Sold by Clarissa Wild

Marcello

The doorto my study swings open. Mario pauses at the threshold and looks at me. In his brown sweater vest, house slippers, and eyeglasses perched on his nose, he looks like a studious professor.

It’s nearly three in the morning.

“Little late for you to be awake, old man.”

“Sleep is elusive for a man of my age and condition. Too many ghosts in the brain, I think,” he says, tapping his forehead to illustrate. He winks. “You might know something about that, don’t you, Marcello?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t seem to be true.”

I sigh and press the ice-cooled glass tumbler against my forehead. A migraine looms in my future. “I don’t need you to come down here and speak in riddles, vecchio.”

He chuckles again. Vecchio—Italian for “old one.” I’ve used this name for him for years now. As a general rule, I don’t like speaking Italian. It’s what I used to speak with my mother. English is a much harsher, more brutal language, and that suits me better. It doesn’t remind me of the dead past, either.

“How would you like me to speak then, Marcello?”

I turn my face with great effort to fix him with a cold glare. As cold as I can muster right now, at least. “At the moment, I’d like you not to speak at all.”

“Fair enough,” he says.

We sit there in silence for a while. I can sense Mario didn’t come here just to keep my company. He may be old, but he’s wily, always up to something, always making strategic moves. There’s a purpose to this visit.

“Fine!” I bark when I can’t take the quiet anymore. “For fuck’s sake, come on. Out with it.”

He looks at me over the top of his eyeglasses. Those brown eyes, so placid and comforting … I shudder. The last thing I want right now is to be comforted.

“Out with what?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, are you going to make me drag it out of you? Say whatever the fuck you came here to say, vecchio.”

This time, he doesn’t laugh. He just maintains that steady gaze, unblinking and unmoving. “I don’t think you will like what I came to say.”

“I’d rather you spit it out than keep torturing me with this fucking charade.”

Mario nods. “I understand.”

“Well then?”

He surveys me for a second longer. “When was the last time you visited Camilla, Marcello?”

I freeze. Of all the things I thought he might say, this was far from the top of the list. “Excuse me?”

Mario says nothing. He just regards me with those goddamn infuriating eyes. Those eyes that say do not lie to me, Marcello. Very few people in my world get to look at me like that.

Unfortunately, Mario is one of them.

It’s not that I don’t want to visit my mother. It’s that seeing her reminds me of a past I have spent many gallons of whiskey and many years of pain trying very, very hard to forget.

Mario rises without saying another word. He leaves the door ominously open behind him. Does he want me to follow him?

I growl under my breath when the room is mine again. “Fuck you, old man,” I whisper, though I don’t truly mean it.

Sighing once more, I set the whiskey glass down on the side table and go after him into the darkness of the hallway.

The house is quiet and still. I make my way through the long hallways, leaning on the walls to stop from stumbling. Mario is waiting for me outside the locked steel door. He nods when I walk up and scowl at him.

He turns and lays his thumb on the biometric scanner, then pauses for a moment. “You know,” he muses, “when I gave Harper her tour of the house, she asked me specifically about this door.”

“And?” I say in a low voice.

“She’s a smart girl.” As if that concludes whatever mysterious tangent he was going on, he turns back and finishes opening the biometric security. The door swings open, and Mario steps aside to usher me through.

I pause just before I cross the threshold and look at him. He arches an eyebrow as if to say, Yes?

I open my mouth to say something; I’m not sure what exactly, though. Should I reprimand him for clearly trying to guilt me into this visit? Should I thank him for coming to me when he knows that my head is full of dark thoughts?

In the end, I decide to say nothing at all.

I walk inside. Mario remains in the hallway.

It is mostly dark in my mother’s room, although the life support machines offer a dull green glow along with the steady beep-beep of her heart rate monitor. I cross over to the foot of her bed and survey her for a long moment.

She looks like a corpse. Only the rise and fall of her bony chest tells me she’s alive.

I reach out and touch her pale wrist. Her bones jut out. Even though she is on a feeding tube, she can’t seem to retain much muscle mass.

Her hair is the only thing that’s retained its former glory. She was a beautiful woman once, and if I look just at her hair, I can still see the remnants of her beauty. Even today, after fifteen years spent mostly drugged up and half-awake in this bed, it’s still long, dark, and lustrous. I shift my fingertips from her wrist to touch a stray lock of it.

“Spero che tu possa perdonarmi, Mama,” I whisper in a low croak.

I hope you can forgive me, Mama.

I sink down on the chair next to her bed. I’m so fucking tired, I could rest my forehead on her sheets and sleep for centuries.

