Chapter 1: Awareness

Palermo, Sicily, Italy 2019 - summer

The phone on the wall in Matteo's room rings around 11am, waking him up from his dreamless sleep. It's his father.

"Come see me in my office please." Is all he says before hanging up. He sounds serious, like he needs to talk business. Not business in a figurative sense, as in, talk about some shit Matteo pulled, but in the literal sense: business.

Matteo started noticing that his father wasn't really a restaurant "manager" when he was around eight years old. One night, after having stayed up past bedtime downstairs in his father's pizzeria, he saw a man coming in with a gun in his hand. He pointed it at one of his father's friends behind the counter, before shooting him point blank.

The man didn't even clock Matteo hiding under a table in the corner; he just turned around and left. When his father found him bawling his eyes out as he came in from the back, he told him to stop crying and that it would be taken care of.

Matteo didn't know what that meant, but the next morning when he went downstairs for breakfast, there was no blood on the walls and no dead body on the floor. That same day during dinner, his father announced that they would be moving to the outskirts of Palermo 'to the countryside' and going on vacation to Taormina during summers.

Since then, they moved out of their townhouse in the city to a big villa with a garden pool and a seaview. That's when Matteo started seeing less of his father, since he only came home during the weekends.

Their mother started growing vegetables in the garden and occupied herself with the greenhouses on their property. Since their father was away during the week, Matteo and his two siblings grew up surrounded by their maids, nannies, and cooks. But most importantly, they grew up together and learned that family comes first, and that loyalty and trust were the key to sustaining lifelong bonds.

During one summer in 2014 his brother, Marco, had asked him whether he's ever seen his mother coming inside with tomatoes since they moved, and Matteo couldn't exactly answer him. That night, the two of them managed to sneak into one of the greenhouses where their mother grew tomatoes. There were no tomatoes there, only stacks of packages wrapped and sealed with duct tape.

The next day, their father called them into his office. Matteo remembers it was a Tuesday. He had seen them on the camera. Then he explained the history of the Giudice family, and that's when Matteo heard the words "cosa nostra" coming from his father's mouth for the first time.

Matteo and his brother have always grown up surrounded by mafia action movies, violent video games and board games such as Monopoly or Poker. They had heard stories about the Sicilian mafia, and they also knew it still had power in Italy. But they never knew what role their father played in it.

The first job he ever did for his father was picking up a shipment on his way home from school. He didn't ask what was in the box, and he didn't want to know. He just did what his father had told him, and in exchange he would get paid.

It worked.

That's how Matteo was eventually able to live his life the way he wanted to. His absent father and busy-with-self mother weren't there to nag him or watch everything he was doing. And as soon as he had the means to get out of the house and get a place of his own at seventeen, he became a grown-up. Physically.

His coke habit started developing around eighteen, when he occasionally filled in as a "manager" for his father at one of his clubs in Manhattan, and security caught a guy trying to sell drugs in the club. He hauled him into the staff room and ordered him to put everything he brought with him on the table.

His security watched the guy empty his pockets, laying out dozens of small baggies filled with cocaine.

"Where is it from?" asked Matteo.

"Why does it matter?" retorted the guy, Russian accent heavy on his tongue.

"Is it good?"

"You tell me." the guy said and pulled out his necklace, only to reveal a small spoon attached to it.

Everyone watched him as he dug the spoon into the powder, before passing it down to his security guards.

"What's your name?" asked Matteo, giving half of the baggies back to the guy.

The guy wasn't a stranger to him, Matteo knew they were in the same year at school. He also knew that he was Russian, and that he was good at science.

"Aleksi. Volkov."

Oh, and he had a hot sister.

Matteo shook his hand and pointed to the door. "From now on, if you want to sell in my club, you come see me first. And we can work out a deal."

Since then, in January last year, Aleksi Volkov has been sort of a friend to Matteo, as well as his dealer.

Matteo gets out of bed, groaning, and looks at himself in the mirror for a second before he's out the door. His face is always puffy after doing drugs before going to sleep, but he's been trying to quit. He read somewhere, or maybe saw somewhere, that the brain eventually starts to get used to the extra hormones and doesn't respond to them anymore.

Rehab never even came into question; he knows he can give it up if he wants to. There's just nothing else that's as exciting for him as doing drugs and going out.

When he was fifteen and moved to a private boarding school his father had arranged, he met a girl called Allison. She quickly became his girlfriend, and they used to do everything together. He would sometimes go clubbing without her because she was younger, which would always cause arguments that lasted for days.

