I release it. There’s no real choice here, and besides, I don’t want to hurt Casso.
He walks over and sits down next to me, stretching his legs with a low sigh. “How long have you been watching this place?”
“A few days.”
“Who’s inside?” I don’t answer. He looks at me sideways and shakes his head. “Nico, man, you have too many secrets. You always have.”
“Secrets are a boy’s best friend.”
“No, brother, that’s a dog. And a gun. Three-letter words, right? Simple and strong. Not secrets.”
“Why’d you follow me?”
“You’re marrying my sister tomorrow. I wanted to make sure you weren’t up to anything, you know, like the last gasp of your bachelordom, and here you are watching a motel with apparently nobody inside of it. Why are you spending your last day as a single man sitting in this hellish heat?”
“Work.”
“That’s a bad answer.” He leans forward on his knees and picks up a stray rock from the ground. He tosses it and the stone skips over the gravel as he looks at the scrubby grass growing between the cracks in the sidewalk. “You’ve always kept your shit close, haven’t you? There’s a lot I don’t know about you.”
“You don’t need to know it.”
“You’re probably right, but a guy’s gotta wonder. I mean, I know you’re a piece of work, man. You shot that Tony kid’s knee out like it was no big deal, right? And that’s not even the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
I glance at the sky and back to the motel. If Rinaldo walks outside right now, I’m fucked. Better to keep Casso talking until I can get him to leave.
“She was always going to marry a man like me. Better the devil you know.”
“True,” he says quietly and frowns at me from behind squinted eyes. “What’s your real game, Nico? I mean, no more bullshit. What are you after? You walk around like you’ve got all these hidden agendas and I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not with you sometimes.”
I open my mouth to tell him. I’m tempted to admit it all—from the death of my parents at the hands of his father on down to the ruthless way I climbed through the ranks of his Famiglia and right into the deepest, darkest depths of my plan to murder everyone he’s ever loved. I’m tempted to spew it out just to see the look on his face when he realizes that his best friend, his brother, was always out to get him.
But I’d be lying.
Maybe once it would be true. Maybe when I first started all this back before I truly knew Casso and his brothers, back before I’d spent some of the best years of my life working for these people, fighting for them, bleeding for them, becoming their brother. Once, I hated them, all of them, like a cancer.
Now I’m not so sure.
I only want it to be true, but if I’m honest with myself, if I’m truly, brutally honest, I haven’t hated Casso for a long time. Somewhere along the way, he went from being just another name and a face on my list of names and faces that needed killing and somehow shifted into an actual person, a real friend.
Though one thing hasn’t changed.
One plan, one truth.
My hatred for his father hasn’t dimmed.
And I don’t know how to rectify the two things. My need for his sister, my friendship with him, and my unyielding loathing for his father. It’s impossible to fit all the pieces together in my mind, even though I try to make them slip into one cohesive whole.
It paralyzes me. There’s a reason I haven’t done more despite all the years and privileges and trust—I can’t untangle what I really want from what I really hate or who I genuinely love.
I’m a mess.
“I want to understand myself,” I say as quietly as I can and don’t look at him. “I want to know why I feel the way I do. Why I do the things I do. My past doesn’t explain everything, and I don’t know, Casso. Sometimes I think I lost my mind years ago when I was floating from one abusive foster family to the next, getting beaten and raped, getting stomped and burned and whipped. Sometimes I think I’m just a husk of a human. But I want to find out if there’s anything left in me.”
Casso’s quiet. He’s a hard man, a good man, but he grew up with comfort. He’s the Famiglia, through and through, and what I experienced as a child is so utterly foreign to him that I suspect he can’t fully understand it. The pain I’ve been through, the loss and the devastation, they’re only ideas to him.
They’re only words.
But to me, they’re memories. They’re my past etched into my skin and deep into my soul and my bones and there’s no way to escape what happened, what I did, and what I’ll do.