Ruined Kingdom Read online

  The man enters and closes the door. He looks around the room, his gaze halting momentarily on that damn book before he faces me.

  “Get any reading done yet?” he asks.

  “What?” I ask, even though I know.

  He gestures to the book. “Your family history. Did you read it yet?” He makes a point of annunciating as if I’m slow.

  I don’t answer him, but I do hold his gaze. I already decided I’m not stripping naked for anyone again. If they want that, they’re going to have to make me. Then it will be out in the open the kind of men they are.

  “Get up,” he says.

  “No.”

  “Get. Up.”

  This time he picks up the desk chair, pulls it out a little, and slams it back onto the floor so violently it makes me flinch.

  “Why? You want to get a look too? Like your brother?”

  He grins, touching his thumb to the corner of his mouth the way men do when they’re appraising you. He takes a predatory step toward the bed, and I find myself leaning away.

  “I thought my brother would have made it clear that you take orders. You don’t question them.”

  “Are you the baby brother?” I ask, watching his eyes narrow infinitesimally. Button pushed.

  “Are you hard of hearing? I said get up.”

  “So are you following big brother’s orders, then?” I ask, standing now because I need to be ready. I know I’m treading on thin ice. “Because from my understanding, Amadeo is the man in charge. He didn’t mention anything about my having to take orders from his baby brother.”

  He grins, and I know I’ve pushed too far. “You know what? I’d have thrown you in the grave with your father if it were up to me.”

  I swallow hard, not doubting for a moment he’d still do just that.

  “But I’m beginning to think Amadeo was right to keep you. You’re going to be fun, aren’t you?” he asks, that grin disappearing behind a curtain of darkness. “That or stupid. I’m going to put my money on the latter.”

  “You’re as big an asshole as your brother, you know that?”

  “No doubt. Let me make things abundantly clear for you,” he says low and menacing, and in the next instant, he takes my arm in a grip like a fucking vise and tugs me into his chest. He’s just as big and as strong as Amadeo, and I know I made a mistake pushing him. He’s going to make me pay.

  I press my hands flat to his chest, but I won’t budge him. He towers over me, like his brother, and hauls me up on tiptoe so we’re nose-to-nose. He’s so close I can see the stubble of a five-o’clock shadow along his steel-cut jaw.

  His eyes hold mine, but I concentrate on the scar across his cheek. The one that matches his brother’s.

  “When I say get up, you get up. When I say sit, you sit. When I say kneel, you kneel. Are you following me?”

  I shove and try to get free. “Let me go, you bastard.”

  He gives me a shake. “Are you fucking following me?” he asks, his voice low and hard.

  “Yes!”

  “Let’s test it,” he says, releasing me so abruptly I drop to my butt on the bed. He looks me over. “Get on your knees, dandelion girl.”

  I swallow hard. I’m not sure it’s the command, the humiliation it will bring, or the dandelion girl reference. A memory flashes so vividly, it makes my brain rattle. Two boys in that room. One just a few years older than me.

  I know it’s him. He’s that boy. The younger of the two. When my gaze falls to his scar, my blood runs cold.

  “I said kneel.”

  I slip to my knees, the carpet rough against my bare skin. I look up at him. He was there in that small house. We were all there in that house.

  “Already better.” He takes a step away to clear a path for me to the desk, and I know what’s coming. “Crawl.”

  I don’t move. I can’t. All I can see is the book on the desk. And the room in that small house. Their faces when my father carried me out as a dandelion fell from my hand onto the linoleum floor.

  He crouches down and takes a handful of hair to tip my head back.

  I grunt with the force of it, my eyes watering as I meet his searing amber gaze.

  “If you prefer, I can strip you naked and use my belt to whip your ass all the way across the room if you don’t start crawling, dandelion girl. I’m being kind. Don’t take advantage of that kindness.”

  He releases me, straightens, and puts a hand on the buckle of his belt.