Leaning my head against my mother’s limp hand, I close my eyes, but there’s no relief to be found. Because I can’t help but think of the war with the Russians and the role Harper has come to play in my life.

I think of her every time I close my eyes. We’re torturing each other—two fated souls locked in a sickening dance that’s getting faster and more intense with every passing second. Seeing who will quit first. Who will give up and submit to the other.

I’ve spent my whole life dominating, not submitting. I refuse to give in to her—to her temptations, her secrets. She is mine, not the other way around.

Still, the prospect of throwing everything away feels so tempting right now.

Ten years earlier

With the Irish and the Italians united, all our rivals have only two choices: submit or die. We control too much territory and too much weaponry for anyone to dare go up against us. We have control over the courts, the police department, and the bureaucracies of all the building committees and business organizations.

We are everywhere.

And now, with this meeting here in the Italian restaurant Vitruvius, we were about to become unstoppable.

The restaurant is reserved for us alone tonight, and I cannot wait to fill my belly with the delicious food they offer. The hostesses takes our coats and shows us to our luxurious looking seats. I find myself in the middle, seated across from the Irish, with my father to my left and my mother to my right.

“Marcello,” Frank Fitzgerald says as he smiles at me, “you have chosen an excellent venue for this evening. I hear the food is marvelous.”

“The best tiramisu in the city,” I reply with a satisfied grin. “Or your money back.”

He lets out a booming chuckle that echoes around us. “You’re a good man,” His dark eyebrows knit together in a kind of frown. “Good enough for us to continue in joint business deals, I hope?”

“Yes, I look forward to doing business with you,” I tell him without breaking his gaze. “There is much we need to discuss.”

A server sets glasses of bubbling golden champagne down on the table. “Of course, Marcello. But first, a toast!” Frank chuckles. Everyone takes a glass and holds it in the air. “To the future.”

“To the future,” we all murmur.

We spend the next hour enjoying dinner and talking about irrelevant things, the atmosphere calm.

“How’s your food?” I ask my mother with a wink. She smiles back and squeeze my hand. Her wine-dark hair reflect the light from the above, and the jewelry on her wrists jangle.

“Delicious,” she answers softly.

“The desert will especially be to your taste, Camilla,” my father boasts.

“Marcello, you were not joking about the food. It is all too good. I don’t know if I’m going to have room for this legendary tiramisu you promised me,” Frank jokes as he wipes the corners of his mouth with a serviette.

Just then, the glass windows explode in a maelstrom of shards. I blink once. Just once, and the entire place is set alight with gunfire. Masked soldiers pour into the restaurant, and bullets fly all around us. My mother’s food flies through the air as her hand comes down, fork and all. Her body slumps, going limp against the chair. The vacant look in her eyes barely registers with me.

But when I reach for my gun and turn to our attackers, my vision goes dark.

Two weeks later, I wake up in a hospital bed with a police officer standing at my side. When my eyes open, his eyebrows shoot up, and he rushes out of the room. I want to yell to stop him, but my mouth is too dry to form words.

The nurses come in shortly after, but they’re all shoved aside by a tall, grim man in a trench coat.

“Marcello Dellucci, my name is Detective Anderson. I’m working your case. I was wondering if you might be able to provide me any detail on what happened.”

A police officer? Fuck. Can’t tell him too much about who I am or we risk exposure.

I tried to think back, but the effort makes my head explode in a vicious migraine. “I … I don’t know,” I murmur.

It’s not a lie. I can’t remember anything but my mother’s hair, the blood, and the pain.

One after the other like a hail of bullets, the memories start to tear my world apart.

My father took a bullet to the gut. My mother was shot in the head.

Oh, God.

Horrifying emotions bombard me.

“Who did this?” I manage to rasp at the end of the detective’s explanations.

He shrugs. “The surviving kitchen staff reported the assailants all had Russian accents. That’s all we know for now. There wasn’t much evidence left after the attackers burned the place down.”

Russians.

Of course it’s the fucking Russians.

Grinding my teeth, I look out the window, swearing to myself then and there … I will never be caught vulnerable again.

Present

In the days and weeks following the attack, I didn’t know where to focus my energy. As I stood at the foot of my mother’s bed while she recovered from surgery after surgery, all I could think was, What the fuck do I do now?

I once swore an oath that meant the world to me.

But now, as I sit at my mother’s side in the middle of the night, I feel like I’ve broken that oath. Not just by getting blindsided by my enemies.

But also by letting Harper into my heart.