Page 1 of Empire
Prologue - Salvatore
loml – Taylor Swift
Thishouseistooquiet for a man who has spent his life ruling every room he’s walked into.
The parlor smells faintly of cedar, old cigar smoke, and the polish the staff uses on the wood every Thursday, whether it needs it or not. Rain taps softly against the windows overlooking the back gardens, and somewhere deep inside the house, a clock marks the late hour with a low chime.
I sit alone in the chair nearest to the fireplace with a glass of whiskey I haven’t touched in twenty minutes, while staring into the flames as if it’ll finally have an answer for me.
It never does.
At sixty, a man is supposed to have made peace with the shape of his life. That’s what people say, anyway. They say age sands down old grief, and time gives old tragedies sharper edges and softens regret.
They’re stupid.
Regret calcifies. It gets harder and becomes part of the architecture. You stop bleeding from it openly and start living around it so well that everyone mistakes it for healing.
It isn’t healing—it’s adaptation. Rats do it just as well as kings do. We’re all surviving the rooms we build for ourselves.
I also find that most of what they say about age is written by fools who have never spent the last thirty-five years carrying one sentence in their chest like a splinter.
I’ll never forgive you, but I will always love you.
It’s said to me in the rain with exile stamped across his face, and the words never leave me after.
They follow me into every room I rule. They sit behind my eyes during weddings, funerals, negotiations, births, and executions. They’re there the night Vincenzo and Silvano are born.
They’re there the night I watch Vincenzo learn how to hide pain behind stillness because I’ve taught him too well and loved him too wrong to teach him anything else.
They’re there when I hand power to my son and tell myself I’m finally done being what my father turned me into, as if men like me ever get the peace of retirement.
Tonight they’re louder than usual.
Maybe because the house is empty in all the ways that matter now. Maybe because retirement is such a laughably gentle word for what this really is.
I don’t retire; I step aside. I let Vincenzo take the chair that has been reaching for him since before he was old enough to understand what inheritance means.
Capo dei Capi. King. He wears power beautifully, my son. Too beautifully.
There are moments when I look at him in a boardroom or at the head of a table and see myself the way I used to think I looked before the years taught me otherwise.
Then there are other moments—smaller and crueler—when he goes still at the mention of a certain name, and I see not myself, but the weakness I gave him.
Or, perhaps, weakness isn’t the word. Perhaps love is simply the wrong thing in the wrong men.
Vincenzo tries very hard not to let me see how broken he is by Nikolaj’s amnesia. He fails, of course. Not because he isn’t good—he is. He’s better at masking his emotions than I was at his age.
But I know what heartbreak looks like when it’s trying to wear discipline as a disguise. I know the specific emptiness of loving a man who’s still alive enough to speak and walk through a room, but still lost to you in all the ways that matter.
Vincenzo may call it surviving, but I call it a curse—mine, more than his.
I see my own heartbreak in Vincenzo’s face. I see it every time he leaves my office wearing that same frozen expression I once wore throughout my thirties, as if grief can be made elegant enough if you tailor it just so.
It can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried.
The fire cracks, and I finally take a sip of my whiskey, letting it sit on my tongue before swallowing. Then, I set my glass down and close my eyes for a moment.
When I was younger, memory came in fragments sharp enough to wound. The sound of his laugh, the feel of his hands, the smell of the rain on his coat. The way he’d call me that infuriating nickname, the one I pretended to hate but secretly wished he’d say.
