CHAPTER1
SANDRO
I standover my father’s body, taking in the puddle of blood that has seeped across the desk, and I try tothink.
Ciro Castellani, Don of the Family, is dead.
I can hardly believe it.
I need to consider my next moves carefully. News like this spreads fast, but so far, only two other people know: Johnny Jacopo, and my half-brother. Jacopo has just left the house, but I know he’ll stay quiet. He has too much to lose, otherwise.
As for Julian, he is locked up tight in the cells below.
My father lies face-down on his desk and all I can think about is howproudhe was of it—eighteenth century baroque, a replica of one from Versailles, made by the same line of craftsmen, to hear him tell it, using the same techniques, the same wood harvested from the same forest…
And yet, still not the real thing.
Like my father himself. Everything painstakingly crafted to appear genuine—but not.
His blood has soaked into the side of a wedding invitation, discarded on the desk among the other mail of the day. A sales brochure for a penthouse suite in Hong Kong. A bank check for thirty thousand dollars. Seats at the premiere of an upcoming movie he helped produce.
His hand lies gently curled on the desk. When I take it hand in mine, it is still faintly warm, and the fingers open with ease.
I take the ring from his finger and inspect it. Perfectly polished and untouched by his blood.
And I wonder, as I slide it onto my finger, who will dare take this same ring offmycorpse, when my time comes.
* * *
The corridors down to the cells beneath Redwood Manor are narrow and cold, always cold, no matter how warm the weather gets outside. I once wondered if my father kept the passage and the cells chilled to reduce the unsavory odors that inevitably arise from keeping and killing men in them.
The darkness is an added atmospheric element. The bowels of the Manor are dimly lit by design, and I have to pause at the entrance of the cells until my eyes adjust.
I don’t want Julian to have any advantages over me.
He was lying down on the jutting metal bunk when I checked the cameras upstairs, but when I key in the code to open the dungeon door—for this place is, in all senses of the word, a dungeon—he is standing at the bars of his cell, grasping them, staring at me with those unnerving, unblinking, pale blue eyes.
There are adjoining four cells, each demarcated by three walls of metal bars and one of rough brick. Each cell is on the left of the long room, except for the one at the end, which runs a little longer, from one wall to the other. Each cell is stained with old blood, old torments. My father would sometimes keep his enemies down here, the ones he wanted to suffer a long and humiliating death.
It was Julian’srewardto spend time in here with them, to torture and maim, to kill slowly and sadistically, to enjoy their screams.
I let the usual wave of disgust for him pass over and through me before I take a step into the room. He can push my buttons well enough on his own. The only sane way to face him is with stoicism.
His eyes dart immediately to my finger, and a knowing smile twists his lips. “What an honor,” he says, “to be visited by Don Castellani himself.”
I ask the question I have been turning over in the back of my mind since I walked in to the study upstairs and saw him standing, with bloodied hands, next to our dead father. “Why did you do it?”
He gives a broad smile. “You should bethankingme, brother dear. Your inheritance come so early? It must be like Christmas for you.”
My temper rises. But I came for information, not vengeance—not yet—and my anger has never frightened Julian. On the contrary, he finds it amusing. “Why did you do it?”
His smile drops. “Why areyouwasting time asking questions that don’t matter?”
“It matters very much to me, why you did it. And it should matter to you. It will inform your death, after all. Quick and merciful, or…”
But all Julian does is roll his eyes. “You know it wasn’t me.”
“You just happened to be in the room when our father was stabbed?”
