"Two daughters huh,"
Donovan sat up straighter, the metallic tang of his own blood making his voice thick. "He has two daughters, but…" he paused, licking his split lip.
This fucking traitor. I watched him from the shadows, my vision blurring at the edges.
"The eldest daughter... no one really sees her. Word is, he can't even stand the sight of her. He doesn't seem to like her at all."
My heart skipped a beat, a cold dread washing over me.
"Fuck, so that man just has bitches?" Luca burst out, his laughter echoing off the glass walls, shrill and hysterical. "Acting all high and mighty when he has nothing but girls? The Caruso line ends with a whimper!"
"Shut the fuck up, Luca," Marco snapped, though he didn't look offended…just bored.
"So you're telling me," Alessandro added, his voice dripping with a smug, toxic satisfaction, "that our father's greatest rival has failed the most basic task of a Don? No wonder the old fool went into hiding years ago. He's probably drowning in the shame of his own bloodline."
I squeezed my hands into fists so tight my nails sliced into my palms. The sting was the only thing keeping me from lunging across the table and tearing Alessandro's throat out. My eyes stayed glued to Matteo. He was the only one not celebrating. He was calculating. He was dissecting the information while his brothers were busy gloating.
He squatted down again, the movement so slow it made Donovan flinch as if he'd been struck.
"You said something," Matteo started, his voice a low, vibrating hum. "Something about him not liking the eldest. Why?"
I swallowed hard. He'd bypassed the insults and gone straight for the heart of the mystery. He knew there was a story there…a weakness to be exploited.
"It's obvious," Luca chirped, still giggling. "He wanted a soldier and got a doll. Probably realized she was a waste of space the second she cried."
"Or maybe she's just as weak as her mother," Alessandro suggested, chuckling. "A disappointment in every sense of the word. A stain on the Caruso name."
Matteo remained silent, his gaze never wavering from Donovan's shivering frame. "Go on," he commanded.
Donovan took a shaky breath, sitting up as the room fell into a heavy, expectant silence. "I'm going to tell it exactly how I was told... not leaving out a single word."
My heart felt like a lead weight in my chest. To have my life, my trauma, my very existence laid out on an obsidian table by a snivelling rat was a humiliation worse than death. And the fact that my father…the man I was supposed to be loyal to—had shared these secrets with a snake like Donovan? It was a betrayal that burned hotter than anything the Riccis could do to me.
"You might want to take a seat," Donovan whispered, his eyes darting to the floor. "Because this goes back. Way back."
Matteo pulled a chair over, his eyes fixed on the man. I watched, paralyzed, as my past was prepared for dissection.
"This happened twenty-seven years ago," Donovan began, his voice dropping into a dark, storytelling cadence. "The night the girl was born. It wasn't just a birth; it was a curse.
The room fell into a suffocating silence as Donovan leaned forward, his voice dropping into the cadence of a dark historian. Even the air in the penthouse seemed to grow heavy with the weight of the Caruso bloodline.
"Twenty-seven years ago," Donovan began, his eyes glazing over as he recalled the archives. "It all started with a ghost of a woman named Isabella. History says Don Caruso loved her more than anything…he would kill for her, spare for her, burn the world just to see her smile. She was his light and his darkness, the only warmth a man like him had ever known. But the Don was a product of a much viler sun."
Matteo leaned in, his fingers drumming a slow, rhythmic beat on the table.
"You see," Donovan continued, "Don Caruso didn't come from a happy home. His father, the Don before him, had six children from three wives. The power was split. The first wife was barren after one daughter; the second wife had the sons and the boasting rights. But then there was Elena, the maid. A low-life servant."
Donovan wiped a smear of blood from his lip. "The old Don didn't love her; he took her. He raped her and claimed it was marriage, but you can't love someone you break. Don Caruso was the result of that violence…the spitting image of the monster who raped his mother."
I closed my eyes for a split second, the familiar ache of my lineage throbbing in my temples.
"He grew up watching his mother treated like a slave in her own home," Donovan whispered. "Elena couldn't even look at her son without seeing the face of her attacker. She cast him away when he was just a boy, telling him to fend for himself among his siblings and the other 'mothers.' At the time, the young Caruso thought she hated him. He turned to his father, fueled by a desperate need for vengeance and a hunger to prove he wasn't a 'low-life' child."
Luca stopped laughing. Even Alessandro looked intrigued by the twisted roots of their enemy.
"By the age of ten, he was a prodigy of violence. By fourteen, he had completely abandoned the woman who gave him birth. He didn't know that she had pushed him away to save him…to force him into the family business so he wouldn't be slaughtered by his half-brothers. When she lay dying in a hospital, begging to see him, he never went. He stayed by his father's side, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the man he admired was the one who had destroyed his mother."