Page 97 of Marcello

If you contact any of your family members or friends, I will know, and terrible things will happen to your family. I’ll start with your little sister. Your first infraction will merit a broken arm. You don’t want to know what the second punishment will be.

I wanted to reach out to them. There were a thousand times I almost did, when the ugliness of my life got too much to bear, and I would have given anything just to speak to Mama again –

But I remembered what Fausto had his men do to my father – the way Papa had looked in the café that night, his black eye and his arm in a cast.

I had no doubt Fausto would do the same to Gemma. I couldn’t live with myself if I was the cause of that. There was no way I could be that selfish, just because I was miserable and missed them horribly…

So I resigned myself to stalking them on social media.

In the pictures and videos they posted, I watched as Gemma graduated university…

Got married…

And had her first baby.

I watched as Edoardo started working as a plumber’s assistant…

Found a girlfriend…

And got engaged.

Over the course of several years, I watched the lines on my mother’s face grow deeper, her hair start to turn grey…

Saw her date a kind-looking man and eventually remarry.

But always, there was a sadness in her eyes.

Every year on my birthday – May 17th – she would post a message on Facebook:

To my darling baby boy, Marcello – I love you. I’ll never understand why you left, but please, PLEASE come back to us. We all love you and miss you.

On my birthdays, I would never go out with Cesare’s crew. In fact, I lied to them and told them my birthday was May 7th so I could be alone on my real birthday.

I would sit there and scroll through years of pictures and videos…

Get drunk on a thousand-euro bottle of scotch…

And prepare myself mentally for another year of hell.

32

Actually, things didn’t turn out quite as badly as I thought they would.

My prediction to Fausto had been correct: it was Lucrezia who ran most of the clan’s business.

She might have been a remorseless psychopath like her brother, but she was far more intelligent. Plus she had patience, vision, and self-control, all qualities that Cesare lacked.

He willingly let her call the shots. As long as he got to kill people, he was happy – and Lucrezia gave him plenty of opportunities to indulge himself.

We began a period of quick and ruthless expansion. Our street-level guys would seize territory from the weakest Camorra clans, and then Lucrezia would negotiate to return it – as long as we kept 10%.

That would inevitably start a war –

At which point Lucrezia would loose the hounds of hell. Cesare would go on a rampage of murder and torture until the rival clan came back to the negotiating table.

Only now, the deal was 50% of the territory we’d stolen.

If the rival clan refused, Cesare would wipe them out. Make an example of them.