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He starts to cry. That nearly breaks my resolve, but I remain strong by keeping my empathy at bay. He needs to struggle and hurt and endure every shard of pain he ever ignored us suffering from. He has to suffer for every misdeed he allowed us to struggle with. I cannot allow him a free pass because I cannot forgive him for the life he wanted for us; the life that is now slowly killing us one by one.

“Please talk to me, Amelia,” he begs, my father spiraling into the form of a desperate man. I have seen many faces to my father, but this one is new. He has adorned many masks, shred many emotions, but never have I seen this amount of turmoil.

I narrow my gaze, but I say nothing he’ll enjoy hearing.

“When is Manuel’s funeral?” I ask, not instigating the father-daughter chitchat. “I don’t want to miss it.”

He splutters for a moment, stunned momentarily for my true lack of heart toward him. “I would never allow you or Enzo to miss something like that. Manuel needs you two there most,” he says, pausing afterwards.

I scoff – Manuel needs us there? Does he even hear himself right now? I shake my head, putting a hand to my head. Once before, I would have lashed out with a fierce tongue, attacked my father, but I have no fight left in me. He stands before me, throwing apologies around and confessing his love for the family, professing how Manuel needs us, but my feisty attitude has abandoned me and left me with a hollow gap he’s only making excessively worse.

“You never knew what Manuel needed before. Why would you now?” I ask, my tone ice-cold and cutting. “You never knew what any of us needed, so why do you think you do now? Manuel doesn’t need anything else anymore. He’s gone, Sal. My baby brother is dead and if anything, he got the peace he wanted every single day he was alive.”

“I understand that,” he utters, closing his eyes with emotional grief.

“Do you?” I snap, asking him harshly.

My father will never know the strangled memories that reside within me. He will never know how poisoned my thoughts have been, or how lost I allowed myself to become. My father will never revel in the battle I cast upon myself for family, for love, for happiness, for absolution. He will never understand how much I fought with myself to decide the right path in life and how much I turned my back on.

“You never chose to understand anything but the game you played with every one of our lives. You never saw past the money and the power and the absolute hell you reaped on Earth. Now,
now
you decide to come back to us with some sort of modest grief as if you deserve to feel anything in the aftermath of Manuel’s death.” I can feel the tears beginning to fight their way to the surface of my eyes, ready to glaze over my vision with a blurry film, but I keep them locked down for a little while longer. “You don’t, Sal. You don’t deserve to mourn for a son you cared less about and you do not get to stand there and resent ever making me feel unloved because it’s been too long. You’re too late.”

“Amelia,” he struggles to interrupt me.

“No!” I bellow, my body seizing up. “I have laid here for two days wondering what I was going to do with my life.” I take a deep breath and use every ounce of my grief to fuel my final statement to my father. “So, I made the first steps. I don’t want to be your daughter anymore,” I remark honestly, laying my gaze firmly on him, waiting to see how my words affect him. “You can fight and try and sway me, but right now, you are just the man who destroyed me.”

“You don’t mean that,” he replies, fearsome terror igniting in him. “Amelia, please, don’t be rash.”

“Oh, this isn’t me being rash. This is me being the sanest I have been since Mama died. For years, I stuck by you, hoping and praying I would see some sort of reminder that my father is the man who brought up six children in a loving home, but you aren’t. You are past the point of saving, but I’m not past the point of saving myself from you, Sal.” I watch him barely react as my words ring true to his conscience – the one that’s laid dormant for years. “There’s a child of yours out there who will love to hear from you,” I comment dryly, hearing the bitterness in my own voice, and it makes me recoil. “But they are not in this building.” I take a deep breath. “I’m sure Giovanni is just waiting for you to bail him out and make this all okay with the family again. Go and dote on the child who only ever did right in your eyes.”

“This isn’t the right thing,” he tells me, taking a staggered step forward.

