Betting Over My Grief

Five years after my younger brother Luca and my fiancée Elena were killed in an ambush, I arranged my own burial at sea. I was pressing the engraved nameplate onto my custom urn when my father, Don Salvatore Leo, walked into the room with a cigar between his lips. "Antonio, you don't need to go to the docks to mourn them this year. They're not dead." My fingers went white around the nameplate. Then the hidden door in the safe room opened from the inside. Luca walked out with Elena in his arms, casually spinning the emerald ring I had once given her around his finger. "I won the bet," he said, lazy about it. "I told you we could live right next door to him for five years and he'd never figure it out." Then he leaned toward Elena, pitching his voice so it landed exactly where he wanted it. "So tell me. The family heir's seat should be mine now, shouldn't it? Hm?" The woman who had once cried over me and sworn she would marry me, after I took a bullet for Luca and was sent onto the operating table, now rested coldly against his chest. She looked at me with disgust. "He was just stupid. He really believed we were dead." So the safe room connected straight through to the house next door. No wonder my father had used the excuse of reinforcing it to keep me out all these years. I really had been a fool. Right up to the end, I was still thinking about what flowers to bring to the water for them.