Page 341 of Mario
“We don’t know for certain,” Diego says. “But we have a strong suspicion.”
He reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a small white card. It’s plain and unmarked. No envelope.
He places it on my desk.
For a moment, I do not touch it.
Then I pick it up.
The card is heavy stock. Expensive, but not flashy. The message is written in black ink in neat lettering.
I let him walk once.
Blood for blood.
I stare at the words.
No name.
One isn’t needed.
I know exactly who left it.
A cousin who does not know he is my brother.
A man who had let Bellandi live once and had now answered for Victoria and the child she carries.
For my child.
My fingers tighten around the card.
Across the room, Ricardo goes very still at my reaction.
“What does it say?” Lorenzo asks.
I set the card down where they can all see it.
No one speaks for several seconds.
Then Dante exhales, very quietly.
“This is him, isn’t it? Luca,” he says.
For two years, my father’s deathbed confession has been a knife in my back.
I have known of Luca Conti my whole life, and I never understood the resentment my father harbored for him. I thought it stemmed from Luca rising to a position of power in a way my father never had. I had thought it was jealousy. Pure and simple.
Even behind bars, Luca stayed on top.
It wasn't until my father’s deathbed confession that I learned the truth. That Luca was actually his firstborn son. That I was not.
And with my father on his deathbed, there was no one left to answer for this betrayal. For fifty years of living a lie.
For fifty years of hate and resentment being stirred up for a man I'd never even met.
Only to find that this man is my brother. Well, my half-brother.
And Luca, not knowing he is my brother, has reached across the distance between our families and put Bellandi in the ground for touching what is mine.
