We don’t do violence against women and I won’t start now in my desperation. No matter how far gone I am. Our methods of torturing lead to death.
“I wasn’t implying you were. I was just…” His voice trails off.
“Cautioning me. Don’t worry, I’m not Andreas. I wouldn’t kill the innocent to get what I want. Not yet anyway.”
I need air. I need to think about what I’m going to do so I step away from him and head through the door.
Dominic calls after me but I keep going. I can’t talk to anyone when I’m like this, least of all him. I don’t want to fight with him now and everything I said to him just now was gearing toward a fight.
Mentioning Andreas alone was enough. I knew he didn’t mean he thought I would stoop as low as Andreas but fuck it I’m still pissed at the situation as a whole.
I’m pissed that Andreas betrayed us and sometimes I’m pissed that no one talks about him or what he did. I get that the hurt is still there and the pain from being betrayed but everyone glosses over the fact that he was our brother.
I walk outside and the warm air of paradise greets me.
This island is supposed to be refuge and sanctuary. It’s become anything other than that, however. Almost a waste.
I called it Pelogos Island after the pet bird I had when I was a kid. It was a Peregrine Falcon I cared for when I found it injured in the woods. It had lost a leg but was resilient until the end when it died several years later.
When Pa built the D’Agostino empire and ruled the oil industry he gave us each a million dollars. I invested mine in property development that made me a pretty penny in a noticeably short time.
That’s how I was able to buy this place. I bought the land and built the castle like house based on the childhood fantasy of the boy and the girl who dreamed it all.
Me and Alyssa. We were just two kids who took comfort in each other.
The island is near Darby island, one of the little private islands in the Bahamas. It’s not on the map and those who don’t have the coordinates for the location have no way of getting here. It’s several hours away from anywhere we know.
You can get here by plane or boat. We have the jet and a yacht the staff will use for going over to the mainland
There are exactly five people who live in the house all the time to care for it and the island itself. There’s never been this many people here.
I walk out to the beach and allow the fresh air to fill my lungs and cleanse my mind.
As my mind clears memories of Alyssa enter. I’d like to say I’m not one of these people who hang on to the ghost of the person they loved and lost.
I do still love her. What I’m seeking is revenge and justice. I will always, always blame her father for what he did. That was the start of our disaster, and it never had to turn out this way.
Her father never needed the money he sought from the man who was linked to Mortimer. It was greed. Then like all greedy bastards he couldn’t pay up when it was time and ended up selling his daughter.
I wanted my revenge against him too, but someone else got to him before me.
Six months after Alyssa was killed his body was found washed up on the beach with bullet holes in it.
Anybody could have killed him, even Mortimer himself. The problem with having too many enemies is exactly that, and nobody knows who pulled the trigger when so many are itching to do it. Alyssa’s father was up to his eyeballs in debt and owed too many he couldn’t pay. He had a gambling problem that could never be satisfied. It was two million dollars I paid to release Alyssa from his debt repayment. I paid the fucking guy he owed thinking I’d gotten her out of trouble. Then weeks before the wedding her father told her Mortimer didn’t accept the money. He wanted her body to give to Vlad, literally. The shit thing about it was Alyssa’s father didn’t tell us until it was too late. Selfish motherfucker.
I guess to be fair, there wasn’t anything different I could have done.
When I think of Alyssa, I try to remember how she was. Doing so, enables me to eradicate the image of seeing her head in the box.
I was dirt poor when we first met. My family had lost everything years before and then we lost my mother. Back then we thought she killed herself. Massimo found her in the river and people said she jumped off the cliff at Stormy Creek.
Those years without her were hard and it was Alyssa that helped me get through them. When we met she’d lost her mother, too. Her mother suffered from depression after an accident that killed Alyssa’s younger sister and the guilt over it made her put a gun to her head. That was our connection. The thing that glued us together.
My brothers and I stick together, and Pa did his best to take care of us but there are somethings which can’t just be healed with words.
It needs one broken soul to another. That was what Alyssa was like for me.
We sought refuge in each other and fell in love, but she was the daughter of a prick who was always greedy for more.