“Why do you even care?” I blurt out. If he’s going to turn this into some sort of big, dramatic deal while we are locked in this empty room together, then I want to know what his beef is. “I get it that you’re angry with me that I lied or kept something from you. I know I broke some sort of invisible best friend code or something. But honestly, Leo, why do you care what I do with my own sex life? I don’t ask you about the girls you sleep with. Granted, Gabriel’s your brother, but we’re all adults here so that really shouldn’t matter. Yet you seem to be all sorts of bent out of shape about it. So, tell me—why do you care?”
I expect him to just have some sort of pissy answer about how I lied to him and broke the trust in our friendship. And I fully intend to try and get back in his good graces somehow after all of this is over. I know I’m in the wrong about it, and I will make it right. But at this point, it’s honestly starting to make me mad that Leo is harping on this instead of being concerned with the safety of our lives.
But the answer that Leo gives me isn’t at all what I was expecting. “How could you not have seen it for all of these years?” he asks with pain in his eyes. It doesn’t even register with me what he’s referring to as I look at him, dumbfounded. “Can’t you see I’ve always wanted to be more than just your best friend?”
“What?”
“For all of these years, Camille, ever since we were teens, I’ve wanted to be with you. How could you have never understood that?”
“Leo, I—I don’t even know what to say to that,” I stammer. I’m so conflicted and caught off-guard. I don’t feel that way about Leo—I never have. And I almost feel betrayed by the fact that he’s been playing that role of being my platonic best friend all these years while apparently secretly harboring these feelings.
He sighs and presses his lips together as if he’s trying to keep more words from spilling out. “You don’t feel the same,” he says bitterly. “You’ve never felt the same and you never will.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, not knowing what other response to give. The air in this room now is uncomfortable. It’s awkward and tense and even though I try to sit down next to him and keep talking, Leo just turns away from me.
It’s been more than twenty-four hours now since I’ve eaten or slept, and eventually, even with this lingering, unresolved tension between us, exhaustion wins out and I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. I lay my head down on the floor. Leo unties my hands behind my back and since he’s obviously not talking to me and still upset with me, I don’t even say thank you. I just let myself fall asleep, hoping that maybe he’ll be less angry in the morning and willing to talk. But when I wake up, after what feels like just a few hours’ nap, Leo isn’t there anymore.
14
GABRIEL
I need clues. I need something I can go on to try and find Camille. And yet even with the remainder of my entire crew searching every corner of the city, it’s still proving impossible to find either Camille or any clues that might lead me to her. And now, on top of everything else, my brother is missing too.
With little options left to look into, I decide to go to Leo’s apartment and see if there’s anything at all there that might help me. I almost wonder if he isn’t there hiding out, afraid of whatever he saw at the massacre and having run off to take shelter behind his own locked doors. But Nick said that Leo had been taken, and so when I step into my brother’s apartment, I’m not surprised to find it empty.
It's a longshot, but maybe there’s something here that can help me figure out who took him. Since he’s now been roped in as a target, it’s worth a shot. I look all around, noting how fastidiously tidy Leo’s apartment is. If I didn’t know he was a decent guy, I might think he was a serial killer just due to how OCD-organized everything is. Everything looks exactly in its place with nothing out of line. There aren’t any clues here either, and I’m just getting ready to leave when I spot a book sitting half-opened on the top of his couch. I walk over and lift it up to take a look at it and see that it’s a personal journal.
No doubt, he’s written all about how much he hates me and what a terrible brother I am for outshining him—it’s Leo’s usual gripe with me. Even growing up, he liked to complain about how our parents favored me, which wasn’t necessarily true. And how I was always stronger, and got more girls, and was bolder than he was. Those things actually were true, but they weren’t my fault. Leo had every bit the same amount of opportunities as I did, he just chose not to take them. He was introverted and didn’t want to spend time sparring or working out or chasing women. He always had his nose in a book or was working at the Greco kitchens hanging out with Camille.
I glance over the open page of the journal, not planning to spend more than a quick moment on this before resuming my search for Camille, but I’m instantly shocked by what I read:
This is the last straw—how could he steal the woman I love.
The line sends an instant shock of warning throughout my body like an electrical jolt, and I know that I need to read more. The more I read, the more concerning it becomes. The entire journal is filled with rantings and musings that bring to light secret feelings my brother has had for Camille, and the not-so-secret resentment that Leo has for me.
He writes about how much he wanted to becapoof the Adamiborgata, and how much he hates me for being older and being given the responsibility instead. That’s nothing new and has never been anything concerning, considering how benign Leo has always been. But now, as I read what he wrote in this journal, I can see that Leo has been looking for ways to gain a position of power for himself—all just so that he can prove himself to be “worthy” to Camille in the hopes of winning her affections. Much of what he writes sounds completely delusional.
