“What do you mean, you’re not sure?”
Vanna Falco had rules. She followed them no matter what. Her number one rule? When her father became loud, she stayed quiet and got out of his way. Not that Adam ever yelled at her because he certainly didn’t. He also never imposed his very large presence on her in such a way that would intimidate her like he did with nearly everyone else around them.
Still, she stayed true to that rule.
One of many, honestly.
Through the Bluetooth speakers in the car, the man her father had been conversing with during the drive tried to reply to Adam with, “This plan of yours, that’s all I am saying. It won’t work the way you think it will. You’re going to get us all kill—”
“Or you’re afraid.”
“I’m not afraid! It won’t work.”
“It will. Just do what you were told.”
“You’re delusional, Adam, and if you didn’t force my hand here, I would have handed your ass over to the boss for this … scheme.”
“Except you can’t,” Adam replied coldly, “not without outing the fact I knew you were stealing to fund your wife’s gambling habit. So, either way, whether you help or hurt me here, you’re still fucked. Remember that the next time you want to back out.”
A beep sounded through the car speakers, saying the call cut off. The silence crawled on, a lot like their vehicle in downtown Toronto traffic.
The passing city streets, and the phone in her hands where she scrolled through her social media feed, held her attention up until the moment Adam spoke again from the front seat. Although, this time he talked to her, and not someone through the Bluetooth. He navigated the inner-city traffic with ease, and patience—driving relaxes me, he would say.
“Do you know what we Italians respect the most, Vanna?”
When her father spoke, Vanna always listened. Her friends, the few she did make at her private high school, never understood why she preferred spending time with her father instead of doing something with them.
“Do you?” he asked again, dark eyes darting to the Mercedes rearview mirror to meet her stare in the back seat.
“God.”
He smiled. “And?”
“Family.”
Adam tilted his head to the side. “That depends on—”
“Their loyalty to the clan.”
If her father thought he would trip her up with that question, she had a surprise for him. Fifteen years of her life spent under his feet taught her a great many things—the most prominent, and constant, lessons had been about their ways; their rules.
The Camorra way.
The mafia life.
“Good, good. But no, those aren’t the things I mean.”
Vanna frowned, chewing over her thoughts as she tried to pinpoint the lesson her father hinted at with his question. He smiled briefly, the strong line of his jaw softening when she glanced at his profile; it told her that he did, in fact, know he managed to make her hesitate with an answer.
“Maybe I posed the question wrong,” her father mused.
“Maybe?”
He chuckled. “If we hold God and family closest to our hearts, then what would we hold even closer, hmm?”
Ah.
Now she understood.
Their life in a nutshell.
Her father talked.
She listened.
Adam was all she had, after all. Her blood relatives were long gone. Her grandfather, Gabriel Canali, murdered, and her aunt—Elena, her father’s half-sister—had committed suicide shortly after, leaving Adam alone as the bastard son of a dead Camorra boss, with a criminal organization in ruins, and the clan in shambles. Shunned by his father before his murder, as his now-dead mother did her best to keep him away from the life, Adam was lower than dirt and treated the same for years after.
All because of one family.
One man.
Gian Guzzi.
He’d married her aunt, killed their grandfather, which caused Elena’s suicide, or so she had always been told, and ruined the Canali name forever. It might have happened decades ago, but to them … to Vanna and her father, who lived with the knowledge of what transpired way back then, and suffered the consequences of it long after, well, they simply couldn’t forget.
They couldn’t afford to.
It didn’t matter they were Falcos—using the last name given to Adam by his mother—because they were still Camorra. And this was their way.
“Well?” her father asked, bringing her back to the present with a bang. “Do you have an answer for me?”
She did.
“Vendettas,” Vanna replied, parroting the only appropriate answer. “Our vendettas are most important.”
That smile graced Adam’s lips again.
Faint as it was.
He grew quiet, and so she turned her attention back to the phone in her hands. Traffic crawled on, but soon they would arrive at the restaurant where her father intended to make his next move to take over the Camorra clan. A goal of his, he made clear, that he had worked on since it was ripped from his hands after his father’s murder.
That was two decades ago.
Finally, he had the chance to take his rightful place again heading the clan. Rome didn’t get built in a day, Adam said, and I won’t take over in one, either. He talked a lot, and she thought he said these things to her because she was all he had, too.
“Vanna?”
“Hmm?”
“I need you to remember that … about our vendettas—always.”
She glanced up from the screen of her phone, meeting her father’s stare in the rearview once more. It also allowed her the chance to see where they currently were in the city. A couple of blocks away from her school where he dropped her off every morning before going about his day and business, only to be right there at three PM sharp to pick her up. No excuses.
He listened to her day.
She listened to his.
People didn’t understand why she never disobeyed her father—always his good girl, following every rule set out for her. She never wondered why. He nursed her when she was sick, read her bedtime story after bedtime story, and he was all she knew.
Her mother, a transient, neglectful thing, hadn’t been in her life since before she could remember. She resented Rose for that the most, and while anyone who had known her mother often said Vanna took after the woman in appearance, she had no memories of her. Her dainty features made up of a button nose, delicate cheekbones, dark brown eyes the same shade as her wild hair, and heart-shaped lips didn’t match her father at all, so she knew it had to come from her mother.
And yet, she still found a better sense of familiarity looking at her father than she did staring into a mirror at herself. She blamed her mother for that, but at least she had her dad.
She loved him.
He loved her.
“And someday,” Adam said, bringing their vehicle to a crawl behind the car in front of theirs that slowed for a yellow light up ahead, “we will finally be able to fulfill our vendetta, won’t we?”
“Of course, Papa.”
“Why is that?”
The words that he repeated to her for years slipped out of her mouth without her even needing to think about it, really. “Because they took from us.”
“Yes.”
“They almost ruined us.”
“But not quite.”
Vanna nodded. “And so, they have to answer for it.”
“Exactly, my girl. Exactly. We’re the only ones who care what the Guzzi family did to us all those years ago, but we also won’t ever forget. It’s our way—our life. An eye for an eye. They took from us, and we will take from them, no matter what.”
Familiar buildings passed them by.
Silence stretched on.
“You can’t forget the vendetta, Vanna,” he said quietly.
“I won’t.”
“Promise me.”
She didn’t understand why he demanded that promise at all. She would do anything for her father—her one constant; a hero in her mind’s eye. Out of love, and little else, her loyalties would forever be with him.
“I promise,” Vanna said.
Adam let out a heavy stream of air, his fingers tightening rhythmically around the leather-wrapped steering wheel. “That’s what I want to hear.”
“Papa?”
“Yes?”
“Everything is okay, right?”
He took a second to answer.
She didn’t like that.
Today would be huge for him, if the move he planned against the current Camorra boss of their clan went off the way he said it would. All the shame of being the son of a man who had nearly allowed their clan to be run into the ground because of his dealings with Gian Guzzi would go away.
They would be great again.
It just had to go right.
“It’s fine,” Adam murmured, “I promise, but you still have to remember what I told you. All of it, Vanna.”
She would.
And her father lied.
It was not fine.
In a week, he would be dead. She buried him on her sixteenth birthday. Vanna never forgot about the vendetta, though.
She couldn’t.
He made her promise.
Didn’t she owe him that?