“You let him run!” I shout and hiss as I erupt the pain in me. I grit my teeth, hoping my father doesn’t see my fleeting vulnerability as something he can abuse to get close to me and pander to my needs. “When I heard he got out of the house that told me all it needed to. You could’ve stopped him. You used enough force on me in the past, but sweet, golden boy, Giovanni gets a free pass to murder his own and run free! You allowed him that, Sal! That is all on you and it always will be. You made us into the people we are today. You had a hand in making us who we all are, but believe me now, Giovanni is your biggest mistake, and I cannot see how this will end well for either of you.”

“I will hunt him down, Amelia, I will do that. I will make sure he pays for what he has done,” he counters, trying to ease my mind with empty promises. “I don’t know how, but I will make sure he pays. He has to pay for this. I am losing my entire family, and it’s Giovanni’s fault. He was always going to bring us down and it took me until now to realize that. It’s time to make the Dio Lavoro be what it always was meant to be. It stood for family once upon a time; it needs to return to that state. Giovanni is an altercation that can be changed, and we can resume making amends and fixing relationships.”

“This is bullshit,” I grumble, unable to continuing hearing him out.

HIs inability to admit fault is sickening, and he has taken full advantage of my wounded state to get his word in and I cannot tolerate this any longer. I want to be home where I can recuperate and make leeway on a real plan for my future. I want to be in the solace of my room where the rest of that murderous house can fall away and be left forgotten. I don’t want to be cooped up in this room, listening to the beeping of my heart, waiting for nurses to come in and mollycoddle me. I cannot stand to see Zane’s distress at trying to make my world right when it’s all going to pieces. I want to be home and able to make plans for Manuel’s funeral, so I can start some of this healing process.

Being stuck here with my father trying to make amends is doing nothing but slowly killing me more.

I push up, ignoring my aggravated stomach as it protests for too much movement and I start to tear away at the pads on my chest, the ones that register my broken heart, and struggle with my body to get up a little more. The heart monitor flat lines with no beating heart to disclose and as I go for my IV, my father flies into action.

“Bambina, stop!” he shouts, grabbing a hold of me. “You cannot do this! Stop before you hurt yourself more.”

“Get off me!” I shout, fighting against him. “I don’t want you to touch me.” It’s as that final sentence falls from my lips that I break, crack, and collide with the misery that lies in wait for me. I sink and I collapse and I give up the little fight that resonated from a deep part of me. “I want to go home,” I sob, held up only by my father’s hands. “I want this hell to go away. Please,” I cry, my head sinking forward. “I just want to go home.” I look up to see Zane standing in the doorway, flanked by my brothers, Carlo and Enzo. I ignore my paternal father and look straight to the one man who has fathered me and raised me to become the woman I am – the one I always wanted to be. “I want to go home, Enzo.”

“I’ll make it happen.” My father’s vow is ended as I finally find his presence replaced by one I want – Enzo. “I will pay for whatever you need, Amelia. You and Enzo will be home within the next twenty-four hours, I promise you that now.”

“That’s the least you can do,” Enzo growls to our father as his arms envelop me and he slowly lays me down again. I can feel his tense posture around me, but it’s the words that ring out that worry me most – the detachment is still there ringing louder with every syllable. “Get a nurse on your way out, Salvatore.” Enzo’s grasp on me offers much more protection to anything transcending in the room and I just cling to him, waiting to calm down. “C’mon, Amelia.” His pushes me away, preparing to leave me. The act in itself lashes out as I realize he’s still the cold, aloof man I’ve woken up to. “You need to calm down. He’s gone now.”

However, as he leaves me, I don’t calm down, not even as Zane comes forth to take the spot that Enzo’s quickly vacated. Zane obviously picked up that Enzo is more isolated as the days go by because the emotional support and stability I used to survive with is slowly dispersing and leaving empty air for me to grapple with. Maybe that’s what I need – the ability to stand on my own two feet. But in the same sense, I need my family just as much. Like Zane said before, we get through this as a family, but with Enzo’s constant disconnect, we’re never going to bounce back.