There are pages of nonsense, describing moments when he iscapoof some imaginary crime family with Camille as his wife and nonexistent children running around them. If Leo was five or six years old, then stories of such fantasy might make sense. But as a man in his mid-twenties, it seems more than a bit disturbing. I skim through pages of grandiosity that might’ve been a convincing memoir if he actually did live the life he was writing about. ]
But by the time I near the end of the journal, with the more recent entries, things start to get dark. The most recent entry, which appears to have been written right after he found out that Camille and I had been intimate with each other, is filled with twisted and malicious verbiage. The fact that I slept with Camille seems to have put a wrench in the perfect fantasy that Leo had created for himself. He talks about how his “dreams of powerful conquest and powerful love” are shattered, and how he will never be able to achieve them both now.
The pages that follow read as if they’re a printed monologue of the war going on inside of my brother’s head. He argues with himself about whether he should try to focus on stealing Camille back from me or whether he should focus on his “rise to power.” I stand there trying to wrap my mind around what kind of “rise to power” Leo could possibly be thinking about. And then, as I stand in the middle of my brother’s apartment with the book containing his innermost thoughts in my hand, the pieces all start to fall together in my head.
How did I not see this sooner? Someone has wanted me dead from the start of all of this. And someone knew that Camille was able to be hired out to execute a hit, even though she had no experience in ever doing a job like that. Maybe if she had done it, and Camille had killed me, it would have ended there. But there was a backup plan in place in case she proved herself to be untrustworthy—in case there was a tiny seed of distrust or a hint that maybe, just maybe there had been something going on between us even before anything actually did. Then, when something really did happen to warrant those suspicions and prove them right—when Camille and I acted upon feelings that neither of us even knew we had—someone then decided that she had a target on her back too.
Just like I thought from the beginning, the mastermind behind all of this had to be someone who had connections to both me and Camille. It had to be someone who had connections to the Grecoborgatatoo, or at least who used to, because that was the onlyborgatacurrently was up for the taking. Or as my brother’s journal put it, was ripe opportunity for a “rise to power.” All that needed to happen was to get rid of the useless figurehead boss of Johnny Greco, and then get rid of anyone who might threaten to expose the plot.
Fuck.
I know where Camille is now, and I’m absolutely livid. I run down to my car and race to Noho. This time, I know exactly where to go. When we were kids, there was an old warehouse in Noho where my brother and I used to go to hold paid sparring matches. It was far enough away from our parents’ eyes that we could get away with it, and an easy way to make quick cash. Leo was always too scared to get into a physical fight, but I wasn’t. Plus, I was exceptionally good at fighting even from a young age. So, my brother would do the books and the math of it all, and I would do the fighting. Guys would come to fight me, and people would place their bets. At the end of the matches, Leo would cash everyone in and since I rarely ever lost, the two of us would make a small fortune.
Eventually, our father found out and shut down our little ingenious operation. But it was good while it lasted. Leo absolutely loved that place, mostly I think because it was the one place where he and I felt like equals. I was the muscle, and he was the brains—both equally as important and both cleaning the house of people’s wallets. Once we were forbidden from going back, things went back to the same old tired trope of our parents grooming me for leadership and telling Leo to “go to school and learn things.”
While I blow through traffic lights to get to Noho, I start to see how all of this has been years in the making. Leo had always been pushed aside and even though I never wanted the spotlight or the leadership role, I took it. And now, even though I hadn’t intended to, I’ve also taken the only other thing my brother has ever wanted—Camille. He’s out for revenge. Quiet little Leo, the guy who never wanted to get into a fight or get his hands dirty, the guy who’s filled the role as platonic best friend to the Greco’s daughter, is out for a bitter, bloody revenge.
But even though I know I’ve cracked this open and figured him out, I still can’t believe it when I think about scenes like the one at my place earlier. No one took my brother. He did that himself. Whoever was there killing my crew, killing Pito and nearly killing Nick, they were under Leo’s direction. The thought of my little brother standing there and watching my men get cut down, watching Nick who we’ve both known as a friend inside ourborgatafor years be gutted nearly to death, sends a chill up my spine. I don’t even really know who he is anymore, and perhaps I never truly did.
When I arrive at the warehouse and walk inside, I’m only partially shocked to see none other than Leo sitting casually at the head of a table in the front room of the massive building. He’s surrounded by men, some of which I recognize. Some of the men are stragglers from the Grecoborgatacurrently in upheaval without acapo. That part isn’t too surprising. But some of the men with Leo are mine. I can see the faces of some of my own soldiers looking back—the ones who never seemed to alert me whenever my brother showed up unannounced at my apartment. I guess that makes sense now too. The only thing I don’t quite understand is why. Leo’s never been a leader, never even said more than a few words to my soldiers, and I’ve always treated my crew with dignity and respect and looked out for them. So why would any of them want to defect to follow my scraggly younger brother? It just doesn’t even make sense.
