Brando gave me a look from the side of his eye. It was a look we had been giving each other. Our father was not the same. He was in the same room with us, half his mind on business, but he was also not in the room with us, the other half of his mind far away.
I had noticed a change in him while we were all on Aria Island, not long after Amora came into my life. I did not care for the way Margherita spoke to me when I escorted her home onenight. It made me feel as if she was telling me things she did not want me to forget if she was not around to do so.
“You, Dario, and Romeo have given me nothing short of true acceptance and respect. I know it’s instilled in all of you, but I’ve always felt the truth behind it. Even if the…situation between me and Luca was not always easy on you. Your father’s marriage was arranged and….there I came, ruffling it all up. I truly have no regrets about doing that. It’s what love does. It ruffles us. Makes us forget the rules and live in the direction of our own happiness. I’m pretty sure I started a ruffle in this family, too, followed by Scarlett—we’re not exactly the type to fit in, and neither is Ari. I prefer to call us trailblazers, though.” She winked.
“But as Brando would say, if he ever spoke of it, I was not always present as a mamma. It’s been my honor to relive that part of my life with all my sons and grandchildren. I consider you the son of my heart, Rocco, and your sons the grandsons of my heart.”
Leaning down, I kissed her softly on the cheek. Her eyes were still closed when I rose to my full height. Two more tears ran from her eyes, but this time she hastily wiped them away.
“Thank you,” she whispered, understanding my response was in the tender kiss.
It was not like Margherita to speak in such a way. When a dark diagnosis had been placed upon her shoulders, although the outcome the physician said was bright because she had caught it in time, even then she did not want to speak of it, or make amends, as if she was saying goodbye or getting her affairs in order. Her speech to me that night had weighed heavily on my shoulders and heart, but as time passed, I wondered if she had just been reflecting on her life and her true feelings.
Occasionally, Brando and I would catch how our father looked at our wives, as if he expected something from them—perhaps to predict the future. It did not sit well in my gut. Neither did the situation with Francesco, which Mac brought up.
“The letters,” my father said, tapping twice on his desk.
I rummaged around in my leather briefcase and set them on his desk.
“I will read over them,” he said. “I expect to be prepared for this meeting. It has been a long time coming.”
We all kept our eyes on him. My father was not a predictable man, but all the men in the room knew when he had more to say. If we wanted to keep our tongues, we kept our mouths shut until he asked one of us a question or we instinctually knew when he wanted us to add to the conversation.
He tapped his finger against his desk, once, twice, his eyes in the distance. He looked directly at me when he spoke the next words. “My wife has requested a favor of me. If any man in this family shares blood with another man, she does not wish for the blood to be spilled.”
My eyes narrowed some.
This was our way, if a challenge was issued and set. We would duel it out in one way or another. At one time, my grandfather, Marzio, had ruled that our branch of the family would no longer take to arms, at the behest of my grandmother, Grazia Angeli, on her death bed.
Every woman on her death bed had this right to ask something of this enormity of her husband, but the only woman who ever came close to this wish was my Nonna. She had requested that no matches be held in the colosseum. She had witnessed Nonno sword fight another man and had never truly recovered from it. She also didn’t want any of the men in my grandfather’s line to draw swords. This was why Brando and I had raced when he had challenged me in my home. My father had reinstated the practices when he became king.
What Margherita was asking was for one of our core rules to be stopped until another man took over the family. That man would be me. I would have the right to reinstate the law, but I noticed the look in my father’s eyes when he said this to me.
He would expect me to keep the law as well.
What he was considering filled in the words he did not have to speak. My father would change the core of this family for the woman he loved.
He had killed for her before to change it.
He would do whatever she asked of him, and do it again.
He was also possessed by the thought of his wife asking this of him before the time truly came. This explained his often broodiness and how his eyes were often in the distance. Margherita had drawn the darkness closer to him, and he was attempting to fight through it to save her from what he felt she had drawn closer to the both of them—the scent of a freshly dug grave, its cold bed ready to welcome a once-warm body inside of it.
I cleared my throat, knowing he was expecting me to speak. I would not mention Margherita’s health, or question him about it; that was between them. However. “The family will fight this.”
My father knew as well as I did that to change a core rule, such as no challenges at all, it would take the power of my father to figure out a way to make this happen.
He nodded. “It will be done. My wife asks this of me.”
All I did was nod, the wheels of my mind working. I was not sure in which direction we were headed, but I knew it was not going to be the path of least resistance. My father then changed the subject. The switching of power in the family. It seemed as if fate had had other plans for me. The year the crown was supposed to be placed on my head, the death of Rosaria Caffi stopped it.
“Francesco could possibly challenge you,” Mac said to me.
I nodded. “Let him.”
“The family might turn and give him favor,” Donato said.
“Especially after what has happened,” Guido said.
