like no other

as nietzsche said of the abyss, she stares back.

[estelasalvarez-blog]

“This is not bravery.” It was more like a dare to the whole world to step closer, if they don’t value their lives. It’s more like an invitation, everyone gather around and see that Palermo might have its devils, but Estela is it’s own very monster, brewed in rage and fed on neglect; she didn’t need to do monstrous things anymore to prove her point – her teeth were sharp enough already, a warning. Yet, Violetta Capecchi betrays her soft mannerism by calling it bravery, monsters are born, but by the raised chin and the clenched fists on her lap, she sees her stepsister is keen to give it a try. “You know it, but I’ll show you those places, and you’ll learn, eventually of course, there’s nothing to fear.” But us.

A smile surfaced, alcohol mixing with the thrill of the promise. She was often called crazy, a bitch, selfish, a rabid dog that should be put down. But never brave.

She never imagined this, she never expected this; at best, when Estela wasn’t entangled with Ciro, or when she wasn’t blinded by the impossible pursuit that was Luca, Estela always saw Violetta as one of her name – just like herself, guarded, too frail, if stomped, she would wither and die; she would never take that as a palpable possibility. Something shifted underneath, something she wouldn’t tell her, not yet.

Taking her time to finish her drink and rise a finger “On the house.” The bartender whispered, and Estela, leaning to give him a goof glance of her cleavage, managed to snatch a bottle of tequila before clasping her stepsister’s hand. Soft, like he expected, like her. She pulled her closer, just an inch, “Don’t forget who I am,” she smiled, a true smile. “And don’t make me regret this.”

[viacapecchi-blog]

As if she could forget who Estela Alvarez was. Violetta swept her hair from her eyes, pulling it back into a sleek, high ponytail, untying the ribbon on her un-held wrist with her teeth. She had kept that, at least. “I’ll call it bravery if it is,” she said, following, then, all she could say, “Teach me. Everything you know. I want to know.” And maybe that was what she had been meant for all along, not knives in soft stomachs and hailstorms of bullets and stolen paintings and the cosa nostra, but what her step-sister did, the way she danced, and her family had never seen that because they looked down at her and missed everything that wasn’t the top of her head.

She glanced at one of the girls they passed, a perfectly manicured eyebrow raising and watching her go, as if the girl could read her, as if she could know. Violetta, little fiore, so delicate, and so in love with every girl who looked even half as delicate as her, but the girls here looked like they could rip her apart and something stirred in her chest, clawing its way out, and her thighs tightened as she walked. She had never noticed. 

“Where are we going?” Curiosity consumed her, and Estela would probably hate her for asking but there was a certain euphoria in following that made it impossible for her to remember or care or remember to care about anything that wasn’t the influence she was now under. “One of those parties you mentioned?” She should switch to English, but she liked being unheard. Bitter, suddenly Violetta wished she knew more Spanish.

[estelasalvarez-blog]

She watched her cautious movements – every action deliberately taken thinking on the afterwards. Estela wondered if she was like this before really knowing her – if she get to say she really knew her; poised, mannered, wary. Her lips stretched into a smirk, how such bramble rose could bloom from the same branch as her vicious sister, and hedonist brother? Was Violetta truly the soft one out of the bunch of bloodthirsty wolves? 

Compared to Estela, she was just that – Palermo’s princess, delicacy in every fold of her body, every corner of her lips. She was all that, cherished by her mother, protected by her father – his words still ringing on her ears ‘hold your tongue before you speak of my children’. Didn’t they know her yet, though? Her tongue was made of blades, and if held inside her mouth for too long, it would cut her insides.

“No one does, Principessa.” A bull in a china shop, Estela never calculates nor cares the consequences of her acts – she knew it well enough, destruction and reborn. She glanced at the glass, untouched, the key her step-sister refused to swallow down. “It doesn’t mean I  can’t teach you.”

[viacapecchi-blog]

“Show me London,” she said abruptly, “All of it. Not the pretty little parts with their green gardens and pretty paintings, the parts no one else would be brave enough to go to. I know you’re brave.” The realisation had cut like a knife — even with that cruelty of her stepsister’s, cruelty she had seen before, Estela was an Alvarez. And if she was no longer a Capecchi, then she wanted that name too, to slip on the girl’s bravery and cunning and mouth and beauty like a second skin. 

