Page 65 of My Dark Ever After

My fingers trembled as I came across the year 1973 and then caught on the section of surnames starting withP. I took the entire file out of the metal drawer and carried it to a table in the back behind stacks of utilitarian shelves.

Piazza, Piccola . . . Pietra.

There were only four births in the region that year with the last name Pietra.

And one of them was Mariano Giovanni Gaetano Pietra.

Born March 3, 1973, outside Pistoia, Tuscany.

My pulse boomed in my ears like thunder after the lightning strike of new information left me paralyzed.

“Oh my God,” I whispered as my fingers shook the paper too hard for me to read it.

I didn’t need to read the information again to know.

This man was my father.

Setting the papers carefully aside, I pulled out my phone to do some digging. I was no hacker like Ludo, but I had been trained to investigate companies we wanted to invest in thoroughly enough to bank on their return, so I had more than enough skills to find what I needed.

Especially because I remembered the name Pietra from discussions Raffa had with hissoldati.

A family in the Camorra that ostensibly worked under the umbrella of Raffa ascapo dei capi, but that had, lately, been rebelling against him. They had bad blood, he’d said, because they had killed his father.

Bile rose in my throat at the implications and settled, bitter enough to make me gag on the back of my tongue.

“Please, no, please, no,” I whispered as I searched deeper and deeper through the internet, checking Italian forums and newspaper archives until I found what I had hoped so deeply not to find.

Gaetano Pietra welcomed his third son on March 3 with his wife, Giulia; named Mariano Giovanni after his paternal and maternal grandfathers. He will be baptized next Saturday at the Cathedral of Saint Zeno.

My head thunked against the table as my spine suddenly lost its rigidity.

Someone who was very thorough had gone through and scrubbed most mentions of the mafioso’s third son from digital existence, but this article in a small local paper remained, with the announcement of his birth.

I killed his two eldest sons in retribution,Raffa’s words echoed back to me.

My lover had killed my uncles.

My father’s family had killed Raffa’s father.

What were the odds?

My mathematician brain tried to calculate them and found it wasn’t as far fetched as it should have been.

I had come to Florence because I knew Tuscany was where my father had been born. Of course, meeting Raffa had been incredible serendipity, but the odds of meeting someone associated with the Camorra who might have known my father’s people didn’t seem unlikely. If Raffa had six hundred people working for his outfit, not including the dozens of capos who operated in other regions of the north, there had to be hundreds of cogs in the machine that would lead me back to the Pietra family.

But still.

My vision blurred as I exited the internet app on my phone and dialed a number I knew by heart.

“Hello?”

“Dad.” The word fell out of me like an anchor, dragging me down, down, down into panic. “Dad, I need to know ... are you related to a man named Gaetano Pietra?”

The silence that echoed back at me was colossal. I had the sudden, incredibly surreal feeling of being alone in the Arctic tundra, surrounded by ice and endless quiet.

“Where did you hear that name?” Dad said finally, voice textured with weariness.

“Cazzo,” I breathed.