“You are the root cause of all our problems. We would’ve been better off had you died that day Madre did.” I watch that comment hit him right where I wanted it to – his cold morsel of a heart – and watch as his jaw clenches. “It’s been a long time since I valued you as anything other than the man who deals me jobs and money. I lost respect for you when you tested me and tried to break me with the task of killing Zane. As you can you see, I’m stronger than you are, Sal. My love for Zane was enough to withstand whatever you had planned for me. I believed in it and even you couldn’t break me of that. Now, I know you see that. You see us all becoming our own person because of the grief of our brother dying, and you know you cannot stop it. You’re not a part of this grieving, but you wish you were. You wish you weren’t now the outsider.”
My father’s jaw clicks again before he speaks, ignoring Manuel’s passing altogether. “He broke your heart twice. You should despise him and never love him again. You shouldn’t be so stupid with a man as flippant with his emotions as you are with your heart. You two are destructive and that’s all your relationship will ever be a result of... utter destruction.”
“If that were true, why are we still here?” I ask, concentrating hard on my father. “Why, when I was lying there dying, was he the one I thought of and wished I had proven how much I truly loved him? Why it is always Zane who saves me when I’m on that brink of fully breaking down? Why is it he who came back to me and committed to you if he’s so flippant with his fucking emotions? You don’t seem to have recognized any of mine and Zane’s true feelings for one another. All the while he’s been working for you, he’s been loving me. I thought he was stupid, but he’s actually just as desperate as I am to get a final shot. And that’s what this is; this is the final time, Salvatore, because this time you’re not something that can stop us.”
“I can stop you from choosing the wrong path,” my father speaks, taking an advance toward me.
“Not this time,” Enzo says, stepping in front to block my father. His voice is still gruff, but he won’t allow my father or Giovanni to rule this family anymore. He’s taking his place as the oldest of us all. “You do not get to decide anything for this family anymore. You especially do not get to decide who Amelia will love or who she will kill. Those days are gone. You get no control.”
“This is still my family,” my father argues, admonishing anything other than that fact.
“This stopped being your family years ago,” Enzo comments back, retorting his words with vigor and anger. “You were on borrowed time.”
“This is bullshit,” Giovanni sniggers from his corner.
This causes me to look at him, seeing all his malevolence and knowing that I need to verbalize everything I feel for him like I did for my father. If I don’t do it now, I never will.
“And you,” I say, turning to the man I fear most. I have been on the receiving end of his brutality for the final time. I’ll never forget what he did to me nor what he did to Manuel, either. "You used to preach about how I was the one destroying this family. How I was the one failing our family, but yet you're the one who has taken a piece of us all, Gio. You're the one who's killed that little piece of hope in all of us. He was all we had left as proof that there could be a good guy among us and you tore him away from us all." My eyes stream with silent tears. They harden my conviction, illustrate my grief and, to me, right now, prove my vulnerability. "You killed him in a vile way to prove a point, So tell me, Giovanni, what point was it you wanted to be proven? Because the only thing I can think is that you're a psychopath who deserves nothing but a slow painful death."
“I get to see you all reduced to this,” he comments, gesturing to all of us.
We are the fallen Abbiatis. Each of us is united through grief and bound tighter as a family than ever. At first, the frightening moment happened when Manuel’s passing tore us apart, but our love and strength for one another eclipsed any of the evil in our worlds. We are still a union of siblings who were granted a second chance. My father and Giovanni do not come into that equation.
“At least we’re not in the habit of killing one another,” I speak gruffly.
I notice Zane and Enzo’s intense gaze upon me; clearly, this amount of exertion is taking a final toll on my body. They never wanted me to leave the hospital, but I couldn’t just lay in a bed while life continues outside my hospital room. It’s why I made my father feel needed by getting a nurse to check in, but other than that, I just needed to be among those who love me.
“That’s fucking great coming from you,” Giovanni speaks up, after having put distance between us all. "You wanted to kill Papà! You pulled a gun on him!"
I laugh, curling my arm around my tender stomach. I protect myself, bracing myself against the painful smarting as I wage a war. "Did you really think I'd pull the trigger on a man I practically idolized?" I ask, almost rhetorically. "Do you really think I was going to be able to kill a man who I thought could do no wrong? Do you really think I'm the one capable of killing my own?" I question, my eyes narrowing on him with every word I utter. “That’s your job, Gio, not mine.”
I watch him shake his head, dismay riddling as if to cover up how right I was.