Violetta wanted to be dangerous like Estela: she had never been taught that, only softness, and maybe if she had been forged from diamond and not bone she wouldn’t have shattered the second she was threatened. Maybe it wouldn’t have made her unrecognisable, because if he saw those words on Alessia he would have glowed with pride but on her his mouth twisted and made him ugly and she could see, not for the first time, but she could pretend it was, that she had never seen him in that light before, why they never said her mother’s name.

She hadn’t lied when she told Lorenzo that she wanted to be like someone else. She had lied when she said she wanted to be like Alessia. Violetta slid off her seat and extended her hand to Estela, nearly reaching back to take the untouched glass and swallow it down quick, liquid courage, liquid luck, but reaching for her stepsister instead. “Teach me.”

[viacapecchi-blog]

Under the Influence

Date: Unspecified Date, March 2016 Trigger Warnings: Sara Summary: I don’t even Notes: What the fuck

“Zuko: How can you forgive me so easily? I thought you would be furious with me. Iroh: I was never angry with you. I was sad because I was afraid you'd lost your way. Zuko: I did lose my way. Iroh: But you found it again. And you did it by yourself. And I am so happy you found your way here.” — Avatar: the Last Airbender 

It was quiet, when he left.

That was all she could think, it was quiet, and that made her blood run colder, worse than anything he had said — I will have you killed — was the nothingness left behind. The centre of a black hole, the calm at the centre of a storm, that was all she had ever feared, really, the dark, because that was what happened when you died, wasn’t it, the absence of light, the absence of sound, the absence of life. He couldn’t kill her. He couldn’t kill someone who was already dead. She had drunken herself to death and called it numbness.

He had left her for dead. He had left her dead. 

Violetta’s head tipped back to face the sky, lips curving into a smile, a half smile, a real smile spinning on her feet with that pretty little coat flaring near her knees. All of your ‘stuff’ is mine. That made her smile, roba, not cose, because no matter what he was now that vulgarity, that informality could not be bred out of him. Sotto capo. There was a reason they would never call him boss. She stuffed her hands in her pockets, fingers brushing that little tube of lipstick she had forgotten was there. She never brought her mobile with her, with her name on it, she could be tracked through a crowd and maybe that paranoia was something he had given her, so the other pocket was empty.

A few euros. Hers. 

She should take her card and empty her account before he could, but maybe he already had.

Jett. Ciro. Santino. Rin. Circe. Talia. Juliet. Estela. They knew rage that could never be quelled, and they knew her fragility.  No one would let her be killed. Men were monsters, all the men she knew were, but the women would never let them take her, wouldn’t they?

She smiled again, eyes back to the ground. How could she be painted in black brushstrokes when everyone knew her? The sweet little flower, the snapping dog. She had been more clever than she thought, exploding like that, and she thought she had done it without care but the sun had not set on the Italian empire. What could he say? She had turned rabid? He had driven her to drink again and, drunk, she had snapped? She had swallowed his fire and spit it back at him? 

Every way he could say it would be a lie and mouths would shut but closed mouths would still know and still stuff her pockets and hold her close and promise it was not her fault.

That was what she had learned from him, then.

[alyinsvoice-deactivated20231001]

I never wanted that name. Keep it.

In a moment, Lorenzo was suddenly sixteen again, staring up at the house he’d once called home. He could hear himself crying out for his mother, begging for her to let him into their house. The house with the lock she’d changed. And there Fiorella De Luca’s face emerged from behind the shade of the front window - before she shut it tightly and left him there.

Lorenzo saw it in Violetta’s eyes, the same look his mother had given him when she’d turned her back on him as well. No, Violetta was no Capecchi. She was a De Luca, even if she didn’t know it. But Lorenzo had let his mother die when she turned her back on him. Violetta would be no different.

Violetta would be the third woman to abandoned Lorenzo in his life. But it would do what the first two had done - make him stronger.

