A rival hit. Clean. Professional. Two bullets each, delivered on a Tuesday evening while the pasta water was still boiling on the stove. The vast and once-feared Genovese empire collapsed inward like a building whose foundation had been removed in the night. The soldiers scattered. The allies grew distant. The tribute payments stopped arriving. And in the end, the great house that had once commanded the respect of every Family from the coast to the capital was reduced to two people. An old woman and a girl. Nonna Elisabetta and me, clinging to each other in the ruins of a name that no longer frightened anyone.
An old woman and a young girl. That was all the Genovese name had left. Two souls holding up the crumbling pillars of a house that wolves circled every night, sniffing for weakness. Nonna Elisabetta kept the old alliances alive with memory and grace, but memory did not stop bullets, and grace did not pay tributes. So I studied. I learned the ledgers, the routes, the names of every capo and soldier who had ever sworn loyalty to our blood. I wanted to carry the weight of the Family before it crushed us both.
Rosalia had come from nothing. A street orphan from the tenements beyond our territory, with no name, no blood, and no protection. The other girls in our circles treated her like gutter trash. When I learned that she, too, had lost her parents, something in my chest cracked open. I saw myself in her. I took her in, gave her the shelter of the Genovese name, paid for her schooling, dressed her in clothes she could never have afforded, and told her we would survive this world together.
I never imagined she would mistake my love for condescension. That every kindness I offered would curdle into poison inside her. She envied everything I had. The name. The legacy. The two young men whose families had been oath-bound to mine since before we were born. And with a patience I had not thought her capable of, she used that envy like a stiletto, turning Giancarlo and Salvatore against me, thread by thread, whisper by whisper, until the three of them had woven a noose around my life.
While these thoughts still churned behind my eyes, the car slowed to a stop.