PROLOGUE

NINE YEARS AGO

Englewood, Chicago.

VINCENZO

❦༺⚔༻❦

"It's normal for a teenage boy undergoing puberty to have sexual urges, but acting on them is demonic and God hates it," the priest said.

My Mama's head snapped in my direction, a silent, accusing warning, and I rolled my eyes. She had dragged me all the way down to this place and forced me to sit through mass, but the man's sermon sounded like the annoying sound of rusty zinc on a windy day back home.

I cast Fiorella a flirty look when Mama looked away and she returned it by blowing a kiss in my direction, then a wink that promised me ungodly things.

Fiorella was Mama's friend's daughter. She was four years older than I was, but we'd been combing the streets of Chicago together since Mama and I moved to this neighborhood, and sleeping together for longer than either of our mothers would ever want to know.

"The back rooms. I'll go first," Fiorella mouthed quietly, a seductive smirk gracing her pretty face.

Yeah, she's that bad.

We were seated in a fucking church, but our souls were naked behind these cheap fancy clothes, eating each other out. I gave my head a simple nod and Fiorella counted three seconds before quietly slipping out of the church.

Three minutes later, I yawned quietly, giving my mother a hand gesture. "I need to pee."

"No, you don't!" she snapped. "You need to sit your ass there and listen to what—"

"Mama, I'm going to wet my fucking pants!"

She cussed underneath her breath. "Fine! Come back in two minutes!"

I slipped out before she could complete the sentence and just like that, I found myself behind the church, squeezed in one of the ladies' stalls. Fiorella was already waiting, her gown lifted just above her perky boobs to allow me easy access to those natural apples.

"You nasty, nasty slut!" I teased as my eyes feasted on her beautiful body.

"We have just five minutes before the choir rendition," Fiorella replied impatiently. "My mother will have my head if she realizes we're doing this again."

Again: yes, our respective mothers have caught us several times before, and neither of them had ever managed to actually stop us.

Without a word, I turned her around, pressing her hands against the stall just above her head. That perfect ass came in full view and I couldn't resist the urge to slap it. Fiorella was perfect. She was the only girl close to my age who I'd fucked in all my years of fuckery.

I undid my belt and brought out my throbbing cock. I'd been told by the ladies at Fog House that my "little guy" was too big for my build, and that compliment alone had done so much in heightening my confidence, which was the only thing I had aside from my mother and a name that wasn't even fully mine, a name I'd built out of stubbornness and street reputation since nobody was willing to hand me a better one.

At the time, Mama insisted I shouldn't let what people called me get to me, but she never told me why I'd never had a surname in all my years of existence, and since I never had a father to prove otherwise, I went with my street-given name, one that carried more weight around here than any Christian name ever could.

All that was until, in a funny turn of events, Don Cosimo Mancini showed up three years ago for one of the meetings with Capo Tristiano and Mama saw him.

Then she insisted I was his son and he outright denied me. I mean, what would a powerful Made Man with three sons and a lovely daughter want with a woman from the cheapest, dirtiest slums of Chicago, let alone the illegitimate son he never claimed? Still, something about the way he'd looked at me that day, quick and searching before he caught himself, had stayed with me longer than I wanted to admit.

"Oh, God!" Fiorella moaned sweetly as I absentmindedly slid in and out of her repeatedly. "So fucking— good!"

That was when the first gunshot rang.

We froze in place.

The sound was loud enough that even the deaf could hear, and when you grow up in this part of Chicago, the slightest sound of gunfire could get your hairs standing on end.

"It was probably nothing," Fiorella said after we stood frozen for three minutes without hearing another sound, not even the sound of the pastor preaching.

"We should go check it out," I replied with a worried expression, but she shook her head.

"Probably just another technical glitch with the mic."

So we continued fucking, until the next ring of shots followed, this time sporadically for three minutes straight. In all my life in this place, I'd seen people get killed and heard gunshots, but none chilled me to the bones like this one.

"Where the fuck is he?!" a man's voice thundered, followed by a deafening slap. "Answer me!"

"Waste the fucking idiots!" another voice thundered.

I heard their guns click as they opened fire again. The cries of agony coming from the church were like daggers to my soul. As I stood there, the realization that the world I knew just minutes ago was being destroyed in mere seconds paralyzed me with fear like I had never felt before.

Fiorella was the first to recover from the shock. Her panic pierced through my haze. "Lolita is in there!" she cried, her voice filled with terror. "She'll be so scared!" Without a second thought, she pulled her clothes back down and sprinted towards the main building.

But I couldn't move.

My legs felt like they were made of lead, rooted to the spot.