“Fine. I’d say you’re welcome to your stuff, but that belonged to Violetta Capecchi and seeing as she’s no longer with us, I’ll just have it destroyed. Clothes, jewelry, photos, etc.” His phone appeared in his hand, a new one after his old had been broken in the catacomb incident. With a few texts, anything he’d been paying for of Violetta’s would be shut off, the lock on the house changed before she got there. “You’ll be cut off, but I’m guessing you knew that’d happened.”

The phone was slipped back into his pocket before he finally regarded her. “You’re not my daughter, you’re not my family. If I find you near the mafia or the society, I’ll have you killed.” Leaving her with that, he exited the tunnels.

[alyinsvoice-deactivated20231001]

“Ho cazzo balbuzie?” He snapped in return, immediately irritated at her childish little tantrum. “È tirato un trigger, sì. Complimenti. Ma indovinate un po ’, Violetta? L'uomo che ha sparato a tuo fratello probabilmente vive ancora. Probabilmente essere praced dai nostri nemici per le sue realizzazioni. E questo, caro figlio mio, è su di voi.” There was a moment where his hand clenched, ready to lift and strike her across the face for the way she spoke to him. She forgot her place so quickly.

“Ti ho mai negato, come mio figlio, come ho mai negato Santino o Ciro. Ma ora vedo che sei solo ignorante come ho creduto di essere. Se non di più.” Disgust was apparent on his face as he spoke, dark eyes boring into the little girl before him. “Dimmi, Violetta, che cosa è esattamente che hai fatto? Oltre a fare scelte stupide che si terra in riabilitazione, o consentire tentato assassino di tuo fratello scappare? Perché a parte questo, non hai fatto nulla. E voglio dire nulla.”

He was beyond infuriated at that point. She’d come to him, wanting to be a part of the family name, and yet here she was spitting back her ignorance, demanding things from him she had not so much as attempted to earn. “Ciro si è guadagnato il suo posto. Egli può essere sfacciato e stupido, a volte, ma ottiene il lavoro fatto. Quanto a Santino, avrebbe dovuto dimostrare a se stesso come chiunque altro. Quindi non giocare qualche festa stronzata pietà con me. Non agire come questo è a causa di quello che sei. Nessuno, nemmeno la mia famiglia, è passato le consegne, semplicemente perché li vogliono.”

Shaking his head, Lorenzo crossed his arms. “Si vuole essere come Alessia? Hai una lunga strada da percorrere, e molto da dimostrare. Quindi, o si accettano le condizioni che ho dato, o ci si sposta avanti e trovare qualcosa che non embaress il nome Capecchi.” 

[viacapecchi-blog]

She spoke as if he hadn’t, and that took all of her strength, strength he didn’t have, for all his rage and those hands that seemed like they could pluck bullets from the air and how intimidating Lorenzo Capecchi was, without his anger, he was nothing. He could never do what was hard. He could ignore it, because he had ignored her, he had ignored the hole ripped in all of their chests, she did not know if she had ever seen him cry and she knew if she ever told him that he would love the very idea of the words. He could not be quiet. She had always known that. But her fist unfurled and her gaze moved past him, straight ahead, unmistakably serene where she stood. “Voi brucerete all'inferno per quello che hai fatto nei confronti di lei.”

‘Are you angry?’ It was a question in the light of one of the windows that looked out onto calm water, but it felt like it should have been asked in the dark. ‘You do not have to be just one thing. You do not have to be everything. You do not have to be anything, not if you don’t want to be, while you’re here.’ Violetta’s hands shook for months, rapid enough that she couldn’t hold anything, not water, not without it spilling, not vodka, not her mobile. Just slow enough for Jett’s hand in hers. ‘Withdrawal could last that long,’ the clinician had said, and it could turn her into that trembling thing.

‘Come closer,’ predatory smile, ‘I’ll tell you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the great Lorenzo Capecchi,’ blink, smile, because she liked stories and she liked people who told them and who was he to know whose blood ran in her veins, ‘He owns this city, no? The mafiosos, with their girls and their guns, no? No one ever thinks about the man in the back of the room wishing death upon anyone daring to cross his path: everyone before him.’

‘I don’t know if I could ever love someone,’ she had choked on it, because in the back of her head she saw Tommaso’s arm wrapped around Talia and he kissed the top of her head and that was something, wasn’t it, they could love, couldn’t they, ‘I know I could never love a man but what if this feeling never leaves and I die alone and unloved?’