  “Crawl,” he commands, drawing the belt out of the first loop.

  I don’t wait because I have no doubt he will do exactly what he threatened, so I crawl across the room, feeling him at my back.

  “Sit,” he says as if commanding a dog. I look up to see how his jaw is set, his hand on the back of the chair.

  I sit in the chair, gripping the edges of the uncomfortable wooden seat.

  When he leans over me, I catch the faint scent of aftershave. Different than his brother’s. I watch as he opens the book to an obituary.

  Hannah Del Campo. Age 14. Beside her name is a photo of a smiling dark-haired girl.

  Survived by father, Roland Del Campo, mother Nora Del Campo, and brothers Amadeo, aged 15, and Bastian, aged 10.

  I glance up at him. This is Bastian. But his eyes are intent on that photo and what I see on his face, it’s pain. So much so that it’s almost hard to look at him. I shift my gaze back at the book and catch just a few words that I don’t understand. Nameless child to be buried separately. He turns the page, and I find myself hugging my arms as I see a photo of a very different scene. My father and brother from about fifteen years ago. My brother looks to be eighteen there. My father’s hair hasn’t gone gray yet and beside him is my beautiful mother, young and alive although not quite smiling like the photo I keep of her beside my bed.

  They’re at a charity fundraiser. According to the headline, my father is donating a considerable sum to children’s cancer research.

  “They attended that party the same night we buried our sister. Just washed their hands and carried on like nothing had happened at all. Like lives weren’t destroyed.” His eyes meet mine. “But I guess for them, nothing had happened.”

  He turns the page, and there’s a picture of me at a ballet recital. I remember that night. How proud I was in my pink leotard and magenta ruffled tutu.

  “You had everything, didn’t you?” He flips through several pages too quickly for me to do more than glimpse a photo or a headline.

  In my periphery, I see the little glass jar with the bunch of dandelions stuck inside it. They’re drooping over the sides.

  He closes the book but remains where he’s standing.

  “Does your brother still like to fuck little girls?”

  My gaze snaps to his, and I want to ask what the hell he’s talking about, but he continues.

  “How many others did Daddy pay off to keep silent? How many knees did he break?”

  “My father…” I shake my head. “He wouldn’t do that.”

  He cocks his head to the side, eyes narrowing, and suddenly, he looks like his brother. The emotion, the intense pain of moments ago gone. Now he’s just frightening. He chuckles. “No, you’re right. Wouldn’t want to get his hands dirty.”

  “He wasn’t like that.” I stand. “He’s dead. You desecrated his body. You had no right—”

  “That’s rich,” he says. “Back on your knees, dandelion girl.”

  My heart pounds but I ignore the voice inside my head telling me to do as he says and stand my ground. It’s dangerous, I know, but I’ve never been good at taking orders.

  “No.”

  One corner of his mouth curves upward as he exhales, shakes his head, and in the next instant, his hand is in my hair. Mine wraps around his forearm, and he’s pushing me down, crouching with me as my knees hit the floor. I think I should have saved my dagger for now. For this brother.

  “I remember you. Hell, I can still hear the tune you were singing. Not a care in the fuck
ing world,” he says.

  “You’re making a mistake. I don’t know you and you don’t know me. Whatever happened to your sister, I’m sorry about it, but it has nothing to do with me or my family.”

  “But you’re here now. Ours,” he says as if he hasn’t heard me at all. He brings his face closer and inhales like a predator might his prey. He’s so close I can feel his breath on my ear and down my neck when he speaks. “Ours to punish. To level the scales.”

  His hand tightens in my hair, and a tear slips from the corner of my eye.

  “When I say kneel, what do you do, dandelion girl?” He tugs my head backward painfully, and I make an involuntary sound as more tears come. I swear he’s going to break my neck.

  “What. Do. You. Do?” he asks again.

  “I kneel.”

