Page 2 of Fallen Rook

Anyway…so back to getting my dick sucked by an anonymous man tonight.

In all my twenty-six years, I’d never seriously considered it before.

I couldn’t muster the courage to go through with it. After my breakup with Adriana, when the whole discourse about me showing zero interest in girls started in our conservative Catholic family, my father had been uncharacteristically quiet about it.

Then, one day, about three years ago, we were wrapping up a Camorra meeting with my brothers, and my dad asked me to hang back after they left. He motioned for me with his hand to get closer to him. I leaned forward, angling my ear close to his mouth. He grabbed my earlobe and twisted so hard that my spine contorted to keep my ear from snapping.

He dropped his voice and whispered, “I don’t give a damn if you’re gay, Vincenzo. If I catch you as much as smiling at another man the wrong way, both of you will be dead before sunrise. You will touch another man over my dead body, you hear?”

I heard him, loud and clear. And even though I killed for a living (though, let’s be honest, all the dudes I offed deserved to die—they were criminals, murderers, pedophiles, scum of the lowest order), no part of me wished to die. Let alone make some poor, innocent guy my father’s next victim.

Instead, I shoved my wants and needs deep into the back seat of my existence and stayed the hell away from anyone or anything I deemed temptation.

So, yeah, I was relieved when my father finally kicked the bucket.

Actually, relieved was putting it mildly. I was…elated.

I never forgot what being called “a gay” in a negative way did to me. It lit an inferno inside me and scorched my soul to ash in a way I found so humiliating, I carried that quiet rage with me wherever I fucking went.

Yesterday, I finally killed him.

It wasn’t very hard, nor traceable through postmortem examination. I knew my shit around medication and took premed courses before Don Vello, a.k.a. Daddy Dearest, forced me to obtain a law degree. I’d even graduated youngest in my class, after skipping a grade in high school.

Skewing his medicine dosage to make it look like an accidental overdose was a piece of cake. It helped that my father had been in a vegetative state for eight weeks prior to my delivering him to Hell’s doorstep. His immune system was already in the shitter, because I’d been poisoning him for a while.

The mysterious illness he’d been suffering from for the past two years? Completely fabricated.

By me.

He was a rotten man who had been cruel to my mother and abusive to all of his children.

Odd, but I couldn’t muster any guilt over killing him, or anyone else I’d ever murdered.

Maybe I was a psychopath like my older brothers, but I didn’t think so.

I was capable of empathy. Capable of love. I loved my siblings and my mother and my friends.

And I would never, ever hurt someone who didn’t deserve it.

As I navigated my way down the narrow, cobblestoned alleyway toward the red neon sign of the club, I burrowed my chin deeper into my hoodie, aware of the curious gazes thrown my way.

I was what Mama referred to as a big boy.

In all the places that mattered.

My Queerdr date was about to get a front-row seat to the exquisiteness that was Enzo Ferrante.

Fuck, my dad better not be haunting me as a ghost, because shit was about to get seriously X-rated.

But there was no way, right? For that to happen, his soul needed to leave his body, and he obviously hadn’t possessed one.

I stopped in front of the neon sign. A cluster of young men loitered underneath it, laughing and smoking. Their carefree air burrowed beneath my skin. My breath caught, and I realized what I was feeling was longing.

I longed to belong to this group of strangers, who looked a little younger than me in age, but a million years younger than me in spirit.

They looked…happy. Calm. Confident in their own skin.

I pulled my phone out and frowned at my last few messages.