Mercenary (Gangsters of New York #3) - Bella Di Corte Page 0,5

hard knock came at the door. My grandfather took a minute before he nodded at uncle Carmine to answer it. The whispers were lost among the noises in the house and the music coming from outside. Tarantella played.

A minute later, uncle Carmine came back in. He seemed to be a completely different man. The minute it took him to answer the door and come back had aged him somehow. It was a look I’d never forget. Like he’d been drained of blood.

My grandfather noticed and his posture went rigid.

“Emilio,” Uncle Carmine said, putting a hand on my grandfather’s shoulder, squeezing. He looked between the two of us. “Emilia.” He hesitated on my mother’s name. Then he cleared his throat. “She has been murdered.”

The mandolin sneaking in through the open door seemed to cry.

3

Corrado

Rain started to fall after they lowered my mother into the ground and sealed her in forever. She and her husband both. They killed him as soon as he’d opened the door to their house. He was on blood thinners, and it didn’t take much to make him bleed out.

My mother—Emilia—they beat her until she could no longer get up. Then strangled her for not talking.

I looked down at my phone, rain splattering against the screen, and pressed a few buttons. I hit speaker so I could hear her voice.

“Corrado,” she had said. “This is your mother. I haven’t heard from you—” She stopped talking. I could hear her breathing and a rush of voices from the other side.

“Where is she? Who the fuck is she? Palermo’s kid!”

“Fuck you!” she spat at the man.

There was more than one. They were yelling back and forth. The pottery she made and sold crashed to the floor in the background. Then everything went quiet, and my entire life seemed to go dead.

When I returned to the land of the living, I was a new man.

The autopsy report gave the reason for death, but it also said that my mother—Emilia—had never had any children. I demanded a DNA test for her husband, and it turned out, the fucker wasn’t my father.

The woman I believed to be my mother was my aunt.

My grandmother finally broke down and told me the truth.

Emilia and Luna left New York when they were young against my grandparents’ wishes and went to Las Vegas. Luna became pregnant with me after she got there. Luna must’ve either fallen in love with the bastard or was afraid of him, because she refused to give up his name. Even to my grandfather. He refused to talk to either one of them after. When I was only a few months old, Luna died in a car accident.

Emilia brought me back to New York, and my grandfather demanded to know my father’s name. She refused to give it to him. That was when he told her he would take care of me, but until she told him the truth, he wouldn’t speak to her.

He’d never speak to her again, because she went to the grave with the secret.

Tito Sala had told me who my biological father was because he thought I deserved to know after Emilia’s murder: Corrado Palermo.

Palermo was a capo in the Scarpone family who’d tried to kill his boss—Arturo—by slitting his throat. Palermo married after I was born, and after doing some research, I discovered he’d had a daughter with his Sicilian wife.

Which meant I had a sister.

A sister that no one, not even me, had a clue what had happened to. Corrado and his wife had been murdered, but the little girl was never found. Marietta Bettina Palermo was her name. We were thirteen years apart in age.

Somehow the Scarpones must’ve gotten wind of something they either forgot or had just discovered—or they had left it alone all of these years because they didn’t want my grandfather to know. If he had known, he would have gone to war over his daughter. Whatever the reason, the Scarpones went after Emilia thinking she knew something about Marietta, since they had no clue about me.

There’s no speaking beyond the grave, so all I had were my own deductions to rely on. My mother and aunt—either one worked for either woman—knew the trouble (always in fucking trouble) Corrado Palermo was in before the Scarpones had hidden him in Italy. The Scarpones and Corrado Palermo had been tight before he tried to slit Arturo’s throat when he returned to New York. After I was born, though, my mother and aunt refused to speak