothing to lose. Now, I have everything to lose, and I’ll die before I let anyone take that away from me.
The man I am without Becca walks a path paved with footsteps I refuse to follow.
It’s a thought that drags me back to the night Sera went back to Newark. The night I sat at the club avoiding Becca. The night Anton spoke the words that pulled back a long overdue curtain.
“Watching love fade away is a pain I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. But fate gave you something others would kill for—a second chance. Don’t blow it.”
I tell myself it’s none of my business and to let the past rest in peace. But when my mouth opens, the question I swore Iwouldn’t ask slips off my tongue. “Did you love my mother?”
“Gianni…”
“Answer the question.”
He exhales roughly. “With every piece of my heart.”
“Do you ever think of what life would’ve been like if things had turned out differently?” I watch him out of the corner of my eye. “If there were no oaths, or codes, or rules binding one family to another.”
“Every day of my life,” he answers, his expression somewhere between fondness and grief. “But we don’t get to choose our beginnings or endings, only what happens in between. That part’s all up to us.”
“You’re starting to sound like Becca.”
He smiles. “That’s actually a Rosalia Valastro Marchesi original.”
It feels like I’m being set straight and knocked sideways all at once. For the first time, I realize how similar my mother and Becca are. Both stubborn. Both opinionated. Both determined to save my soul. I never imagined a woman more pure-hearted than my mother, then a prim and proper psychiatrist with glasses and an attitude threw an apple at my head.
“You think she had a hand in all this?”
It isn’t until he digs in his pocket and hands me a folded piece of paper that I realize I spoke the words out loud. “You tell me.”
“What’s this?”
“Your mother gave it to me the day before she died.” He gives me a half-hearted shrug. “Maybe she knew what was coming, maybe she didn’t. But she handed me that note along with her wedding ring and told me to give them both to you when the time was right. I guess that’s now.”
My throat tightens as I open the worn note. “Genesis 24?”
“One of the longest chapters inthe Bible.” Anton opens the passenger side door and climbs out of the car. I stare after him, ready to lay on the horn when he leans down, one hand gripping the top of the door, the other braced against the roof. “The story of Rebekah.”
Twenty minutes into my search, I’m about to give up. I’ve walked every blade of grass looking for her and somehow keep ending up at the same damn spot. It doesn’t help that it’s almost dark, and my only guide is a half-lit lamp that looks straight out of the nineteenth century. However, just as I turn to leave, I glance to my left, my heart crashing through the wall of my chest as I see a praying Virgin Mary statue.
Every step feels like I’m moving in slow motion. Once I’m in front of it, I can’t do anything but stare at the name engraved on the ornate headstone.
Rosalia Valastro Marchesi.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say, the words sounding raw and stilted. “I brought you something. They’re peonies. Your favorite. Twenty-two of them for every year I was a shit son.” Placing the flowers on the stone ledge under her name, I scrub my hand down my face, four weeks’ worth of beard growth scraping against my palm. “I thought when I got here, I’d know what to say, but I don’t. What is it about mothers that make even hardened criminals feel like a fucking child?” The curse echoes like a gunshot through the silent cemetery, and I grind my teeth. “Ignore that last part.”
I don’t know what the hell I’m saying. Coming here was a spur-of-the-moment decision and a questionable lapse in judgment. After leaving Anton’s house, I had every intentionof going home, but that damn note in my pocket seemed to fuse to my chest and take over my body. Three turns in the opposite direction and I found myself at the one place I haven’t stepped foot in two decades.
“I turned into the man you tried to prevent me from being,” I continue with a sour laugh. “Commendable effort, but I think we both knew it was a lost cause.”Christ, why is this so damn difficult?“I’m sorry for all the times I said I hated you. I didn’t. I just didn’t understand why you’d choose to die and leave me here. But I get it now. I understand loving someone so much you’d sacrifice everything for them.” I drag her worn, folded note from my pocket and tap it against my palm. “Genesis 24. The story of Rebekah. I was thirteen years old when you wrote this. Six months ago, I would’ve chalked what happened up to coincidence, but I guess I’m not so skeptical of the whole fate thing anymore. Becca would probably have a field day picking this apart, but I’m choosing to believe you knew how this would all play out.”
A smile pulls at my lips as I think of how my mother would’ve reacted to meeting Becca. Something tells me they would’ve gotten alongtoowell.
“You’d love her, Ma. She’s smart, beautiful, strong, forgiving, and most of all, she loves me—not the Marchesi heir, or Torch—butme, a man she only knew as an ex-firefighter with a messed-up head.” My smile fades. “I also know about you and Anton. I’m sorryLa Cosa Nostratook that chance at happiness from you. You deserved more than what life handed you.”
