Prologue
Fourteen years ago
ELIO
From what I wore to how I talked and walked, to the first time I had sex and tasted alcohol, and down to my first cigar, my father had been the voice that decided who I became.
I told myself I didn’t mind. He was my father, and I was his shadow. His merciless soldier. His machine. I was to follow in his footsteps. Never make mistakes. Remember his advice and implement his instructions.
That was me, three hundred and sixty-four days of my life.
The day of my birth was the exception, which made sense because it was the only day I got to be me. Twenty-four privileged hours where I got to live outside myself, rearrange my thoughts and my previous experiences if I could.
But that all changed on my nineteenth birthday.
My father had forgotten, which meant I ought to have forgotten, too, but December 1st had been permanently etched into my memory.
The first thing I did that day was visit the church in our compound. I knelt and prayed for the salvation of my soul, just like my mother had taught me.
After that, I left the premises, but unlike the other times, I didn’t feel lighter; I felt… heavier.
Pushing down the feeling, I went to get food and drinks for my brother, Elia. He had no idea it was my birthday; I neveronce told him; he just knew I stayed longer on this particular day. But unlike the last time, I didn’t join him to eat; I just watched. When he asked why, I told him I had no appetite.
He was ten and old enough to pick out my lie, but he didn’t ask any further questions.
When I finally left, I went to a private bar, got myself a beer, sat alone at a booth, and drank on an empty stomach.
It was the first birthday I celebrated with… sadness.
I was about to take on another year of being Elio Marino. Of living in this skin, in this time, in this face, of talking with this voice, wearing these clothes… another circle of ups and downs, ofyes, sirsand turning a blind eye, another round of living a lie that was programmed to be my truth.
I was about to do it all over again, and the feeling was downright… draining.
The bar was dimly lit, and the music was nothing more than a dull hum in the background. I was on my fourth bottle of beer, my hand on my chin, my eyes closed, drowsy but alert enough to know I was still sober.
At the very back of my mind, a distant thought haunted me. For the past four years, since the day after I almost killed Elia to please my father, I’d caught myself doing the same things my mother once did. The same silence. The same way she’d stare at nothing for hours, as if she could see the end of everything. It terrified me to recognize her silence in my own.
I was slowly becoming a shell of myself. But I hid the cracks well; I willed them to leave, for me to sleep better, for the dark thoughts to let me be… but the more lives I took, the more I fell deeper and deeper into that shell, the more my mind failed me, breaking piece by piece.
At least I’d always had December 1st to pull me back out of the shell. But my dark thoughts had now tainted my one day of freedom, and I knew there was no coming back from that.
I knew my nineteenth birthday would mark the day I felt the heaviest because there was nothing to celebrate. I couldonly mourn the next year to come. I could only hate the thought of taking in my first breath when I woke up the following day.
My birthdays would now be the worst days of my life. Constant reminders that I was still living.
I shook my head, pushing those thoughts away, and took another swig of beer, looking around and catching the eyes of a pair of women sitting at the far end, one of them waving at me, the other twirling the ends of her blond hair.
Discomfort settled inside me, and I looked away.
Seventeen had been the first and last time I had sex.
I had been at one of my father’s private clubs. He’d been celebrating a successful shipment for whatever the fuck he did outside the business. I knew it was a huge shipment because 75 percent of his capos were present. They were so rowdy, and I was not too fond of the crowd, but I endured as they conversed in cheers and slurred words.
My father had put a drink in my hand. It wasn’t my first taste of alcohol. I’d had lite beers with Casmiro occasionally, but nothing this strong.
When I finished it, he pushed another, and then another, and then another, until feeling my toes began to seem like a struggle between life and death.
Everything that happened from that point blurred into flashes and short clips—the raw and thick smell of cigars in the air that night, the gruffness of his voice when he called two women over… two women with barely any clothing; he was grinning when they both leaned into me, but his face zoomed in and out of focus.
