Sandro cocked his head. “After everything you’ve seen, you still want to stay?”
Desperation clenched Kevin’s stomach. “Please tell me there’s a reason, Daddy… I don’t want to go. I never want to go.”
“If I give you a good reason, you will stay despite what you’ve seen?”
Kevin hugged himself, small and unimportant yet desperate to be acknowledged by his Daddy. “I want to know you.”
Sandro clicked his tongue and leaned against the door, scanning Kevin from top to bottom as if he were seeing him for the first time. “I am offering you two million, Kevin. One for the year of your company, one for your silence. But you’d rather get the truth and stay? There will be no way to put the truth back into the box, just like you cannot erase the memory of what happened downstairs. Do you understand what you’re asking?”
It wasn’t simple curiosity that guided Kevin. He was far beyond that by now. Even if the truth led him to the hell downstairs, even if he was in love with the devil himself, he needed to know. “I don’t need the money. You provide everything I could ever want. I want to be your partner, your boy. I love you. But you have to let me in…”
Sandro watched him in silence for what felt like forever, but then started unbuttoning his shirt, which confused Kevin to no end. He pointed to his chest, to the tattoo of the raven with a skull head. “It all starts here. Are you sure you want to know? I won’t blame you for leaving, but if this is your choice, if you want the truth, and if you want to stay… it would make me very happy. But there will be no turning back.”
Kevin took a deep breath, weighing the options. In his heart, he’d left his old life behind long ago. Whatever Sandro’s truth was, he was still the man who fell asleep while watching movies and interrupted Kevin’s cooking with cuddles. No other future mattered than the one Kevin could share with him, and if this meant stepping off a ledge with a blindfold and trusting Sandro to catch him, then Kevin would do it.
He took a step closer, then another, until he could touch the inked ravens himself. “Yes. I want to know.”
Sandro squeezed Kevin’s fingers, briefly flinching when their eyes met, as if he were remembering something painful. “The explosion in which my family died was no gas leak. My last name is Corvo, which means raven and the tattoos commemorate those I lost. At the time, there was a major Mafia war ongoing in our city, and our building was targeted because of other people who lived there. I vowed to myself I would take revenge. I wasn’t associated with any of the families, so they didn’t see me coming. One by one, I turned them into ash. But these things never happen in a vacuum. I needed help at some point, and got involved with a Mafia family here in America. Once I’d taken my revenge, I found myself without an anchor, so I stayed attached to them.
“I don’t get involved in their politics, but when they need my help, when they need to extract information, I’m the man they get in touch with. As you can imagine, I get paid handsomely.”
Kevin’s head throbbed with the heat inside it. “S-so you kill whoever they tell you to?” he whispered.
Sandro cupped his cheeks with bloodstained hands. “No. Never innocent people. I only handle those involved in dirty business. They know the risks, and they still take them, so yes, I have no remorse about it, Kevin.” He took a deep breath, but never broke eye contact. “You will never look at me the same way, baby, will you?”
Kevin turned his head just enough to kiss Sandro’s fingers despite the dark stains on them. “I won’t. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
“But can you live with it, sweet thing? I’ve only ever had boys stay with me for a year, because a man can only hide his true nature for so long.”
It was so hard to comprehend that Sandro’s loving fingers were those of a murderer. To Kevin, Sandro had only ever been kind, and even discipline wasn’t devoid of affection.
Kevin took a deep breath to give himself a few more seconds, shocked by how little he cared about the fate of Sandro’s victims. After all, as Sandro said, they made the choice to live in the underworld, so why would Kevin feel sorry for them? He didn’t even feel sorry for ending Roberto. He just despised having to do so.
“Are you saying you only ever pretended to be tender? That your true nature is cruel and violent?” he whispered, needing to be absolutely sure about this one thing