‘Do you want to find her? Because we could, if you wanted to.’ It was a suggestion that had followed a storm off the coast, the water grey and cold, rain streaking down the windows as if it too did not want to touch their unclean flesh. ‘You should fight her, if you see her again,’ smile like the sun, because he was her sun now, ‘I’m serious, you should fight her. Just fight your mom, it’ll be easy,’ laugh, higher, louder, until she rolled onto her stomach and stretched out next to him and laughed too. 

This was a breaking point.

‘So you are angry, then.’ ‘I have only ever known one person who is angry. The rest of us are either sad or alive.’

She lifted her head higher. “I never wanted that name. Keep it.”

[viacapecchi-blog]

We formed a new religion, no sins as long as there’s permission And deception is the only felony, so never fuck nobody without telling me

They call us Capecchis.

[estelasalvarez-blog]

She could feel the alcohol numbing her senses – sure, sober Estela would be loyal to her true self, she would be brash and caustic, every word burning a hole on the skin of whomever sits besides her. Sober Estela would feast on Violetta, as always – would explore the weaknesses her step-sister tucks inside her sleeve and rub slat on the wounds; but Estela was not completely sober, no, and her anger hadn’t taken the best of her. Yet.

That’s why I don’t drink. The small, reasonable part of her mind whispers as she finished yet another glass – drinking puts to rest the monster ever clawing her insides. She couldn’t serve to her purpose inebriated, she couldn’t serve to her god that way. She raised a finger, ordered two.

Maybe she wasn’t so far gone yet.

“More than fun, querida.” She was still smiling, cocking her head to a side, analyzing her companion. There were so many things off about her – so many ugly secrets that Estela would die to scatter all over and roll on. “The wonders those walls hide, imagine what you love the most –” A smile stretched into a poisonous smirk, “And let your imagination go wild.” 

The extra glass sat between them, “Maybe there’s still time for you to enjoy that.”

[viacapecchi-blog]

She was not a poetic drunk — the closest she came was wandering Florence with her veins full of red wine like the blood of Christ, laughing at Dante’s memorial. She had thought, then, that they were the same, the poet and the daughter, exiled from their cities, their cities desperate to lay claim to them only when they were dead. When she was sober, the comparison seemed silly, because the words that had tumbled from her mouth would never come close to the ones that had flowed from Dante Alighieri’s head.

Violetta stared at the glass: paired with Estela’s words, an invitation. She could do it, couldn’t she, just one drink, one last test to prove to everyone that she had survived unscathed and then she could run to Rome or Florence or somewhere very far away, Cape Town, Rosário, Melbourne, with Jett tucked under her arm.

She traced her finger around the rim of it like she was going to take it. “I don’t think,” she said, more to the bar than to her step-sister, “I have an imagination like yours.” 

And then she swears to herself she won’t say another word, because the honesty can spill from her like a glass tipped over on the bar.

[pleasebe--naked]

Visit Original Link

[alyinsvoice-deactivated20231001]

For a moment, Lorenzo was certain he’d heard Violetta incorrectly. She wanted to learn everything that Alessia knew… He had to take a moment, absorb that information, let it completely process. Facing her, the Mastermind took a long moment to simply look at her. Violetta was soft. In features and in personality. She was a gentle soul; frail, fragile. She would never be like Alessia, not in a million years. And he had a sneaking suspicion that she knew that. After all, if she truly wanted to learn all that Alessia knew, she’d have been to be taught by Alessia.

But she was making an attempt. Reaching out, asking for a place in the family. He couldn’t fault her for that. Capecchi’s were built on their loyalty to each other. “Alright. We’ll start with gun training. I’ll set something up with Ciro, he’s pretty handy with a gun,” he said. “After that, I’ll get Tommaso to introduce you into what duties and responsibilities are expected of a caporegime. Once I feel like you’ve mastered those, we’ll start up lessons on what I need from my coordinators.” Lorenzo met Violetta’s gaze, speaking to her bluntly. “This isn’t going to be easy, Violetta. What I expected goes above and beyond anything you’ve ever done. You wanna learn what Alessia does, you’re going to first prove you can handle it.”