Maybe it was fear, or maybe it was the gut-wrenching certainty that it was already too late, or maybe I was just too fucking stupid. My mother was in that building, the only family I had, my only anchor in this unloving world, the only person who had ever once looked at me like I mattered.

Yet, I couldn't bring myself to go after her.

It took a small girl running into the yard, her face streaked with tears and her eyes wide with terror, for me to snap out of my haze completely. "Everyone is dead!" she sobbed, clutching my arm with desperate strength. "My mother— they shot everyone!"

Her words jolted me out of my paralysis. The raw fear in her eyes was a mirror of my own. I had to do something, but what? What chance did a malnourished teenage boy stand against men armed with guns?

"You fucking coward!" I could hear Capo Tristiano's voice in my head. Being his errand boy all these years had certainly taught me something, and being afraid was not one of them.

Gritting my teeth, I forced my legs to move, dragging myself towards the building. The scene that greeted me as I stepped inside the church was a nightmare I wouldn't wish for anyone. Bodies of the innocent, smiling faces I'd left just minutes ago lay sprawled across the pews and floor, some moaning in pain, others eerily still.

Blood stained the walls and pooled on the ground, gaping bullet holes in every part of the body, more gory than I'd ever witnessed. The pastor, too, was lying sprawled across the floor, part of his face blown off.

"Ma!" I yelled, my voice cracking with desperation. "Mama, where are you?"

I stumbled through the bodies, my heart pounding in my chest, my eyes darting from one familiar face to the next. I found Fiorella kneeling beside a woman, tears streaming down her face as she cradled Lolita's lifeless body. The sight made my stomach churn with dread.

But I still hadn't seen my own mother, my entire heart prayed silently and fervently that somehow, miraculously, she'd managed to survive this, but the impossibility of that glared right back at me as I searched the pile of bodies frantically for her.

Finally, I saw her. She was slumped against the wall, blood seeping from a wound in her side, and another in her shoulder. I rushed to her, dropping to my knees and taking her hand in mine. I was already sobbing uncontrollably.

I never cried, but I did.

"Ma, stay with me," I pleaded, my voice trembling. "Please, stay with me."

Her eyes fluttered open, and she managed a weak smile. "Vincenzo," she whispered, her voice barely audible. "Oh, thank God! You're… alive— and unhurt."

Tears blurred my vision as I pressed my hand against her wound, trying to stem the flow of blood. "I'm going to get you out of here," I promised, though I wasn't sure if I believed it myself. "You're going to be fine, Mama, you hear me?"

But one look at those wounds and I knew the truth.

"My baby," she choked out, her voice so weak that I could almost feel her pain. "You're alive— stay that way."

"Who did this to you?" I asked quietly. "I swear, I'll make them pay, Ma, I'll—"

"Find— your father," she choked out yet again.

"I don't have one!" the anger flashed in my voice. "He rejected me even after the three DNA tests proved—"

"Vincenzo, you're a Mancini," she admonished, her voice soft even in pain. "You might not accept it but the world knows now. They'll come again— the world will haunt you…" Blood slid down the corners of her mouth. "You need the right resources to prepare for that."

My tears ran unchecked. "I was so scared, I should have saved you!" I hissed angrily. "I should have been here! This is my fucking fault!"

"Vincenzo— stay alive."

As my mother's grip on my hand weakened, I felt a cold rage building inside me, that rage would live with me throughout my fucked-up days on this earth, a permanent tenant I never invited but could never evict either.

Quietly, I stood up, picked her body up, and carried it towards the altar, maybe as an offering? I stood there with it for over five minutes, my mind was simply blank and my body unfeeling, the scene around me blurred into oblivion and the wails of Fiorella and the little girl faded away.

I stared straight at the pulpit, my conscience reeling with guilt, the taste of Fiorella still on my lips like a mockery of everything that had just been taken from me.

I had desecrated His altar, and He punished me for it.

He took my mother in return, the poor, innocent woman who'd never done anything worse in her life than fall for the wrong man and love an ungrateful son.

"You should have taken me instead," I whispered repeatedly, over and over until the words lost all meaning and became just another sound in that ruined room.

Oh, He'd tried to.

But I'd been too scared to face death like a man. I froze at the first chance I got to prove myself as a Made Man, something I'd desperately wanted to do long before I learnt to talk, and instead I'd stood there useless while my own mother bled out on a church floor.

I'd cheated death.

And there, in front of the altar, I made a promise to God that I'd spend the rest of my life chasing death until it finally caught up with me, whichever came first, the reckoning or the rest. It was the first oath I took before the sacred oath of Region Mafia Men.

Then I carried her out of there like a broken promise.

"I'll find them, Mama, and I'll make them pay. Every single one. I'll grind their teeth into the pavement and flood the streets with their blood until there's no one left to mourn or even whisper their family names."