Zane holds me as a nurse ushers everyone out of the room, and as she begins to shoo Zane away, I cling on more, scared to be left alone with her. I need a constant in my life, and Zane is that. Apparently, my disrespect for my own health has me awarded with a sedative as I feel the piercing of a needle in the top of my arm.

As I fight the drug invading my system, all I remember is whispering for my brother to come back.

Then everything swirls into a glorious calm.

***

When I open my eyes again, the sun has fallen slightly in the sky, shadowing dawn across the view out of my hospital window. My head lulls back on the pillow, and I now notice that I am free of the heart monitor and am no longer tied down.

I feel groggy again, but I can assume that was the sedative used to calm me. I try to shake the fog from my mind, but inwardly I’m thanking the nurse’s initiative to put me out of my misery for a little while because I feel calmer now. That aching my father brought on is now diminished back to the refines of my heart, but I still cannot quieten that ebb that resonates through my entire body.

As my head clears slowly, I listen to the sounds of my room and when I pick up distinct voices, I look at the window overlooking my room from the hallway. I see Zane and Carlo with their backs to my room, and Enzo’s face saddened as he confronts them over things.

It’s that which gets me moving first. I cannot stand the turmoil he is barely surviving. The tyranny in which Enzo has self-inflicted is never going to help anything, and I cannot allow it to continue. As I drag myself across the room, my movements still sluggish due to the sedative, I stand in the doorway and watch, listen, and take in what it is they’re discussing.

“I think I broke my family by taking too long,” Enzo frets, slamming a closed fist weakly into the nearby wall. “I could’ve taken them and run any time of any day, but I didn’t. I tried to keep the peace while making sure everything was flawless. If I had just cut a loss and ran with them, we wouldn’t be here.”

“And haphazardly gotten us all out,” Carlo admonishes, his tone brisk and unkind. “Your logic wasn’t warped on this one, Enzo. You were creating the perfect life so that Papà couldn’t think anything was any different with Amelia being back and Zane joining the ranks. That’s what we do when we get people out. We create a perfect life for them, one so no one suspects.”

“And it paid off,” Enzo’s gruff tone states. “It’s a little too late to be thinking that what we were doing was perfectly executed when the one thing executed in this life is our brother!”

“Enzo,” Carlo tries, stepping in, but Enzo pushes him away, taking a step back away from him.

“Don’t!” Enzo bellows, throwing his hands up into his hair. “I will forever bear this cross because it’s down to me, as the heir of the Dio Lavoro, to protect you all. That was my duty, Carlo. Can’t you see that? I only ever stuck around to inherit it all so I could make the world a little safer for Amelia and Manuel. Now, look where it’s got us. Our own is dead while our little sister is breaking into pieces because of me. The one of us who showed more strength than any of us is now a shadow of herself, and that’s on me. I broke her before I could save her. I broke us all before I could save any of us.”

“You could never break us,” I break into the conversation as I linger in the doorway. “But I could.”

“No, Amelia,” Enzo whispers, his dire tone wraps around me and makes me close my eyes. He advances toward me, clearly evident that he never wanted me to hear a word he had to say. “No.”

“But I did,” I answer; my voice quivers and I hate how weak I sound again. “We’ve been on a downward spiral since my first kill. You would’ve been out and happy if I hadn’t have killed him. Carlo, too. You’d both be living real lives with real happiness if I hadn’t done what I thought was right back then.”

“Amelia,” Carlo breaks, stepping forward in the same manner of Enzo. “Real happiness for me includes you. I’m sure Enzo will agree with me on this one.”

“But I’m worried you’ll never get it trapped with me,” I admit, solemnly casting that burden out.

I have always felt like the root of all evil. I was built up to be a killing machine, one without a heart. My father devised a plan that saw me become exactly what he wanted, but he never anticipated for a force like Zane to come in and obliterate everything. There was never room for love until it walked straight into my fist that day. Zane Maverick was a blessing in disguise, and even with our tumultuous relationship, he is the one who has kept my conscience alive and thriving. Without him, I wouldn’t feel anything but the thrill of every kill. With him, I continue to feel absolutely everything – just how he wished it for me.