  He releases me and straightens. I stumble onto my hands and see the dirt on his shoes. I wonder if it’s from the cemetery. God. Did all of that happen just yesterday?

  “Good girl,” he says condescendingly. “It’ll be in your best interest to remember that.” He looks around the room. “I think my brother was right to keep you.”

  I don’t like the grin on his face.

  He walks to the door, and I watch him go. “You get some reading in. There may be a pop quiz, and you won’t want to fuck that up.”

  8

  Vittoria

  I shudder, exhaling as I watch the space he just stood. A hint of aftershave lingers as the minutes pass, and I remain sitting on my heels, unable to move.

  Hannah Del Campo. Fourteen years old. Dead.

  Nameless child to be buried separately.

  The field of rich green grass dotted with the brightest yellow flowers flashes in my mind’s eye. The soldier who’d been left to watch me while my dad and brother ran an errand had gone off to piss against the wall of the tiny house. I don’t know how many children that age hold on to memories, but I remember giggling at that before slipping out of the car to pick a bouquet. I thought they were daffodils.

  I glance at the dandelions on the table now. The book sits like a dark thing before the limp, dying flowers. I push myself to my feet. My knees feel raw, scratched by the carpet. I sit back down in that chair, and I remember his eyes. The almost unbearable pain I saw inside them when he opened it to that page. To the girl’s photo.

  Does your brother still like to fuck little girls?

  Nausea swells in my stomach, and the food I ate threatens to come up. I force it down and open the book to that page. I look at the girl’s face. She was pretty with big brown eyes and a dimple in her right cheek as she smiled at the photographer. Although the smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes. Inside them is a shadow.

  I force myself to read Hannah Del Campo’s obituary. She was at the top of her class at the school she attended, a large public school in a lower-middle class neighborhood of Philadelphia. We had a two-story penthouse just minutes from the neighborhood but a world apart. She loved to dance. Ballet was her favorite, but she’d recently fallen in love with modern dance. The cause of death isn’t stated, but the date is the same as the unnamed child who was stillborn. Did she die in childbirth?

  I look at her photo again. She looks too young to have been pregnant. Fourteen is too young. I went to an all-girls catholic school where my every movement was monitored. I know circumstances are different for most people. I know I grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth with a mother who loved me and a father who would dote on me. Who made me feel like the center of the universe. It caused trouble between Lucien and me. Lucien was jealous of our father’s attention, but he was thirteen years older than me. Our father had divorced his mother to marry mine, and I know Lucien resented her and probably me as a product of that love that took his father from his mother.

  Blinking, I refocus on Hanna’s photo. Pregnant at fourteen?

  Does your brother still like to fuck little girls?

  I shake my head and turn the page to read about the fundraiser, smiling when I see my mother’s photo. She’s been gone for a year, and I still miss her every single day.

  My mind wanders to Emma at the thought of Mom. She was with her in the car. Was trapped inside it with the dead body of her mother for almost six hours until another car drove by and saw the wreckage. One of the photos the papers had printed showed Emma’s small pink suitcase beside my mother’s larger one lying along the side of the road, the trunk having popped open during the collision. They were almost to Atlanta. I’d been at school most of the day and had so much work to do I’d holed myself up in my bedroom after getting home. When dinnertime came and my dad and I were the only two at the table, he said they’d gone out overnight. A little trip for mommy and daughter. I remember being surprised and a little hurt that I hadn’t been invited. She hadn’t even mentioned it to me.

  I flip the pages of the book finding clippings from events my family attended, some with me, through the years. When I get to the one of my mother’s funeral, I stop because a flood of emotion rushes through me. It was raining, the clouds heavy and dark over our heads. I’m wearing a dress similar to the one I’m wearing now and holding little Emma’s hand. She’s wearing black too. She didn’t understand why she had to wear black. I remember how she tried to take the dress off. She’d already stopped talking by then. Hadn’t said a word since they’d found her. We’d thought it was shock, but it’s not.

