Page 172 of Marcello

The car was bulletproof –

But bulletproof glass doesn’t stop bombs.

A motorcycle rider planted one on the undercarriage of the car while it was stopped at a red light, then sped away.

The driver realized what had happened and fled –

But he left my brothers behind, trapped in the backseat due to childproof locks.

They died instantly in the explosion.

When Papa found out that the driver had fled, he had him hunted down and brought back to the castle –

And then he tortured the man to death.

“With my own hands,” he hissed as tears streaked down his face.

I stood there trembling, unable to speak.

“That is why I haven’t let you out of our home all these years,” he told me. “Because I could not bear to lose you the way I lost them.”

“There aren’t… there aren’t any pictures of them anywhere,” I whispered.

He nodded sadly. “Your mother could not bear to see them, so I had them stored away. We got rid of all their clothes and toys, until not a trace of them remained. And after the funeral, she never spoke of them again.”

He told me something else, too.

Yes, my mother had had fertility issues after Rolando’s birth…

But the main reason it took so long to have me wasn’t just because they stopped trying.

It was that Mama wouldn’t let my father touch her for years afterwards.

She blamed him for my brothers’ deaths…

And it wasn’t until she finally let go of some of her anger that they finally began to share a bed again.

That was why I was born so late…

Because my mother hated my father for years.

And that was why my father became my jailor, and the castle my prison…

Because he couldn’t stand to lose any of his children ever again.

52

If the Camorra were the villains of the story I lived in, then the Cosa Nostra were the heroes – but only because we were part of it.

I didn’t realize that until I was in my teens, and I only figured it out because of The Godfather…

The ultimate fairy tale of the Cosa Nostra.

By that point, I was already heavily into shows on streaming. When you have no friends besides the servants in the household, and you’re not allowed to go any farther than the driveway of your house, you tend to watch a lot of Netflix.

I wasn’t allowed a cell phone or even access to a laptop because Mama was convinced the internet would corrupt my soul. But as long as it was on Netflix, I could watch it.

After years of kids’ stuff dubbed into Italian – Animaniacs, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Hannah Montana – I graduated into Gilmore Girls, Dawson’s Creek, and Pretty Little Liars. Plus Stranger Things and Gossip Girl, among many others.