She’s trained her whole life, she’s fought hard and worked hard to prove to me and the people she commands that she’s more than deserving of the titles she’s gained. Your my daughter, yes. But that will only get you the chance to prove your ready, because in truth, you’ve done nothing to show me that you can do what I need you to.” He was being honest, laying it out for her. Because he wasn’t sure she’d end up making the cut.

[viacapecchi-blog]

“Do you think — do you think Chi is — capable? Of that?” She always wished it was easier to talk to her father. Even now, when he didn’t seem so — angry, she still struggled, tripping over the words she knew she wanted to say but still couldn’t manage. “I just mean, his injury.” It was a pathetic excuse, given the one beautiful thing their father had done to his middle son was make him seemingly immortal. He would heal. Violetta closed one hand in a tight fist without realising she had done it. Above and beyond everything she’s ever dared to do.

The youngest daughter turned on him, but maybe that was what she had been meant to do to the grosso sotto capo cattivo. “Beyond anything I’ve ever done? Oh, but I am your child, aren’t I,” she snapped, “I have done nothing to show you I can do everything Ciro, at the very least, can do? And Santino, would you make him prove himself? Because me, I couldn’t kill someone when my fingers slipped because my brother was bleeding next to me? Because I have to audacity to be like Mammina instead of you and I have followed your orders only without hers?” That was cruel, Violetta knew, but her words and her heart were moving faster than her head. “I think you’ll find that I have done everything, Papa. Fottiti.”

That would have been a dangerous choice of words even if her father hadn’t been who he was. “I have been through hell and the cold of it is still on me and still you say I am not yours.” 

[estelasalvarez-blog]

Violetta was a mystery in which Estela did not mind to solve, like many things in her life.

For her, it was always black or white and a forever-lived life in the gray area, it was kill or be killed, it was thrive or wither – Estela, like a vicious dog, always chose to attack to destroy, to guarantee her survival and to damage as much as she could; and like a hungry dog, she was never loyal – and she was always hungry.

Still as her step-sister settles herself beside her, she beams amuse, lips playing on the edge that what for her was simply mild fun, for the other, the reason of her decay. “Well, that’s such a shame.” Another sip, another wink to the barman to keep t coming. “Never fun to drink alone.” If Estela had been brought to this world not tainted by violence, not a breed of pure viciousness, she would have cherished her – loved her, even; but the world was not gentle, and Estela was simply a result of such savage environment. The world was loss, and she fed on it – she could not sympathize, for she never had anything in the first place.

She could love her, though, but her bone were not of noble matter, they tried to hold such pure feeling once, and shattered her whole. 

For all that matters, Estela had drank a couple drinks before, and the loose words comes out in her accented Italian, even though she spent a life time using it. “Kensington is cute, those white building, and white gullible men.” She laughs softly. “Amazes me you have never been here, the private parties are the best part of those rich fucks.”

[viacapecchi-blog]

She was staring, she knew, when she lifted her head again, and her attempt to focus on something, anything, to get through this conversation, this summons Violetta was so compelled to follow, left her gaze of red-coloured lips. Still her favourite colour, after all this time, so angry and cruel, esecially on that mouth. But easier to stare at her step-sister than someone else, tinkling glass and long hair and girls were so pretty when they laughed, weren’t they.

She almost ordered a drink. Not to drink, but to fill the silence spilling from her, but once it was in front of her, she wouldn’t be able to not drink it. Estela would only encourage her.

Gullible white men, private parties, rich fucks. It seemed impossible that two sisters could lead such extraordinarily different lives, colliding rarely and threatening to explode when they did. It had been a long time since she had kissed anyone in a way that counted — not a kiss on the cheek for Jett, not kissing knuckles and whispering — she almost missed it. Even the boys, if she had drank enough she could convince herself they were acceptable, but now they made her skin crawl except in her memory. 

Impulsively, Violetta called the bartender over, and until the last second, when she said ‘Do you have limonatas? Ah, lemon soda?’, she thought she might ask for a shot of tequila, to drink to Estela because she hadn’t said anything back to her. 

“Fun,” Violetta said, “Shame I haven’t come here sooner.”  It was easier to feign enthusiasm than to focus and stare, apparently.

