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Tristan

"I had the heart of a monster long before my soul joined the ranks."
-Tristan

Tristan at twenty-one years old...
 

This was not the first time that Bruno insisted I accompany him on a “business” trip out of Sicily. I called him Bruno, but he was my biological father. I had stopped calling him papa the day my mother, a renowned ballerina, was killed because of my father’s “business.”

That day in Bermuda, on my sixteenth birthday no less, my father’s enemy had come knocking. Before that day, my sister, Danika, and I had never left the island. What we knew of the world, we had learned through books and movies.

Besides each other, my sister, who was six years younger, and I had only adults as companions— teachers, servants, or bodyguards on the estate. We had ballet and martial arts lessons in equal measure to traditional education in mathematics, science, literature, history, and geography. My father paid for the best, and while we were not geniuses, we were advanced in our studies. At sixteen years old, I had already completed three years of a university degree online and was several months into my final year.

Despite my age, I had already topped six feet and had the lean muscular physique of a highly trained male ballerina and martial arts expert. So, when the stranger crashed my birthday party, my mother escorting him to the dinner table where my guests were seated, every instinct in me had gone on red alert. There had been something about the bastard that set my nerves on edge, and I immediately palmed the gun that I’d always worn under my jacket since I was seven years old. And always wearing a jacket in a country that ran an average temperature that hovered around 85℉ (29℃) all year round was an act of pure discipline that my trainer, Burak, who was a Turkish ex-soldier, insisted on.

The guy had been bold as brass, walking into the dining room with our mother and stopping beside Danika and me.

“So, this is Bruno’s little love nest and his bastard mutts,” the man said mockingly. And before I could even take in the implications of what he meant, he gripped our mother by her hair and sliced her throat open.

My mother’s gurgled scream as she was choking on her own blood will live with me until I die. Cold rage unlike anything I’d ever felt before sizzled through every pore in my body. Instead of my gun, I pulled my Ka-Bar knife, and within a blink, I sent it sailing through the air and right between the fucker’s eyes.

In a kind of rage that needed a bloody outlet, I was also morbidly ecstatic that the fucker wasn’t alone. There were over twenty of them up against the few bodyguards my father had left to watch over Mom, Danika, and me.

Despite the attackers having high-powered assault weapons, allowing them to kill many of the household staff and bodyguards, Danika and I, along with our last remaining bodyguard, Burak, survived the professional assault. I lost count of how many bodies I hacked down that day. Even Burak had stared at me with sick appreciation for the brutality I had unleashed. I hadn’t once used my gun. I wanted my hands coated with their filthy blood and my knife in their damn hearts, throats, guts, and their fucking skulls. That may have been the rage talking, but it was also the rage that I embraced.

Yeah, my sixteenth birthday might have been my first kill, but I’ve killed hundreds since. And each kill has chipped away at my humanity until I have almost none left. I had become a heartless monster, and I embraced that shit too.

Bruno loved that his son had the brutality of a demon. While I stopped calling him papa after that day, he had started calling me Il Carnefice in celebration of that day. 

Bruno Falcone was the leader, the Don, of the Cosa Nostra of Sicily, a deadly Sicilian mafia. Already wealthy and respected by the other crime syndicates, Bruno became revered with me at his side. His prominence and wealth grew exponentially, but the rage that I’d had since I was sixteen years old instilled a fear in others that Bruno encouraged, and I reveled in it.

Il Carnefice is the name the mafia came to know me as. It is a name that came to be associated with pain, terror, and absolute retribution. To further my father’s power, no one who came into my crosshairs escaped without a liberal dose of one or all three.  Il Carnefice, the executioner, had become my father’s most efficient weapon in the past five years. 

Today we were visiting the Camorra’s Don in Las Vegas. My half-brother, Raoul, and a few of my men accompanied Bruno inside for the meeting. I hated this kind of political bullshit that Bruno insisted on carrying out. He loved rubbing the other Dons’ noses in his success and wasn’t above using my presence to give him an air of invincibility.

My dark skin and reputation ensured that I was recognized by everyone in the mafia and other organized crime families. As far as I knew, I was the only black high-ranking member of the mafia.

“You need to learn how to pay your debt, Stuart,” one of the Camorra soldiers was saying inside the house I was standing next to. The voices were coming from the lower vent that led to the basement.

“I was coming by tomorrow to pay. I swear.” The terror in Stuart’s voice was evident from the slight tremor and his clear failure to hold back tears.

I twisted my lips in distaste at the familiar refrain. I’ve heard that response too many damn times for it to have any impact. 

