Carlo looked as if he wanted to lunge at Jovi. Or use the weapon he didn’t have to relinquish, because he was thesotto capo.
But he didn’t. Because he was only and ever a coward where it counted.
Antonio, on the other hand, merely studied Jovi, all cold assessment. “Interesting approach,” he said after a moment, and it wasn’t a compliment. Because while he often complained about his son, it was a risk for anyone else to insult him by doing the same. “What happened to that girl in Prague?”
Jovi stared back at this man who had been a shadow over his whole life. The man who had literally kicked Jovi while he was down. Repeatedly.
The older man had gotten rounder as the years had gone by. Gravity had not been kind to his face. Or his spine, though Jovi accepted the possibility that he was the one who had grown tall. Maybe his uncle had always been much smaller than he acted.
Not that his size did anything to dilute the depraved power that emanated from Antonio.
“What do you think happened to that girl?” he asked him. He kept his back to the door and fixed his gaze on his uncle. “Am I normally in the habit of disobeying you, Ziu?”
“I hope not,” Antonio said with that laugh of his that made many a man’s bowels fail him. He didn’t have to infuse his voice with any further threat.
The threat was him. The threat was this house. The threat was Jovi’s entire life up to this moment.
But Jovi felt all those bullets, all those memories, and stood tall.
“Yet you question my work?” Jovi asked. He looked at his uncle as he said it, then swung his gaze to his cousin. “Do you, Carlo?”
Carlo looked as if he wanted to start shouting, raging, brandishing his weapon—but he didn’t. Antonio merely studied his nephew some more. Longer than was comfortable.
And after a while, he nodded his head toward the door. “Get out,” he told Carlo. “And calm yourself down while you’re at it. You’re turning red like apicciriddu.”
The look Carlo threw Jovi was murderous, not that Jovi cared. His cousinwasacting like a baby boy. He only wondered why his uncle made it sound as if that was something other than business as usual where Carlo was concerned.
Jovi stepped out of the way as Carlo barreled toward him, and for a moment he thought his cousin was going to try to tackle him—
But at the very last moment, Carlo thought better of it.
What a shock,Jovi thought, and was certain the sentiment showed on his face.
When the door closed behind him, louder than it should have, Antonio waved to the seat near his preferred armchair, where he liked to lounge like he was a king on a throne.
Here in Sicily, he was.
But Jovi shook his head.
“What is this?” his uncle asked quietly.
Dangerously.
Jovi looked at Antonio for a long while. He remembered the boy he had been, scared and grieving—and beaten for both. He remembered the grim years spent under this roof, the man he’d had to make himself into to survive it, and what it had cost him to become the version of himself he was now.
Or had been, before Rux had turned all that heat and light of hers upon him, and melted all his ice away.
Year after year, his uncle had stripped Jovi down and built him back up into exactly the kind of monster he needed to do his dirtiest work.
Until he was so deep in the ice it was as if his veins were frozen solid, too, because that was the only possible way to survive.
But now he could feel the blood in him, the heat.
He could hear his own heartbeat, even here in the most dangerous place he’d ever been—the place he’d first learned, long ago, to hide it and anything else that made him human.
He looked at his uncle and tried to see if it was visible on his face. If there was any clue to the brutality this man could dish out without a second thought. This man who had murdered his own brother and his brother’s wife and young daughters. This man who had brought his own son along and treated a bloodbath like a party.
This man who had then made sure that the only survivor of that night paid for his father’s sins by becoming a creature who would have been Donatello’s worst nightmare.