[estelasalvarez-blog]

The wind only blows cold every time someone enters the bar, joining the warmth, the drinks and the endless chatter under amber lights. Men have loose ties around their necks, rolled up shirt sleeves and a matching wrinkled look on their faces – tired, worn. In a corner, a group of women sat – one of them with a tiara bearing a white veil, talking in a high-pitch, alcohol filled tone. 

Around her, life seems to follow its course undisturbed. None of those people were aware of what happened in the last couple months, none of them wondered what was to happen. Estela sits in a bar in London, away from home, and orders another drink – the one she gets with a wink from the bartender. She drinks it without savoring – it could be water, or vodka, she doesn’t really mind, her mind far to blurred at to tell apart. 

“Why, you’re late to the party.” Her voice is low, the weight of the third shot dragging her words in the right places. “I thought I would have to drink and entire drink by myself.”

[viacapecchi-blog]

Violetta could have loved her step-sister. She could have fallen for her, even, if there wasn’t such a practised malice to everything she did: her walk, her words, the places she loves. “You still will,” she says in her most polite, civil tone, taking the seat next to Estela, fingernails tapping on the bar in a way that irritates her even though she’s the one doing it. If she held out her hands they would shake. ‘It’s an exercise in self-control,’ she tells herself, ‘You don’t have to do anything but sit here and wait.’ 

She really could have loved the curves of her step-sister’s body, narrow collarbones and a waist to match and hips that could sway in a way that made people forget there was anything else in front of them, if she wasn’t her step-sister, if she wasn’t so cruel, and not for the first time, she averted her eyes from a room and looked at wood of the bar. Not Estela. Not a pretty girl with her head tossed back, laughing, near the door, away from everyone else. Not now.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been to this part of London before,” she said in Italian, trying, reaching out for a common thread, something to say if they weren’t going to drink. “The houses are pretty.”

[cecilyvilliers-blog]

            Bunny slippers traded for ballet flats, the prospect of teetering over the edge already prominent without the height of stiletto heels. 

The return to London had meant that whilst Cece had found comfort in the things she loved most, the stumbling, bumbling Cecily Villiers fell back into school and further behind. The pretty girls still snickered, and she thought desperately of her next next. 

Elvis, or better known to his friends as El-Dog, had sent her a quick text with their location, and she’d succumbed to her desires and fell willingly down the rabbit hole. They were not the sort of people she was supposed to hang around with, but then nothing Cecily did was supposed to happen.

She’d received a message later that day saying it was cancelled, only after she’d already pre-drunk and was sufficiently ready for the evening of hanging out with outcasts, like herself. Apparently Eggsy’s mum had busted his stash, and has ratted out the whole gang, Cecily the only one excluded.

Cecily had sat on a stone bench in the park, staring up at the cloudless sky after her plans had turned out crap. The question which left her mouth was aired under the knowledge of solitude, since the girl had not noticed another presence near, “Do you think the stars are lonely up there in the sky?”

[viacapecchi-blog]

As a rule, she hated London. She hated the way it belonged to Eleanor, to her ‘mum’, and when people asked she could say that someone she once knew was English but she was Sicilian. Finding herself in it again felt like a nightmare, but dragged across the continent at the heels of her watchdog, like she was a child, and she hated Ciro and Santino and their incessant drinking and their incessant need to keep drinking around her, she had no choice but to wander the streets and feign ignorance. Parliament was in Westminster — was that a city or the name of the building alone? — and her grandfather had been a lord, hadn’t he, in the House of Lords, wasn’t he, and was that nearby? Violetta’s curiosity was ugly. 

The English loved drinking, and not in the soft, calming way the Italians did, wine with dinner, sitting on sunlit terraces drinking Campari and Aperol. She had stumbled into the park on her own, pinching the bridge of her nose and refusing to return to the hotel she was being kept in. She knew the girl on the bench, and that was the most impossible of coincidences.

“Cecily,” she touched Francis’ daughter’s shoulder, “Cecily, are you okay?” She had been drinking. Violetta knew that. But she felt protective of her, of Isabel, of the other littlest daughters, even though she was sure she had nothing in common with them.

