And then I broke him.
I took someone like that and I twisted him until he broke.
I think again about the first time I ever saw him. Eighteen, shivering in the rain under an umbrella Tony Stuccio was holding over him at Cesario’s funeral. Eighteen…but he was just a boy.
My first instinct wasn’t hatred. My first instinct was pity. I hate to admit that even now; at the time, I smothered it, becauseit was a weakness to feel pity for my enemy. For my father’s enemy.
In many ways, Caligulaisstill just a boy; hell, he’s half a decade younger than Sammy, who I still treat like a child most of the time. I’ve always hated people calling Caligula a boy. Making out like he’s helpless. But for all his smarts and all his plans, he’s still just a twenty-one-year-old kid.
And I’ve been cruel to him. To someone who never deserved that kind of treatment any more than Sammy did.
His father killed mine.
But he is not Cesario.
With a sick sensation, I wonder what my father would think of me if he could see me now…
I close my eyes.
“What are you thinking about?” Caligula asks.
“My father.”
I can practically hear him choosing his next words. “You don’t talk about him much.”
“Nothing to talk about. He’s dead.”
“Will you tell me what happened that day?”
I open my eyes and look at him. He looks…
Sad. He looks sad.
I shouldn’t tell him. There’s no reason to tell him. Telling him gives him ammunition, gives him a weakness to use against me later, because that’s what Clemenzas do.
But he was kind today. He was kind when it would have been easier to just ignore Sammy, let the guy stew in his own jealousy, easier not to push me into acting decent for once in my life.
I owe him something for that.
“My dad was…he was friends with yours. My mom died of cancer when I was nine, and the Clemenzas sent your dad to the funeral as a sign of respect. I guess that’s where they met. And then…I don’t know. Your dad used to come over every now and then. He’d bring wine. They’d talk together, and then my dad would send me to bed. But they’d keep talking, long into the night. I’d hear them sometimes.”
Something flickers across Caligula’s face. Not pain, exactly. More like recognition. His father, alive in someone else’s memory. “What kind of things did they talk about?” he asks.
I shrug. “It was mostly in Italian. So I guess it was work stuff. But one night…one night when I was thirteen, I heard shouting, so I got out of bed. I came downstairs and?—”
I stop. I’ve never said this part out loud. Not to anyone. Not to Big Gee, not to Seb, not to Rosa. It’s lived in my chest like a stone for twenty-one years, and the thought of pushing it up through my throat makes me feel like I’m thirteen again, barefoot and cold and unable to move.
Caligula slides a hand into mine and holds on.
“I saw Cesario,” I grit out. “Standing over my father. My dad was on the ground. There was…so much blood. My dad was trying to say something, I think. His head was facing the doorway and I think he saw me, but I…” I swallow. “I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry,” Caligula says at last. His voice is barely above a whisper. “I’m sorry my father did that to yours.”
I actually believe him.
“There’s something else,” I say, and this is the part that’s going to break me. “When I saw Cesario—when I saw what he’d done—I ran.”
Caligula waits.
