The Blood Oath’s Ten-Year Silence Chapter 08

The Blood Oath’s Ten-Year Silence Chapter 08

By the end of my first year of silence, the leaves on the ancient cypress trees had turned rust-orange and drifted across the monastery flagstones.

The intelligence summaries delivered to my cell grew bleaker with each passing

moon.

The betrayal of Carmela had shattered the Falcone syndicate to its foundations.

According to the reports from our contacts in Palermo, once the smoke from the Corleone raid cleared, Lorenzo had dragged Carmela down into the wine cellars. There had been no trial. The family elders-the very men who had raised glasses to her on the yacht-had watched as her throat was cut over an empty oak vat, her body wrapped in heavy chains and dropped into the deep trench off the Aeolian Islands.

The mistress’s daughter, who had spent months batting her eyelashes and weeping over fake bruises, had cost our family forty loyal soldiers, half our territory, and our supreme seat on the Sicilian Commission.

The Falcone syndicate was now bleeding from a hundred cuts.

Rival families from Catania and Messina were encroaching on our docks, seizing our shipping routes, and gunning down our street captains in broad daylight. Without my blade to eliminate rival capos before they struck, and without Lorenzo’s former tactical clarity, the family was crumbling into a third-rate gang.

And outside the high stone walls of Mount Pellegrino, two ghosts had taken up residence.

Every Sunday morning, when the monastery bells chimed for prime mass, Matteo and Lorenzo would walk up the three miles of jagged mountain

stones on their bare feet.

Matteo had aged twenty years in twelve months.

His dark hair was shot through with streaks of dry gray. His expensive cashmere suits were gone, replaced by a threadbare black mourning jacket. He leaned heavily on an ash-wood walking cane, coughing from the scarred tissue in his lungs where the bullet impacts had permanently damaged his ribcage.

Beside him walked Lorenzo, his head bowed, his hands wrapped in prayer rosaries, his eyes hollow and sunken like empty graves.

They would kneel on the sharp gravel directly beneath the archangel statues outside the gate.

“Elena…” Matteo’s hoarse, broken voice would drift through the small iron grille high on the outer wall, muffled by the howling autumn winds. “It’s Matteo… We brought Mother’s rosary. We brought your gold Berettas… Lorenzo polished them with velvet… We sleep in the armory now, Elena. We can’t bear to walk past your empty room…”

No one answered.

Inside the courtyard, thirty silent novices raked the leaves in rhythmic synchronicity: shhh, shhh, shhh.

Lorenzo would press his forehead against the freezing iron bars, sobbing until his tears turned to bloody mucus in the biting cold.

“Elena, shoot me!” Lorenzo would howl, his voice cracking against the stones. “Take your rifle and put a bullet through my skull! Just look down from the parapet! Just wave your hand once so we know you’re alive! Please, little sister… don’t leave us alone in this graveyard…”

I stood in the cloister colonnade with my hood drawn, holding my brass watering can, tending to the white belladonna flowers in the monastery

garden.

The wind carried their cries across the courtyard like the wailing of restless phantoms.

I remembered the cold barrel of Lorenzo’s Colt .45 pressed into my

forehead.

“You’re an attack dog, Elena… Die in the dark.”

I remembered Matteo’s shoe grinding my mother’s key into the floor.

“You will kiss Carmela’s feet before I let you back inside.”

The words were carved into the granite of my memory, but they held no sorrow anymore. Only the cold, sterile distance of a closed chapter.

I tipped the watering can.

Clean, clear spring water flowed over the pale petals of the belladonna.

The bell struck the third hour.

Outside the iron gates, my brothers wept into the mud until their voices

faded into silence.