Jovi heard a crash from inside and assumed that Carlo was expressing his displeasure the way he often did, because he ran hot. And if asked, could claim any damage was an accident.
Jovi, obviously, had never asked.
Carlo was a coward, but he was also dangerous. He was sick in the way many men in their profession were sick. Pain was a game to them, not a means to an end—and because of this, they would be their own undoing.
It was written all over them.
It was what made Carlo who he was. His life was a preview of how he would die.
Jovi supposed his was, too. Ice unto ice, frozen into nothing.
This was as inevitable as the death of the daughter of a fool named Boris who thought he could play games with the likes of Antonio D’Amato.
Theirs was a world with very strict rules. They were always the same rules. Death stalked them all, and none of them could escape it. None of them would.
Especially not if it came for them in the form of Jovi, Il Serpente’s coldest flame.
He sat still for a while longer, until the sounds of his cousin faded away. Until the roar of Carlo’s engine was swallowed up once more by the sunshine and the breeze. The careless birds wheeling overhead.
Only then did he rise and head into the villa filled with ghosts and the shattered remains of whatever glasses Carlo had thrown against the wall, so that Jovi could begin planning the most expedient way to do the thing he did best.
Because unlike his traitor of a father, when Jovi had promised his body, soul, and eternal loyalty to his uncle right here in this villa on the night of the great brotherly reckoning when Jovi had been eight years old—he’d meant it.
CHAPTER TWO
IKNEW DEATHwhen I saw it.
When I sawhim.
I knew it the way any living creature sees its own mortality come at it, implacably, in the final moment. That narrowing within. That impossible calm.Zero at the bone, as the poet once said.
A caught breath, a deep chill.
But it was not completely unexpected.
I figured out who my father was a long time ago. Not the specifics, not at first. Yet what was obvious, always, was that he was an unpleasant person. A bully. The sort of man who thought nothing of using his fists. The kind of man who had never acknowledged the role he almost certainly had played in the death of his first wife, my mother—if the whispers were to be believed. And in my world, they were usually scripture.
It was not a tremendous surprise to find out that he was a criminal.
He had always been one as far as I was concerned.
Even before he summoned me home from that strict convent school near Bratislava, Slovakia, dragged me before him in his study in his ugly, brutalist house outside Prague, and looked me over in a way that made my skin crawl.
It’s time you stop draining the family coffers, he had told me.
I don’t know what that means, I’d replied, careful not to show him too much spirit. Since this was a man who took anything but abject deference as outright defiance.
I mean that you’re pretty enough. You take after your mother in that way, and God knows I’ve paid enough to get you more cultured than she ever was.He’d sneered.A common bit of trash off the streets of Transylvania.
I knew better than to react to that, the way he likely wanted me to.
What I knew about my mother was little more than scraps and whispered stories and the one photograph I’d managed to find of her. I didn’t know if she was trash or not. I wouldn’t have cared if she was. I wished I could remember her, but I’d still been a baby when she’d died. Disappeared. Whatever you wanted to call it.
Boris loved nothing more than to bait anyone around him, because when they reacted to him, he could call it an attack. Then anything he did was just fine. Justified, even. And I had been eighteen then, only a month away from my graduation. The last thing I wanted was to spend that last bit of time away from him under a doctor’s care, recovering from a beating.
Yes, sir, I said instead, like the good little convent-trained girl he’d paid for.
And I think, looking back, that was why he let me go back to school at all. And allowed me to actually graduate, which was the only accomplishment a daughter of a man in his world was permitted. Everything after that would be the duties I was expected to perform, at his command and then, when he chose a husband for me, that husband’s.