[alyinsvoice-deactivated20231001]

Violetta had not been who Lorenzo had expected to be the one who came for him. But she was a little more welcome than some of the others would have been, that was for sure. Not by much, however. He sighed, reaching a hand up to run through his thick hair. It needed to be cut, re-shaved along the sides. How it hadn’t managed to go grey, especially with all that had gone down in the last month, was a mystery. But not one that Lorenzo was going to tempt fate by questioning.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. Truth be told, he hadn’t sent anyone to go looking. He had nothing to go on other than a not-so-great description and the knowledge of who the attacker worked for. It wouldn’t have gotten him anywhere. He’d have likely only lost more men in the process chasing down what was essentially a ghost. “But I didn’t bother sending anyone.”

[viacapecchi-blog]

Stupid question. If what she wanted was to talk to him, she should have had a better one, one he couldn’t dismiss with one word. She found something to lean on, back arrow-straight against the wall behind her. It was stupid of her to have come anyway, looking at the ground and not at her father. The Lohovarys. They had put everyone on edge, hadn’t they, with their game, with their cruelty, and for a moment, she hated them, strangers, the way she hated everyone who had ever wronged her. Sometimes that included the mafioso before her. Sometimes, now, it didn’t. Violetta closed her eyes, just for a second.

“I want to learn. Everything that Alessia knows. But not from her.” It came out as a rush, because it wasn’t true, not really, but she thought it might make her father happy and she wanted someone to be happy and she wouldn’t have to kill anyone that way, but he could still be proud, and she could just learn, and then everything would be okay. Better.

She should have been born to another family.

[vclentins]

There she was — his darling sister. Fresh out of the hospital and already looking at him like he was full of shit, seeing right through his pretty boy charades that had the rest of world’s knees buckling and bodies swooning. Truthfully, he felt a bit bad about drinking after Violetta had been wheeled into the hospital on a gurney looking as pale as death. The incident most certainly should have scared him sober, but truly? Tino could not handle heavy things. He was built for light and mirth and happiness, not darkness and thickening seriousness. 

— So when heavy things came about he drank — doing things harder than the hardest of things in order to beget them. Really the whole thing really made him look at life and just how short and fleeting it really was, the murder of the senator and his little girl only serving to solidify this depressive notion. And thus the youngest of the Capecchi Clan drank and drank and drank until the morning and he couldn’t see because he was Santino fucking Cappechi and he would live while he was alive. 

The italian comforted him for a moment before he recognized the tongue that spoke it, her words and tone changing with the surprised expression on his face. She judged him, he could feel it, but he feigned innocence, annoyingly coy as ever. “Did I?” He cocked his head to the right, pursing his lips in thought. “It must be the thief blood. Just yesterday I stole a pen from the bank as well — pray for me, sister: how will I be accepted into heaven now after such sins?” How will I be accepted into heaven when I’m hotter than hell was the real question, but Santno was certainly not looking to get whacked across the back of the head.

School. He stared blankly for a moment. Oh right. School. He’d almost forgotten he was enrolled in one which, like most colleges, required him to attend but, as with everything, it he took as a mere suggestion. Looking up, he smirked.

School, schmool.

“Last lecture my professor showed up with a black Balenciaga.” He breezed, looking cocksure, effortless and disinterested. The usual. 

“I doubt she’ll mind if I’m fashionably late.”

[viacapecchi-blog]

He had been so little, once, before his words got sharper and his liquor got clearer. The only one under her. The only one of her siblings she could remind of that. And ruined anyway: Alessia, Tommaso, so far out of her grasp she could have never saved them, but Ciro, Santino, she should have been more careful. Violetta can see herself in her fratellino, more than their sun-lightened, winter-dark hair and dark eyes to match and their father’s blood under their skin. She should have never succumbed, she should have sacrificed, something.

She sighed. “Fashionably late is not an entire city away, scemo, did they not teach you geography? Maybe you need to study something else.” She was still holding his bottle, sitting on the cold stone the edge of the piazza and gesturing up to him. Sit down. You owe me an hour. I missed you. I hate you. Little brother. “Balenciaga’s respectable. For a French house.”

