by J. J. McAvoy
I inhaled slowly through my nose before speaking, “I asked for people, Tillio, not carpet. Did something happen to those people?”
“No, but…”
“Did those people refuse to work for me?”
“No, it’s just—”
“Just what, Tillio? You are going back on your word before the ink is dry?” I asked, meeting my own gaze in the mirror.
“Don’t be like that, Calli girl. I told you the atmosphere is tense right now. I got people looking at me. If I break faith to help you out, how am I going to look?” He sighed heavily. “The Callahans are a messy family who have been shitting on us for years. We don’t have much power or say in anything anymore. This is the only way we let them know respect is fucking earned, not inherited.”
I clenched my jaw, my hands balling to fist.
“Calli?”
“I’m here…” I fought to get the words out. “I understand.”
“I know this makes you look bad, Calli. I’m sure that’s why that husband of yours swiped you back up quick. He’s hoping that if he sticks an Italian broad on his arm this time, he will get us to fall in line. I wouldn’t be shocked if that nut job blew up half the city over this, based on what his brother did last time. But he can’t kill all of us. We aren’t going to be bullied.”
“Nor should you be. After all, where would this family be without all of you?” I replied, twisting the ring on my finger with my thumb.
“Just know, no matter what last name you got, you and I are good, okay? I owe a lot to your grandfather.”
“How could we be anything but good, Tillio? We’re basically family. Thank you for giving me a call. We’ll talk again later.” I didn’t wait for him to reply before hanging up, tossing that phone onto the dresser. I pulled out my other phone and dialed a single number.
I’d come here with a plan, Venire, Videre, and Vincere.
Come. See. Conquer.
And I planned to do that without taking anything from Melody Nicci Giovanni’s playbook, because the moment I started, people would begin to compare us. I would automatically lose. Even though she was alive, she was dead to them, and dead people had all their flaws wiped away. That’s how legends were made. I had no desire to fight with people’s memories. I’d walked my own way, and for years, it had been working perfectly. I was different from her; it was a byproduct of how we were raised. Melody had to make sure everyone knew she was the boss. I, on the other hand, never needed people to know it was me, that I had been the one secretly at Ethan’s side feeding him information, taking out his enemies.
A good assassin could take out a target and get out clean.
A great one made you believe there was never a target to begin with.
Calliope Orisni could never take credit.
Calliope Callahan had to, apparently.
ETHAN
“Dino Tacinelli, age thirty-three, five-feet, eleven-inches, one hundred eighty-three pounds, born in New York City, moved to the coastal town of Sorrento in southwestern Italy with his mother after his parents divorced when he was six. He joined the Italian Armed Forces at twenty-three and returned to the states two years ago after the death of his mother,” Helen stated, spinning gently in her chair as I looked at the man on the screen. He had white skin, slicked-back black hair, brown eyes, and a long scar that ran up his left hand.
“How did his mother die?” I asked.
“Umm…from the death certificate, stroke,” she said, pulling up a picture of said certificate.
“Next,” I said; however, the picture didn’t come up, and I glanced over my shoulder at her to see her rubbing her wrist. “Do you need you a moment?”
“I’m fine,” she said, using her other hand to change the photo. “Next is Italo Tizzone, age twenty-seven, born and raised in Palermo, the capital of Sicily. He was a painter and was admitted into the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo at seventeen, but joined the Italian Armed Forces instead of going.”
“Why?”
“He wrote his reason for enlisting as losing his girlfriend in the terrorist attack in the city that year.”
Italo Tizzone.
I remembered when my father told me of how he ended up in jail because of my mother and how he’d met the leader of the Italians inside. The man’s nickname was ‘The Spoon’ because he bent spoons. My father thought it was the dumbest name he had ever heard. He told the story over and over again until one day, my mother told him that ‘The Spoon’s real name was Giuseppe Tizzone, and that when Giuseppe was a boy, he ran into the woods to find his little brother. Some of the other boys had found out his brother was gay. When Giuseppe found them, his brother was naked and tied to a tree. The boys were laughing as they threw rocks at him; they had even burned his clothes. Giuseppe had run out of the house so quickly the only thing he had in his hand was the spoon from cereal he was eating. He used that spoon and stabbed out the eyes of two boys. The third one tried to run away, but Giuseppe chased him, stripped the boy off his pants, shoved the spoon up his ass, and bent it.
From then on, where ever Giuseppe went, people would be muttering about the spoon. But over time, people stopped telling the whole story. Giuseppe didn’t bring it up because of his brother, and so everyone just assumed it was his nickname until it became his actual nickname. Giuseppe bent spoons whenever he thought about someone he was going to hurt…and to mess with people.
The look on my father’s face that day…it was like the clouds opened up and he saw Christ. After he got over the shock, he questioned why my mother had never told him that, and because my mother seemed to always want to piss him off, she replied, “If you want to hear a story, go to the damn library. Do I look like I have time to tell you the history of everyone? The only reason I’m telling you now is that if I have to listen to you speak about your little vacation in jail one more time, I’m going to send you back!”
