Page 46 of Hateful Vows

THIRTY-FIVE

DANTE

M y breaths are short when I come back to my senses. I’ve lost track of time. The table I’m laying on has been washed, but I’m still strapped to it, shivering between cold sweats and hot flashes. I try to swallow around the dryness of my throat, but it’s like I haven’t had water for hours.

The light steps I now would recognise anywhere alert me that my captor has entered the room he keeps me in. Despite years of training, nothing prepared me for this.

Fear has my body shaking. That, and missing the fucking drug the bastard keeps injecting me with. I wiggle like an animal the first few times, but fuck if I don’t crave it by now. It’s a promise of sweet oblivion, an escape from the hell he put me in.

“If I let you out of your bindings, do you promise to be good?” His tone is condescending and annoyingly sweet, but I’ve been on this table for what feels like a lifetime.

I’m strong.

I can take him. He’s alone, I’m pretty sure of it. No one else ever comes down here with him, he doesn’t talk to anyone. I can tackle him to the ground with brute force, disorient him and flee. Find my wife and my man.

“Yes, I promise,” I reply, injecting enough shame into my words to have him trust me.

He unbinds my wrists and ankles, his face still hidden by the overhead light.

My heart pumps faster in my chest.

I surge up.

And fall on my knees, my muscles completely atrophied with the lack of exercises and proper food.

My captor hums low in his throat. “You disappoint me, Dante. But I should be used to it. It’s not the first time, after all.”

“You know nothing about me,” I rasp, anger surging through me but doing nothing to lift me up the floor I’ve crumpled to.

“No?”

He drops to a crouch in front of me.

The light hits his face differently from this angle. Eye-level with me, he gives me a grin. One I know all too well.

Because it’s the same I see when I look in the mirror.

“Hello, brother,” Gio says.

Panic seizes my chest.

“No. No. You’re dead. You died years ago.” I close my eyes and shake my head. “You’re not real. You drugged me to make me hallucinate.”

My mistake cost me, but even if I looked, I’m too weak and wouldn’t have been able to escape the knife that cuts my forearm in a deep and long gash. I hiss, the cut burning and air coming into the wound where my blood pools and wets my arm down to my wrist.

“Trust what you can feel, fratello ,” Gio says conversationally, like he isn’t cutting me up but sipping fucking breakfast tea.

“Gio! Why are you doing this?”

The blade leaves my skin and I inhale sharply. My lungs are seizing. I’m panting with the force of the panic attack I’m having.

My brother is alive.

My brother is alive.

He’s alive and he’s here, in front of me, like only time has separated us, not years of pain and loss and missing him like a cut limb.

“Gio? Ah yes, that was my name, wasn't it?” he says to himself with an edge of apathy that wakes a fear I didn’t know still lived inside the boy he’s awakening back in me.

I’m not a Don in the face of my twin facing me, I’m a boy who lost his brother, who wasn’t allowed to grieve, who sheltered his mother and withstanded his father’s harshness.

More tears pool and fall on the sides of my face. “You’re here. You’re alive. Why are you doing this?” My voice cracks at the question. I’m unable to hold the pain inside even if I tried.

He frowns like my question puzzles him.

“You wanted to take my place. I’m here to show you where you belong, fratello .”

“What are you talking about? I lost you.”

“Lost me?” His chuckle is dark and edged with a promise of pain.

He straightens up while I’m prostrated at his feet. His tongue clicks. I’m an unruly child. It doesn’t matter that he seems willing to cut me to pieces, my ignorance as to why he made me prisoner is an inconvenience to him.

“Must I really spell it out for you, Dante? As a Don, you know exactly why you’re here.” His tone turns dark and low, as if his only desire is to see me annihilated.

“I thought you were dead,” I cry out.

“And how convenient for you.”

“What are you talking about?” I repeat. “Please, Gio. I… I missed you so much.”

“Missed me? Missed me?” His mad cackle sends a shiver of dread up my spine.

The man before me isn’t my brother. Gio and I were always inseparable.

This… this person in front of me erases everything I thought I knew about my brother, and my heart breaks all over again, the grief more potent in my blood than the day of his burial.

We buried an empty coffin, thinking all we could retrieve of my twin was his ashes.

Ashes I scattered in my mother’s garden while holding her hand as she wailed.

Gio fishes something in his pocket and jerks it at my eyes with unrestrained anger. “I know what you did!” he yells.

With tentative fingers, I take the photograph from his hand. It’s grainy but shows an image of my father and me, standing in the manor’s garden. We’re both wearing the suits my mother had picked for Gio’s funeral.

And we’re smiling.

From my perspective, these are sad smiles.

I remember the moment like it was yesterday.

After the ceremony and the burial, family and dignitaries from our allies had gathered at the manor.

But my father had taken me to the back of the garden.

