If The Seas Catch Fire(110)

“Which part?”

“Killing. Does it ever bother you?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“Never. The only people I’ve ever killed have been directly involved with the Mafia, and after what the f*cking Mafia did to my family…” He avoided Dom’s gaze. “The only time it’s bothered me has been when I knew I’d hurt you.”

Dom studied him for a long moment. “What happened to them? Your family?”

Sergei cringed.

“You don’t have to—”

“My father got caught between the Maisanos and the Cusimanos,” he said. “I was pretty young, so I don’t remember much of the details. Only that Papa was worried about it. That both families were making demands. Trying to play him against the other. He tried to make it work, but…” Sergei shuddered.

“You don’t have to tell me.” Dom kissed him softly. “If it hurts that much.”

“Can I tell you?”

Dom blinked. “Of course you can. If you want to.”

“I haven’t told anyone about it since it happened.” Sergei swallowed. He sat up a bit, and lounged back on the pillows, lacing his hands together behind his head. “I was eight when it happened, so I didn’t really know what was going on at the time, but I’ve figured it out over the years. I guess my father owned a couple of warehouses down near the south end of the Cape. The Cusimanos ran that part of town back then, but the…” He glanced at Dom. “Your uncle decided he wanted to get in on the south side. Raffaele Cusimano was already bleeding my family dry with protection money, not to mention helping themselves to shipments that came through the warehouses.”

“That sounds right, yeah,” Dom said quietly. “I… I was a kid back then too. But I remember.”

Sergei nodded. “Anyway, my father refused to play nice with either family, so they started harassing us. All of us. And then one night, Giacomo Maisano and some of his buddies attacked my brother and his girlfriend. They…” Sergei shuddered at the memory. He hadn’t seen what had happened, or understood at the time exactly what the words meant, but the aftermath had told him it was horrific. “They threatened to rape his girlfriend. Made him beg for her life. And when he did, they…”

Dom pulled him closer.

“They raped him instead. And made her watch.” Sergei swallowed the nausea trying to rise in his throat. “All of them. One after the other. I guess they figured that would send a message to my father. And in a way, it did. My father was ready to pack up the entire family and get the f*ck out of town before anyone else got hurt, but my other brother took matters into his own hands. He hunted down Giacomo, and he shot him.”

Dom fidgeted, but said nothing.

“My father was furious with my brother for doing that,” Sergei said. “He knew damn well Corrado would kill us all, so he got all of us in the car, and we headed out of town.” Sergei hugged himself, shivering away a chill as that night played over and over in his mind in horrific detail. “We got out on the 103 somewhere. A car blocked us. Then another came up behind us. My father told my brothers to cover me with blankets, had me hide down on the floorboards. They all said no matter what happened, I had to stay there, not move or make a sound.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, icicles forming along his spine.

Dom took his hand, and he kissed it gently but didn’t speak.

“I heard the shouting and the gunshots,” Sergei said. “I heard my mother scream. Then there were squealing tires, and the two cars left. I waited a few minutes, until I was sure they were gone, and got out of the car.”

In almost twenty years, Sergei hadn’t gone a day without thinking about the scene that had awaited him when he’d stepped out of that car. In the milky beams of the station wagon’s headlights, his father and both of his brothers were sprawled on the pavement, writhing and whimpering in pain as enormous pools of blood expanded beside their midsections. Mama was on her knees, holding Vasily’s limp form against her and screaming. Just… screaming.

One by one, right before Sergei’s eyes, his brothers had stilled. Then his father.

And Mama still screamed. Even as she let Vasily down onto the asphalt, her shirt and face and arms covered in blood, she’d screamed.

“Mama?”

“Seryozha?” She’d looked up at him, eyes wide and glittering in the headlights. “Sergei? Are you…” She reached up and frantically ran her bloody fingers all over his face and through his hair. “Are you real, Seryozha?”

“I’m real, Mama.”

She’d thrown her arms around him, and they sat there until almost daylight, both crying, both rocking back and forth in the darkness until another car finally came by. When the driver had gotten out and found them, Mama had screamed and pleaded, “Please don’t hurt my son!”

Then the cops had come, and there’d been a hospital, and social workers, and relatives suddenly sending him to live with relatives. He saw Mama once more—briefly— before his aunt took him away. To his knowledge, that was the last time she’d known who he was.

In the present, he cleared his throat. “I went to live with some family in San Diego. I didn’t have any contact with my mother, and no one would tell me anything, so I ran away when I was fifteen and came back to Cape Swan to find her.” He exhaled hard. “No one’s ever been able to tell me exactly what happened, but what I’ve gathered is that she fell into this horrible depression. She thought I was dead. Overdosed a few times on meds, tried to drink herself to death a few times, and then she just kind of… lost it, I guess. So now she’s in a home, and barely even knows who she is half the time.” His voice wavered a bit as he added, “She doesn’t know who I am.”