My father cursed her out. She cursed him out and then left. When it was over, my father fell back into his chair and shook his head. I would never forget the image of him taking a deep breath, shaking his head, muttering to himself, “Is it so fucking hard to just to say, ‘I’m sorry, please stop talking about it because it makes me feel bad to remember, you damn pigheaded wench.’” And then he smiled to himself, and he never brought up The Spoon or his time in prison ever again. Not even when Wyatt had asked him.
Because he loved and understood her that much.
“Ethan?”
Shaking my head clear, I glanced back up at the freckle-faced, tan-skinned man with curly, ear-length, dark brown hair. “What about the rest of his family?”
“Mom, Dad, two sisters, and dog all live happily in Palermo. One of his uncles died in prison here in Chicago about nine years ago. No wife but one daughter. She lives in Spain now. He has another uncle…No, he had another uncle who committed suicide before he was born. Should I keep looking?”
“Next.”
“Vinnie Napolitano, age thirty-four, six feet tall, one hundred and ninety-one pounds, born in southside Chicago. Mom was a prostitute—she has several arrests going back decades. She’s currently serving life in Cook County for murdering his father, her former pimp, which is proof our justice system is still a sexist institution of shit.”
“And what has he been doing for the last thirty-four years?” I questioned, ignoring her commentary.
“He was a Navy Operations Specialists.”
“For the United States?”
“Yep,” she said, bringing up a photo of said man, dressed in his all-white uniform with the United States flag in the background. He was a square-jawed man with light-colored eyes and shaggy brown hair.
“Did he spend any time in Italy?”
“Not that I can see. But he worked in the military, so he could have been anywhere at any time. For me to really know, I’ll have to hack into classified—”
“That’s all I need. You should go rest now, Helen,” I said, looking through the three men’s photos myself. I h
ad woken up before dawn, and seeing as Gigi and Calliope were still asleep, I started work early.
“You aren’t wondering how Calliope knows them or why she asked for them?” she questioned, which was strange.
“Helen, the reason why we have always been close is that you have always known when not to ask questions and when to leave. I truly hope my brother doesn’t end up clouding your wise judgment and making you act outside of yourself. Because then I will start to care about your relationship with him. Do you want me to care about your relationship with him?” I met her brown eyes and froze for only a moment before she rose from her chair.
“I think I put too much strain on my hand. I’m going to rest. I will see you at breakfast.”
“Hmmm,” I muttered, not bothering to watch her leave.
Dino Tacinelli, Vinnie Napolitano, and Italo Tizzone—what was their connection to Calliope? Of all the people in all of the world she could have asked for, she asked for them…and referred to them as TNT. The simple reason would be that they were all military men, and she was in the military; therefore, they had all crossed paths. But Calliope never did simple. It was not in her nature. My mother was complicated, but she couldn’t hold a candle to Calliope in complexity.
Feeling my phone vibrate, I reached into my pocket. The moment I saw the name, I knew I wasn’t going to have time to figure out this puzzle today.
“What happened?”
“Someone tipped off the feds. They are en-route now to raid multiple stash houses,” Monk nearly yelled through the phone. In the background, I could hear other men calling out to one another.
Closing my eyes, I inhaled through my nose….
Breathe Ethan.
Breathe.
“Sir?
“How long until they get there?”
“Ten minutes if we are lucky.”
“I make my own luck,” I replied, rising to my feet. “Call everyone back. And tell them to take half and burn the rest to the ground. Then meet me out front.”
“You want to burn half?”
“Did I fucking stutter?”
“Yes, Boss—”
Hanging up on him, I glanced back to the three men on the wall for a second before dialing. It didn’t even ring twice before she answered.
“I was just coming to find you—”
“The FBI is about to raid my stash houses. As you know, because of Miguel Muncha, we’ve been on a freeze. There is over a billion dollars’ worth of product just sitting there and not enough time to move it.”
“What do you need?” she said to me.
I checked my watch already on the move. “I need a distraction. The men you demanded, I need them now.”
“If they shut down Link, Southie, and Camden-bay, the backup should buy you all an extra thirty minutes.”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” I said, grabbing my coat off the chair. “Meet me when it’s done. I’ll send you the location.”
“Our first official job as an official couple. I have butterflies.” She giggled.
“Don’t worry, they will die within a week.”
“You just had to ruin it.” She sighed loudly and dramatically. “What happened to working on your romance?”
“Now really isn’t a good time, Calliope.”
“Make it a good time,” she replied before hanging up on me.
Smirking, I glanced back at the phone. “If you want a date, all you had to do was ask,” I muttered to myself…then froze as a wave of déjà vu washed over me.
And so, the cycle continued.
CALLIOPE
Our first official job as an official couple, as Mr. and Mrs. Callahan, was going to be a failure. I was sure my grandfather was the one that tipped off the feds, and he did so with the information I gave him. On top of that, Ethan was waiting for men to shut down Link, Southie, and Camden-bay, and those men wouldn’t show up. I knew that as I spoke to him, but I couldn’t tell him. Today had to fail, or else my grandfather would know I had stopped him. And stopping him was akin to open treason.
Part of me wanted to say it wasn’t all my fault. Big Tillio canceled my men. But that was a lie.
