Page 1 of Dagger in the Sea

Prologue

Turo

I’ve always hated Hamlet.

Hamlet never got the job done. Entire play goes by, and the Prince of Denmark does nothing. Bottom line, he couldn’t deal with the truth, nor could he handle what that truth required of him.

Masking the truth is easy for some of us. You become an artist, painting pictures for yourself with your lies. A dash of richer color here, a broader stroke there.

The lies you paint for yourself are the most brutal though, because you need to believe them, wrap yourself up in them. We fight to make them defy logic, remain digestible, real, three dimensional, and oh so pretty as we insist they pirouette on our stage again and again and again.

But when they’re ripped away, because eventually they will be, they hurt the most and leave the deepest wounds, the ugliest scars. They’re the ones that reveal the vileness that we’ve been working so damn hard to disguise. That rawness can never truly be obscured, no matter how hard we try.

I know because I’ve been trying. For years.

Unlike Hamlet, I’ve been brave enough to hunt, maim, kill when needed. And tonight I needed to. I had to for reasons that seem so fucking inconsequential all of a sudden, and only one that seemed real. Her. I needed to do it for her.

There is one spark of hope in the whole damn play for me. Just one—that forced journey of Hamlet’s across the sea. That journey to England had allegedly renewed his determination, and he returns home to Denmark full of grim purpose and ire. Finally. This was going to be good.

Wrong.

Still, the ass is incapable of getting the job done. Still he philosophizes and watches from a distance, still he admires the boldness of his peer, the warrior prince Fortinbras and envies him, still he puts on a show. And at that show, that sword fight, he hasn’t prepared for every outcome and ends up getting himself and his mother poisoned, leaving others to speak for him, others to rule.

Fuck no.

I’d always been filled with purpose and ire, but I was bound by thorns that my ambitions kept sharp. My own journey across the sea, however, has loosened those bonds, stripped me bit by bit.

Tonight, I took up the gauntlet that fate offered, and I rose to the challenge. Now I was the pawn, again. The means to someone else’s end. Inconsequential.

And in that flickering, loud darkness, in that surreal stillness, the cold, hard metal of that gun slick in my sweaty hand, expectations like flames licking at me, the jagged music of that violin ripping through me, the power of that bullet waiting to be unleashed under my touch, I’d seen my lies and the emptiness that lay beneath. Everything I thought I knew, everything I’d been clinging to for so long slipped from my hold as my fingers moved around that trigger.

Only the heavy click, that horrible gasp between my roar and the foul silence.

To be or not to be?

Oh, I am, fuckers. I am.

My heart thrashed in my chest once more, and there, in every hard pound, in the rush of blood, through the smoke, her eyes held mine.Sheremained. She knew.

That was the victory. That was the only triumph. She was the only truth.

And that scared me more than all the lies.

Chicago

1

Turo

1993 - Ten years prior

I’d never metmy father before that moment.

“Arturo.”

That unusual, rich baritone voice saying my name in Italian made my heart leap in my chest. I was being summoned by an unknown force of nature right there on the sidewalk.

He cut a cool figure from my very own imagination—dark hair, dark eyes, dark suit, sly aura. I was speechless. The tone in his voice expressed he knew things, understood secret shadowy things about life.About me.Things that I had no concept of, but that a small, burning piece of me had always been intrigued by.

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