The fact that I could hear a beatdown that should have been held in a secure location showed the sloppiness and incompetence of this group. If Bruno wanted to take them out, it would be like arm wrestling a damn toddler.

I moved deeper into the shadows of the corner I had been standing in for the past half-hour. Bruno would call me when he needed someone dead. In the meantime, I was staying out of the way. I never got involved in such petty shit. Collecting money from some poor schmuck was one of the parts of the business that disgusted me. Trafficking weapons and drugs, sure, but I stayed well away from debt collections, making businesses pay protection money, or running strip joints and whorehouses. That shit was not my thing.

Bruno’s mafia engaged in all of it.

“We will take your daughter as payment,” the Camorra soldier told him darkly.

Several other soldiers snickered in the background.

“No!” a woman wailed. “She is only eight years old!”

“You can have my girlfriend,” Stuart offered.

“No, we like what we have.” The Camorra soldier laughed with glee.

Eight years old? I mouthed wordlessly. I was so tired of this shit. These stronzos were fucking depraved. Eight fucking years old! Fucking pervs!

The sounds of a young girl’s screams soon pierced the air, a few grunts and huffs, followed by a feminine shout from someone I suspected was her mother, and then some more taunting laughter from the Camorra scums.

From the sounds of scuffles, the grunts of pain and high-pitched screams, the little girl was putting up quite a fight.

I sighed in disgust because I hated having to interfere. Pissed and resigned, I entered the house and moved swiftly from the back entrance, through the kitchen, and into the main part of the house. I had no clue as to where the fuck I was going.

“Where is the basement?” I demanded on sighting a maid, who looked as if she was about to crap her pants on seeing me approach. I guessed my reputation had made the rounds among the servants already. I hated this shit! 

With a trembling finger, she pointed the way.

The lack of guards and general weakness of the security ticked me off. However, in this case, it allowed me to move quickly toward the basement trapdoor, which stood open.

At the trapdoor, I could hear even more clearly the loud assault going on below. I moved even faster. 

I had intended to simply demand that they let the girl go and to make it abundantly clear that real men didn’t hurt women and children. However, when I descended the stairs, there were four men holding a girl on the hard, cement floor, one man holding each arm and leg as the girl screamed bloody murder. She seemed quite strong, too, because the men were having some difficulty, even with four of them, holding her down, while a fifth asshole started to climb on top of her.

 I roared, my gun palmed and ready in my right hand, as I grabbed the dipshit by his shirt collar and lifted him from the girl with my left hand.

The other four men dispersed around me, palmed their guns, and glared at me, trying to appear menacing. But it would take more than their false bravado to intimidate me. I feared nothing and no one, including death. I had lost my soul to death a long time ago. My soul was chiseled down to nothing from the death blows I delivered almost on the daily.

Instead of tears and fear on her face, the girl scowled and bared her teeth as she quickly and agilely sprang to her feet. She immediately flew at the man I was holding up. She kicked him in his knee with a hard jump kick, making his legs buckle painfully. 

I released him to his fate and watched as he fell hard to the cement floor.

The girl punched him in the face as she yelled, “Perv!”

One of the not-so-bright stronzos turned his gun on the girl, but I was faster. I put a hole in the heads of all five men within nano seconds before any of them could think of reacting with their own guns.

The girl looked up at me with sparkling eyes and a big grin of approval. For as long as I lived, I knew that I would never forget such a beautiful child. She had the face and glow of an angel. An enchanting brown angel with bluish-gray eyes. Even as a mixed person, I had never seen that combination of brown skin and such vivid sparkling gray eyes.

The hiss from behind me came just before I felt a slicing pain in my back. I roared and turned swiftly, determined to eliminate the threat. How I could have forgotten Stuart and whoever was holding him at bay was a testament to how thoroughly distracted I was by the girl’s bravery and strength. I punched a bullet in my attacker’s head and in Stuart’s for being such a low-life and putting his family in jeopardy.

I looked at the dirty-ass knife that the fucker stabbed me with, and I punched three more bullets in his ass, even though I knew he was already dead.

Just then the sound of running feet came from above the stairs.

The girl’s mother, who I’d barely taken note of before, rushed forward then, grabbed her daughter’s hand, and whispered a swift “thank you” and hurried toward a doorway that led to the outside.

Ignoring the blazing pain in my back, I watched until they disappeared through the door and noted distractedly that the woman was surprisingly beautiful before I turned to dispense with the Camorra soldiers rushing down the stairs into the basement.