Three years after getting together they finally decided to break up. It worked out perfectly, because Matteo started working at the club full time as soon as he finished high school.

That's when he started noticing how women acted around him. It was well known that the Giudice family was one of the wealthier families at their private boarding school, and Matteo had a reputation. Girls from his school, as well as other schools in New York City, started noticing him and his brother. It wasn't a challenge to get a woman into bed, especially when he picks up the tab and supplies the party drugs.

He liked his lifestyle, and he knew some girls had crushes on him that he could never reciprocate, but he never gave them false hopes or lied to get them into bed. Being his confident self was enough, and when you add money to the equation, then you don't even have to lift a finger.

"What?" he asks his father as soon as he sets foot in his office and closes the door.

He's spent the last week just chilling outside with his brother or playing video games in his room. The only times he ever does that anymore is when he's bored out of his mind.

"I need you to do me a favor."

"What kind of favor?"

"Sit down."

Matteo looks at his father weirdly, before he sits down in the chair in front of his desk.

"There's this guy, Enrique, who owes me a favor. He's bringing a shipment over tonight, but he docks in Taormina. I need you to go get it."

Matteo sighs, throwing his head back. "Can't you ask Marco?"

"Take him with you, I don't care."

"Are Paulo and Diana still at our vacation home?"

"No."

Matteo stares at the ceiling for a moment before he looks back at his father, crossing his arms. "Can we stay the night there?"

"As long as the shipment is in this room by this time tomorrow, do what you want."

Matteo smirks, standing up. "Is that all?"

"Make sure it's ten kilograms. This guy has tried ripping us off before, and he might do the same now. Take a scale with you. Tonight, 6:30pm"

Matteo nods and takes his phone out before he even leaves the room.

He opens the group chat he has with his brother and the Barone brothers.

Matteo: Party in Taormina tonight? Our vacation home is empty

Vinnie: hell yea

Matteo: text as many people as you can about this, see who can come to Italy short notice

Vinnie: on it

Matteo's boredom has come to an end , finally. He'll tell the guy he'll be picked up from the pier and brought back to the house where they'll weigh the shipment and then send him on his way.

Their seventeen year old little sister Aurora also insists on coming to the party, saying she's been holed up in her room ever since summer started.

They use their father's helicopter pilot (a new addition to the household-their dad just casually mentioned he'll start traveling by helicopter because it's faster one day in 2016) to get to Taormina. It takes an hour with the helicopter instead of three hours by car, so they arrive at their home on the cliff around 3pm.

While Aurora calls around to hire someone who can put a party together on short notice, Marco and Matteo call their driver from the city into work so they can arrange the meetup.

If there's one thing all the Giudice men in the family understand, is that Aurora needs to be kept as far away from the business as possible.

She doesn't suspect a thing, but she would find out if her life were ever put in danger. Until then, their father wants her to live a life as normal as possible.

Last week, when their father told Marco and him that they had to go to the cemetery, Aurora was told that they had to go pick up some tools for the backyard. She doesn't even listen to them talking half of the time, but they still do it.

They went to a cemetery an hour away from Palermo with two other men, his father's lifelong friends (who Matteo was 99% sure were the consiglieri and the underboss, one of them being Paulo Barone – Vinnie and Eddie's dad), only to watch a random funeral taking place a few hundred meters away.

"Who is that?" Marco asked, squinting.

"A dear friend of ours sadly had to pass away last month."

Had to??

"Why aren't you at the funeral then?" Marco pushed, and Matteo looked at his father to see whether the questions had any effect on him. He didn't usually like to explain himself to them.

"We wouldn't be welcome." Is all his father said, and Marco knew better than to continue asking questions.

"He's a skinny guy, he probably won't try to pull anything." Marco observes, looking out the window and onto the pier. There's a tall skinny man awkwardly standing there with two trash bags.

"Are you Elliott?" Matteo asks, rolling down the window.

"No, I'm Enrique." The guy answers.

"Put the bags in the back and climb in."

Enrique climbs in the backseat next to Marco before the driver speeds off. While his brother makes idle conversation with the guy in the back, Matteo reminds himself of something else he has to take care of.

Matteo: can you come around taormina tonight?

Matteo: 7:30ish

The reply comes five minutes later.

Aleksi Volkov: if you arrange for a helicopter in 30 mins.

Matteo: ok

Matteo: get me 20 if u can

He smiles and turns around to look at his brother. There's excitement in his eyes, and there's a feeling in his stomach that he can't quite place. It just feels like tonight is going to be outstandingly amazing.

Marco smiles back at him, not having to ask to know what his brother just took care of.