As I looked around the Tillio family house, the lie was even more apparent. I should have been by Ethan’s side; instead, I was in this very charming and cozy house far too goddamn early in the morning for house calls. The walls were covered in photos of friends, family, as well as graduation certificates, karate and gymnastics medals. They were even the type of family that kept their grandkids’ drawings on the refrigerator. Looking to the corner walls, I checked for those markings people made to track how tall their kids had gotten…and sure enough, there it was on the wall beside the front door.
“I hope you don’t mind, we only have Earl Grey,” Chloe said, carefully wheeling the cart of tea into the room.
“Thank you, that’s perfect,” I said, walking by her and taking a seat down on their tacky floral couch.
She smiled and turned, lifting the teacup to me…well, to the side of me. The fact that she had gotten this far without letting show how much of her sight was now completely gone was impressive. Shifting over a bit, I took the cup from her hand. Nodding to herself, she proceeded to move the small snacks she had onto their wooden coffee table—the top of which was covered in many markings and words. When Chloe Tillio was my age, she was a girly girl with long, pretty brown hair, smooth olive skin, and bright hazel eyes. She loved sundresses and always had her nails done. She was short but not too short, the perfect height for girls, but now, her long brown hair was cut into a buzz cut, her ivory skin was rough and covered in aged scars from her face to her legs. Her eyes were still hazel but with this white film overlaid on them. She wore torn jeans and an oversized shirt. She was only a few years younger than Coraline, and yet she looked much older.
“You didn’t really have to go all out. I feel bad coming unannounced like this,” I said when she finished setting the table and pushed the cart away.
“Of course, I did. You are a Callahan now.” She took a seat beside me. “A Callahan…” she repeated slowly.
“When you say it like that, it sounds ominous,” I replied, lifting the tea to my lips, and her lips formed a tight line. “Out with it, Chloe. You know you can say anything to me.”
She just shook her head. “How did you get mixed up with them, Calli? You might be from Chicago, but you grew up in Italy. Barely anyone knows anything more than trite gossip of you here. And yet, not only do you have a child with him, but you are now with him and living here?”
“You make it seem like we have no ties. My grandfather used to work for his grandfather,” I reminded her, taking a sip of tea.
“You mean to tell me, he went to visit Fiorello?” She snorted, not even daring to believe it was a possibility.
“Why the snort?”
“I’ve met your grandfather, Calli. He’s not a fan of your new family.”
“He’s not a fan of the Juventus football team, either, and yet, every year, he goes to at least one of their matches screaming at the top of his lungs.”
She made a face. “Are you really comparing the Callahan family to a soccer team?”
I shrugged, even though she couldn’t see it. “What? If you think about it, isn’t life just one big soccer match?”
“Oh, I’m not even going to touch on that. The last thing I need is to get sucked into a philosophical debate with you. You drove me crazy when you were younger!”
I grinned. “That proves I’m just a good student, and you taught me well.”
“Your grandparents didn’t pay me enough,” she muttered.
“What? Are you telling me you didn’t enjoy tutoring me?”
She didn’t reply, taking a sip of her tea instead.
“Wow,” I said loudly, shaking my head. “You and Big Tillio really know how to hurt my feelings.”
“Now we are getting to what brought you here, finally.” She lifted her head to the sky and shifted her head to tur
n to me. “What is it, Calli? Why are you talking to me instead of Frankie?”
“Frankie is being difficult,” I replied.
“And you’re hoping I’ll tell him to be less difficult?” she questioned, putting her cup down. “Calliope, since you’re married now, I’ll give you some advice. Never go against your husband for someone else. You’re either a team or you’re nothing. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m not going to get involved.”
“I didn’t ask you to get involved, Chloe.”
“So, you just came to eat stale cookies and drink old tea?”
“They weren’t that bad,” I said, putting down my cup. “But you’re right, I didn’t come for tea. I came because being a Callahan means I have access to information I didn’t have before.”
“And this relates to me how?”
“Well, doesn’t your hatred for the Callahans come from the fact that Melody and Liam poisoned your gas lines, which caused a fire in your neighborhood? They killed your whole family and left you blind, sick, and nearly crippled…allegedly.”
Her jaw clenched almost as tightly as her fist. She inhaled through her nose. “Are you confessing for their crimes now?”
“It wasn’t their crime.”
“Bullshit!” she hollered. “Everyone knows that bitch Melody poisoned us because we wouldn’t fucking do what she—”
“You never thought it was strange how Big Tillio and his boys were able to come save you just in time?”
“They saw the fire and came—”
“They saw the fire because they set the fire.”
She shook her head. “I see you fit in perfectly with your new family—”
“You sure the poison won’t kill her?” Big Tillio’s voice rang out of my phone as I held it up so she could hear. She froze like she was afraid to breathe.
“Frankie, calm the fuck down.”
At the second voice, Chloe turned to me and nodded, even though she couldn’t see.
“Yes, that is my grandfather. If you remember, Big Tillio used to be Flabby Frankie. I believe your father said he was all fat and no brain? Nowhere close to good enough for his precious daughter. And you had all the guys after you back then. How was he ever going to get a chance—”
