Just as the enemy used me to draw Brando out, so had his father.
On terms, it seemed, that they couldpossiblyboth live with.
Brando had refused his place before, over and over, and his father wouldn’t have it again. Not only that, but this was a test, and whatever the curriculum, it was pass or suffer the consequences from this moment forward.
There was nothing I could do to stop this moment.
Still, my blood froze in my veins, my heart stood still, and the cold, steel hand was back once again.
Though I had suspected my husband would come, none of us were ready for what we witnessed.
Rocco, Dario, and Romeo lined up like soldiers about to be inspected for war duty. They all fell in line, as we had, but became separate men from the ones we knew, lived with, and loved.
I’d always said they each looked as if they were made of the finest Italian marble. The hand of God might have designed them, but Luca Fausti chiseled them in stone.
If the breath of life belonged to any of them, I couldn’t detect it. Each face was devoid of an expression. All eyes were forward. All features hardened to fit an impenetrable cast.
All but Brando, who had sidestepped them, putting a proprietary hand on my lower back. But my husband’s demeanor matched theirs. He was as hard and as impenetrable as his brothers.
I had never seen him and his father this close, felt both presences in the same room.
My head spun and my knees started to knock.
The clash of invisible wills rang in my ears, and the blood in my veins had done something it never had before—resisted its own flow. It vibrated in my veins as though filled with thousands of angry bees, the entire hive attempting to go backwards instead of forwards.
Mia buried her face in my neck, holding on tight to the cross, when powerful words pierced the air.
“Figlio mio, sapevo che saresti venuto.”My son, I knew you would come.
How many times had Brando heard those words over the years? Judging from my husband’s immediate response, I suspected it had been each time he had gone to see his father in prison.
“Non lo faccio sempre.”Don’t I always.
A feeling passed between the two men that almost made me shudder.
Brando had once told me that the only reason Luca had not been imprisoned in a place like Alcatraz or Attica was because he had a feeling the sheriff had a hand in keeping him where he was—under his thumb. But I was positive even the long treks to Alcatraz or Attica wouldn’t have stopped Brando from going to see Luca.
He was addicted to the man’s concentrated truth. He had found both revered friend and greatest foe in the man he called father.
Luca frightened me, but not because of his monstrous presence, or the stories that went around campsites at night of his savage lust for blood.
None of that even mattered.
He frightened me, more than anyone in this world, because of what he could do to my husband, in terms of sending him in another direction by “advice” alone.
Luca had reversed the flow of our lives more than once after Brando had gone to see him.
The internal war going on inside of Brando was strong, a sickening push and pull of forces, sending me deep into his side, to find some semblance of the stable security that I’d come to depend on. I craved it even more in the face of this man who knew how much sway he carried.
“You have been loyal to me, forever truthful,” Luca said, nodding his head.
Brando stepped forward, and a piece of the tulle dress had latched on to his suit, moving with him as though a diaphanous hand was attempting to stop him from going forward.
It couldn’t pull him back, but it moved with him until he stopped a breath away from his father’s imposing body.
The scene was eerie, almost like looking in a mirror of time. There were two men who were vastly different, owing to the mirror’s reflections, but somehow, they were so alike that the mirror couldn’t tell them apart. It could only tell that two separate entities gazed across the span of seconds, minutes, years, but where the differences lay, it had no clue because they were so similar.
Even blind, I could tell them apart. It took more than seeing; whatever lived between us existed inside of me, as alive as the beating of my heart or the space my soul occupied.