We had sat on the old wooden bench. After a bout of silence, he’d asked me, “Tell me what’s the most outrageous thing you and Gio did behind my back.

I won’t get mad. I need to… I need to hear what a lively young man he was. ”

Remembering the pain of the recent loss, I had hiccupped through a memory.

Gio and I had stolen my father’s favourite gun directly from his safe.

Gio had spied on him to find what the code was nights before.

Then, we’d slipped through the night to play with it and practice-shoot, exactly where we had been seated.

But none of us had expected the recoil, nor the very loud sound it would make.

When lights had turned on in the manor and Father had shouted that we were under attack, we had buried the gun under a bed of flowers and taken a mad dash towards our bedroom.

We thought our father would know immediately we were responsible when he found the gun missing from his safe but apparently he never even noticed.

We never found the culprit of the mysterious shot.

Until I admitted it all to my father. His laugh had lit up my whole face into the smile on the photograph Gio was using now to… to what exactly?

“This was the day of your funeral,” I tell him.

“Exactly. You organised my death and laughed with our father once you thought you had scattered the ashes.”

“What?”

My jaw hinges open with the mad story Gio told himself.

“That’s not what this photo was,” I argue. “We grieved for you. I cried every night for months. I?—”

He backhands me and my head whips out to the side. I bite the inside of my cheek and taste blood.

“Enough. Misha already explained everything. You wanted to be kingpin. And you were. You replaced me.” He throws pictures of me at different ages, all with Tino. My best friend. The man he killed in cold blood. “And now you’ll be my little pet for as long as I deem necessary.”

“Misha? Misha Petrov? He’s a liar! He trades in people, Gio.”

“Oh I know,” he chuckles darkly and nausea rises inside my stomach. “What do you think I did for him and all of his friends for years?”

The weight of his confession has me heaving, a deep-rooted sense of failure taking over me, changing me at a cellular level. Gio never died. My happy, care-free twin, the one I missed everyday, was taken to serve the desires of sick men.

I don’t deserve to get out of here. I may have felt pain, grief, hurt, but I lived. I’ve lived a comfortable life, I had friends, and for a short time I had a wife I loved and a paramour I adored.

And my brother has suffered unspeakable crimes onto his body and his soul.

I’m never getting out of here. And why should I? If this is how I die, I deserve it.

“Did you kill our father?” I ask, half-dazed and starting to shiver with the drug almost fully out of my system.

“Of course. He surely knew, too. Poisoned by his own garden, the one planted by his beloved wife. Poetic justice, don’t you think?”

Gio gets on his haunches once more, slapping a condescending hand on my cheek before swiping the tears that have fallen on my cheeks with his thumb.

“Don’t worry your pretty head with silly questions anymore, fratello . This is your new home. And I’m the only thing that will matter to you. I decide if you eat or don’t, if you get heroin, or not. If you soil yourself, or is afforded a bath. My thing.”

My eyes widen when the syringe appears in his hand again. “No. No, not again. Please don’t. Gio, don’t do this,” I beg, but he doesn’t listen. And it’s half-assed anyway, the craving strong and the drug needed.

He stabs a needle into my arm and poison flows freely through my bloodstream. I crouch in the corner of the room, tripping yet still aware of mismatched eyes and dark brown hair like silk that smelled of temptation and my ruin.

Will Irina miss me? Probably not. She has Aleksei now. At least, I can die reminding myself that I did that for her.

Gio holds a bottle to my lips.

I gulp greedily, looking into his dark eyes. They are void of any human emotions. He looks at me and gives me nothing. No hate, no love. No disgust or pity. Just nothingness.

“That’s enough,” he snaps and takes the bottle away.

I whine because fuck, I need more. I’m so hungry and thirsty.

Putrid paradise greets me back into its soft arms. I forget that I’m a prisoner.

I forget that I have a wife, and that I never told her I love her.

I forget everything but the rush of oblivion.

Until I start to crave the next.

“Perfect,” a voice says above my head but my lids are too heavy to lift up. “Thank your lucky stars that my proclivities aren’t the same as Misha, fratello .”

The voice continues its monologue but I can’t hear a thing. Nothing makes sense. He talks about how he was a slave for the Russian Pakhan for years. My subconscious recognises the words but it’s too far out of reach.

“Can I have more?” I ask.

The voice knows what I need and taps the syringe in my proximity. I can’t see it but I hear the tap of a fingernail on the glass clear as day. My mouth waters with anticipation, and I hold my arm to him. He said I could soon eat but I don’t really care for food.

“You’ll get more, soon, fratello . But not today.”

I blink my eyes open and lunge at him, but he pushes me back easily, kicking my ribs and cackling cruelly before closing the door behind him again.

Cold shivers rake down my body and I curl further onto myself.

How long until I completely forget my own name?