Page 8 of Angelo’s Vengeance (The Commission #3)

ANGELO

Asshole Chat

Ilias: Heads up. I’ve got reliable intel that your lovely mother has been poking around. She’s been seen having lunch here in the city.

Me: Fucking great. Just what I need right now.

Ilias: You want me to put a pin on her? We lost sight of her, but we can start tracking her when she pops back up again.

‘Put a pin on her’ was Ilias’s way of having Kostas and his crew mark someone for surveillance.

Me: I think that’s a good idea. I’m not sure what she’s up to, but whatever it is, I’m sure I won’t like it. Thanks, man.

Ilias: No problem.

It worried me that my mother had been spotted.

She left New York just before my father’s death twenty years ago.

I had always assumed she’d become fed up with old Stefano and given it all up.

She left him and abandoned the three of us.

Carlotta was a cold fish with no maternal bone in her body, and none of us felt sad she was gone or surprised that she didn’t take us with her.

Still, after I took over the Santelli famiglia and all it entailed, she never crawled back for a penny.

You’d think she would have. If there was anything I was sure of, it was that Carlotta was only out for one thing — herself.

Of course, we had recently learned that another mafia don was my sister’s biological father, which meant our mother might have had other sources of income we were unaware of.

I wouldn’t be holding it against her if she’d made any sort of financial arrangements to give birth to us, but knowing her, they were all strategic.

She probably made all kinds of deals that we didn’t know about.

All three of us were illegitimate. At one point, she took great delight in telling me that Don Santelli couldn’t father children and that I was a bastard.

It later became clearer to me why we were so disposable to him, or perhaps it made it easier to accept.

Remo and I still didn’t know who fathered us. I wasn’t sure I cared, but Remo did.

Deep in my bones, the one thing I knew about Carlotta Santelli was that she was trouble.

If she were back, it didn’t bode well for us.

She was mean to her core. Something inside her had festered and rotted to black long before my father had gotten hold of her.

There were many things I could have forgiven in a person given the right circumstances, but nothing redeemable about her remained.

I had no soft memory of her, not even a tender moment when she held my hand or my siblings’ hands.

Neither of my parents deserved to have children in their custody, let alone care for them.

The best thing my mother did was hire a nanny.

At least then, sometimes my siblings were fed and sent to bed on time.

I had seen movies where the parent comforted their kids or loved on them, but that wasn’t her.

She’d been cruel on her best days and evil on her worst. The day of the blood oath, she’d looked over my father’s copy with satisfaction, telling Stefano he’d done a good job.

She’d ignored my split and bleeding lip as if a beat-up eleven-year-old was no big deal.

She hadn’t cared that my sister and I had been bartered away like sacks of potatoes on the altar of greed.

I hated her. She had been right not to ask me for a fucking penny because she wouldn’t get anything from me.