“She doesn’t want to see me. I’m sure you know why.” I killed her baby boy, and she’d been suffering from PTSD since. She’d left us and decided to go back to Italy, where she locked herself up in a mental institution in Filicudi. Her bellowing screams at me the last time I tried to visit still echoed in my ears.
Lanza leaned forward, menace darkening his eyes. “I think I’m not making myself clear. Like you eloquently said, you owe me, so youwillgo to Filicudi tocheck on your motherbecause I need you there and that’s the only way we can settle that score.”
Confusion clouded my mind. “How?” It couldn’t be about a case. “I’m not licensed to testify in Italy.”
He snorted. “I don’t need you in court, Doc. Courts are for pussies like that pig Safin.”
“Then why did you let him go to court? Why didn’t you solve the situation with him the way pussies don’t, Don Lanza?”
“Ravenna,” Papa said, shocked.
Lanza raised a hand in my father’s direction, his lips stretching with another sickening grin. “If that piece of shit married my Nina with my blessing and did what he did, believe me, he wouldn’t have made it to court. But Vincenzo had pumped enough of his treacherous and greedy blood into his daughter to make her as stupid as he was. She thought the Russians would help her gain a better status after what her father did. She disobeyed me and married Safin without my consent. Look what that got her.” He let out a sigh. “It doesn’t mean I won’t avenge her death, of course. Blood is blood.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“To make you understand I’m a strict believer in retribution. Everybody has to pay for their mistakes.”
He let his cousin die in retribution, and she was his blood. I wasn’t, so what would he do to me? I pushed my glasses up my nose and pursed my lips. “Why do you need me in Filicudi, Don Lanza?”
He smiled again. “To be a shrink. Isn’t that your job?”
“You have a patient there? Is that what it’s all about, you want me to treat someone in Filicudi?”
“Not exactly. What I want is for you to run that nuthouse your mamma is in.”
“Run it?”
“A nice promotion, vero?”
Absolutely. Running a mental facility would be a dream coming true. I’d finally be a real doctor, one who treated real patients, not criminals who wanted a free get out of jail card. But why would Enzio Lanza offer me a reward when he should be punishing me? Something wasn’t right. “What’s in Filicudi, Don Lanza? Or should I say who?”
Taking a deep breath, he nodded at his bodyguard. The man in the black suit left my father’s wheelchair and reached inside the pocket of his jacket, his gun showing on his side. Then he gave me a photo.
The second I laid eyes on the man in the photo, my heart skipped a beat. “He’s… After what happened in Chicago, I didn’t think… Is he still alive?”
Lanza rolled his eyes and grunted. “His father’s wish.”
I nodded, shaking, not knowing how to feel or respond. I hadn’t seen that face in years. He hadn’t changed much since the last time I saw him, and many memories I’d locked away came rushing in, invading me like a hurricane.
“How do you know him?”
“Anybody who lives here knows who Leo Bellomo is and what happened between him and his father,” I answered carefully, not taking my eyes off the picture.
“I’m asking howyouknow him.”
Was my body language giving away too much? “We…we went to school together.” That was all I volunteered.
“Ah, I keep forgetting you were one of those Bellomo kids.”
That was a lie. He knew exactly where I went to school and why I became who I was now. But what else did he know to choose me for whatever dirty mission he had in mind? “Is he in Filicudi? In the same mental institution my mom is in?”
“Well, that’s where you come in.”
My eyes darted up at him as I finally grasped what he was asking me to do. A wave of coldness washed over my body as my skin rose in goosebumps. “No. Please. Not him. Anyone but him.”
He cocked a brow. “Why not?”
“Because…” I quivered, hesitant to answer. “Because Sebastiano Bellomo is the only Mafia boss that hasn’t asked me to do his dirty work for him. Not even after he let me finish my education at his school when we no longer could afford it. I’m in debt to him. Betraying him is the last thing I want to do.”