Teach Me Daddy

The family I’d pieced together from the remnants of my life.

There wasn’t any part of it that I would change, no matter what.

CHAPTER TEN – CAMILLO

THREE YEARS LATER

I chopped up the vegetables and threw them into the pot while the water came to a rolling boil. Junior was sitting at the table, playing some sort of game on his handheld gaming system, lost in the world that was unfolding before him while I made our stew for the night. I threw the rest of the vegetables into the water before I started trimming down the meat, removing all the gristle while I watched him out of the corner of my eye.

The day my brother died was the worst day of my life. I’d walked into his home and found my brother and his wife slaughtered, with their blood coating the walls. I’d heard Junior crying out from the closet, urinating on himself in fear as he clutched a very bold knife. I scooped him up into my arms at only nine years old, wrapped him in my jacket so he wouldn’t see the carnage, and carried him away from that house.

In the past three years, he’d gone from a lively, vivacious young boy to a closed off, angry little man. That first night that I kept him in my New York City penthouse, he’d cried himself to sleep on my lap. He’d yelled out for his mother in the middle of the night and screamed for his father. The only thing I could do was hold him close to me while his little fists pounded against my chest. It was in that damn moment I’d made a decision to take him the hell away from this lifestyle. I was no longer willing to allow this legacy to bury any more of my family.

I was fed up with the horrific system my nephew was being exposed to. It was the same system that ripped my entire family away from me. My mother. My father. Countless cousins and my brothers. In that moment, with Junior wailing against my chest, I knew I had two choices.

I could stick around and watch my nephew suffer the same fate, or I could put an end to it all and begin a new life for him.

A new life for us both.

The decision was harder than it should’ve been. Every cell in my body wanted revenge for what had happened. I wanted to lay waste to the entire Del Vecchio family with my own two hands for what they’d done to my brother and his wife. I wanted to seek revenge for the little boy I cradled in my arms night after night, who cried for his mother and pleaded with me to take him home.

Everything in me screamed to spill the blood of that disgusting, ruthless, piece of shit family and line the city streets with their corpses.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t risk putting my nephew in harm’s way any longer. I had no idea what he saw that night—he still wouldn’t talk about it—but I knew I had to get him away from it all. I knew I had to do what was right by my brother as his son’s legal guardian and get him away from the same nightmares that still woke me up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night.

My only choice at making a new life for us was to get off the grid. I had to move someplace secluded in order to get away from all my connections to the mob. I sold off my penthouse and gave the club over to someone else. I liquidated all the assets I could and stored it in offshore investment accounts. I funneled the money through various investment firms to clean it up before purchasing a cabin in an isolated area of Pennsylvania. It took longer than I’d have liked but, finally, after two and a half years, we moved into an isolated cabin.

A place near the Poconos. The only place I’d ever known to have any sort of beauty.

Back during my empire days, I’d taken many trips there to ski. I ate at many of the diners and sampled many of the homebrews in the bars that peppered the area. It was beautiful in the wintertime and it was the first time I’d ever gotten a good look at how secluded and isolated some people could live. I encountered people who were completely self-sustained. People who’d cashed in their riches and their businesses to live a slow life, out from beneath the prying eye of the public. At first, I thought they were insane for leaving behind their fancy lives of opulence.

But when I purchased that cabin under a random alias near the mountain side of the Poconos, the only thing I could think of was my songbird.