Deviant Prince [Romano Brotherhood, #2]

49 | Massimo

My whole life, I've been cursed to kill all the wrong people. It's just always been that way.

The innocents whose lives I snuffed out when I was younger? Vivienne would have joined those ranks soon. My brothers—I used to dream about killing them just so nobody else could hurt them.

I got it right with my parents, but I only killed them because the hurt they inflicted on my brothers was greater than what they inflicted on me. See, I could handle pain as long as I could feel it. Then, it could be managed. Organized and controlled. But not once it started spilling onto other people, especially my brothers.

I always struggled retaliating against those who came after me.

And not because I believed I was worthless. I could just never get it right, and that was a whole lot more pathetic. To merely fail for no real reason at all. I learned to process betrayal with my finger on a trigger, learned to be a man with blood under my fingernails and bodies stuffed in my bedroom closet. Eventually, I started pretending the Romano name, the business, was the reason for it all. As the oldest son, that was my legacy anyway. I had to make it glamorous if it was going to be worth dying for. 

But I wanted somebody to trust. And I wanted it to be a woman who was beautiful and warm. I'd had enough of men who got angry and pretended they felt nothing until that was really all they felt. Then that woman taught me not to trust myself, lay in bed with me and kissed me with blood red lips, showed me how to lose control, made me love it and hate it at the same time. It threw me into a tailspin I don't think I have ever come out of.

And it brought me to this point, where I now lie at the bottom of the hole I've been digging myself for nearly thirty years.

Why don't you just kill Cora? A desperate voice in my head has persisted over the years. Just kill her. Get rid of her.

Because, I'd always chastise myself, Cora has a superpower. She has a secret.

Unbeknownst to most, she's part of a mafia bigger and darker than anything I or my most powerful associates could dream of contending with.

There's a network that threads through society. It's hidden but deadly, like a violent rip current that hides beneath the surface and controls the flow. Rip currents are difficult to spot, but if you look close enough, you can see them.

You just need to look at the VIPs of society for the network to be visible. And it's not the gangsters hiding in their mansions in plain sight, or the violent criminals who get away with it because of money and connections.

Everyone involved in this network is quite powerful and holds important posts. Aristocrats, clergy, politicians, highly placed government officials. These people are connected to an international network—a mafia that uses children to blackmail people. They lure in those they know will become important players and at one point, they seduced my father. They know how to find the right people and when they do, it's an easy bait and catch. It turns out it takes a specific kind of person who won't stop before they're in bed with one of the most innocent members of society. And there's only a very slight difference between this kind of person and everybody else.

When my father brought me to Devil's Dice the night I met Cora, he made one thing very clear. I was his son and I was to be left alone. As a player, he was involved in a lot of the elite parties and he enjoyed putting on his own. But once my father was gone—and I believe part of his reason for faking his death was that he was getting too deep into this dark mafia—I was vulnerable. I was suddenly in danger of becoming one of the expendable children. Those lacking a parent or guardian within the network.