  I can’t imagine what Emma felt during those hours alone in the car with our mother’s body beside her. How scared she must have been out there in the dark all alone. What is she thinking now? Is she wondering where I am? Did she see them take me? See the violence those men did at her father’s funeral? Does she think I’m hurt or worse?

  A feeling of hopeless sadness overwhelms me. I close the book and stand to go to the window. It’s a clear night. Emma would count stars with me if she were here. I leave the light in the bathroom on and the door slightly ajar so it’s not full dark. I need to be alert for the next visit by one of the brothers, but I’m tired. Exhausted. So I climb onto the bed and lie down, staring up at the ceiling, wondering what happens next. Wondering if I’ll walk out of this house and get back to Emma. If I’ll walk out at all.

  9

  Amadeo

  I wash my hands and take the offered towel to dry them.

  “Thank you, Stefan.”

  Stefan Sabbioni keeps his gaze out the window on the boat speeding away from the island. It carries the body of the man who went by The Reaper. His real name was Bob Miller. Generic. Unremarkable. A hired assassin.

  “Humberto was a good man. And Angelo did not deserve to die so young,” he says, then turns back to me. “Come in. Have a drink with me.”

  “Thank you.” I follow him into the beautiful house. Set in Palermo, the views are similar to my house, but he’s much closer to the sea than I am. I don’t know Stefan well, but he’s been an ally and supported Caballero’s decision to place me as the man in power of the family. “You and your wife live here alone?”

  We go into the study, where he pours us each a whiskey, then sits in the armchair across from mine.

  “Gabriela’s brother spends about half the year here. And of course, there’s Millie, who dotes on Gabriela these days. Our first child is due in a few months.”

  “I didn’t realize your wife was pregnant.” Stefan is incredibly private about her. I’ve only been here a handful of times, but I’ve never met her. Never even seen her. Gabriela is the daughter of Gabriel Marchese. Stefan had taken her as payment for a debt Marchese owed, and he ended up falling in love with her. Strange world.

  My mind wanders to Vittoria locked in her bedroom.

  “Men in our world will always have enemies looking for a way in. A weakness,” Stefan says, interrupting my thoughts. “I realize I can’t keep the birth of my son a secret forever, but I’ll hold on to it as long as I can.”

  “I understand. Your secret is safe with me, and I am in your debt.”

  He shakes it off, then sip
s his drink. “How is Bastian?” Stefan has made no secret of his dislike for my brother. But I know he’s been betrayed by his, so perhaps that’s why.

  “He’s well. We moved our mother to the house a few months ago, so he’s with her now.”

  “That’s good.” He studies me as he drinks, and I know he has more to say, so I wait. Stefan is about my age, give or take a year or two. “Family is important, but brothers can be a tricky thing.”

  My jaw tenses. I know what he’s saying. Watch my back. Trust no one. But I have to trust Bastian. What I’m doing, it’s for him too. We’ve come this far because we’ve trusted each other.

  “Bastian carries guilt over what happened.” I hate Vittoria Russo, but I think guilt makes him hate her more.

  “Guilt? How so? He was a child when what happened to you happened.”

  I recall the day in our kitchen. Bastian speaking up and getting Geno Russo’s attention.

  “Too long a story.” He nods, although he’s still assessing me. “And he is young. He’ll learn.”

  “I’m sure he will,” he says after a beat, which makes me wonder if he’s sure at all. He finishes his drink and checks his watch.

  I finish mine. It’s time I head back. We stand. “Thank you again.”

  We shake hands, and he walks me out to where Jarno, my trusted right-hand man, and two soldiers wait beside him. One stubs out his cigarette as we approach. His driver will take us back to the airport, where I’ll take a private jet back to Naples, then the helicopter to the villa. It’s the fastest way to travel. Living remotely has its advantages, especially to keep my mother safe, but it presents a challenge if you need to be anywhere fast, so I bought the chopper along with the house.