Violetta’s hands were always cold, and they were always busy now, and she toyed with the plastic, flicking it open and closed. Not wine, but it wouldn’t have been. Even as alcoholics, Capecchis were better than that, they had taste. “I’m serious, Chi —” she glanced at the small crowds on the cobblestones, “He could have died. And so could you, if you had been there. Go back to school. Don’t come back until you’re wearing black and a cap and begging me to introduce you to my friends.” 

It was dangerous to bring that night in Rome up, because he had probably heard that she had shot someone, and he probably had questions, but then again, she didn’t know if he could be serious about anything. Maybe he would brush it off the way he had dismissed her order, back to school, I’m your sister, don’t follow my path, don’t kill yourself like I did.

[xanthebeauregard-blog]

There was something about her, reporters would write, something about the way she attracted attention – no matter the events that occurred beside her. The world could be fissuring up into a devastating split, swallowing people like ants in cracked concrete, and the on-looker would still hold her gaze like a moth drawn to a flame, flies drawn to the light. 

And so was the way of the world, the escapists of Europe, oh, how they liked to watch a reverie and ignore the oncoming moroseness. Long legs that stretched for miles and golden hair to her breasts, it was hard to ignore the salacious allure that was Xanthe Beauregard.

She’s hardly wrestling through the crowds that open up before her like the Red Sea, her the Israelite and those behind her an Egyptian army, but truthfully she’d expected no less. It was, after all, the way of the world – her world, clasped cleverly between her hedonistic fingertips and her debauched way of living. She expected it, above all, for how can you not expect a thing you’ve had since you could walk? 

Continuing to navigate what she’d call starlit pathways, severed solely for her walking, she finds herself stumbling beneath the weight of Versace and Chanel, Ricci weighing down her wrists in bags and Armani (a treat for Silas, for they were to look together as gods – no more, no less) and near into the arms of a stranger – oh, what a gruelling and grinding life she led, incessantly oppressed by the inopportune moral decay of gold.

“Oh!” She pauses, lunged and grappling strands of flax behind her ear, and thus her disposition evolves from the scorned nescience to the familiar, though unexpected, bias. “Ah, bonjour étranger! I’m always forgetting how small this continent is, aren’t you?”

[viacapecchi-blog]

It was rare she felt beautiful, and even rarer that she felt dangerous like Alessia, like Estela, like her step-mother, like the women she was so surrounded by and so overwhelmed by. But wearing stilettos again, those gorgeous black leather knee-high boots that shone in the winter afternoon light, she felt like she could be one of them, the way she used to, when she partied with them, like them, next to them, and there wasn’t a drop of Sambuca in her veins.

Violetta hated Milan. She hated it the way she hated Rome, because it always felt like a ghost of a city, no life in it when the night-blooming flowers floated on to the next city, and maybe she could say that about her entire country, the world’s playground, their museum, without people who lived in it. So: she was bitter, with her hands in her pockets, only a few inches taller wearing her high heels, and certainly not tall enough for the Amazons that descended upon the city for the shows that took up afternoons and nights and no one would get up early for anything but Prada and Versace. 

She knew Xanthe Beauregard, she would have known her even without Ciro’s hold on her — or maybe it was her hold on him, that sounded right — and without the society, the second one, that bound them together. They couldn’t have been as different as they were now, walking along the same path in the same miserable city, a Beauregard and a Capecchi. Violetta smiled.

“I can usually keep my cities straight,” she said, not mocking, “But I haven’t been awake very long.” She paused, glancing at the bags draped over Xanthe’s arms. “You have, haven’t you.”

[alyinsvoice-deactivated20231001]

Everyone had their own getaway place. The one spot in which they felt the most comfortable, felt the most in touch with themselves, where they felt…safe. Even Lorenzo Capecchi had a spot that invoked such feelings. That place was the The Tunnels of Palermo, Sicily; a wide ranging grouping of underground tunnels. It had been found and brought to life by Vico, and since his passing it had become Lorenzo’s. It was what connected the fighting pits, Il Coniglio Nero, and the pleasure dens. In the near future, it would hold more than just those things, however. Lorenzo had plans upon plans for what he would do to help expand upon Vico’s ideas.

But that wasn’t what brought him into the depths of the tunnels that day. It was in hopes of finding a bit of clarity. Not a religious man by any means, but Lorenzo was not without faith. And when even he had a struggle, it was here that he would come to clear his head. For a moment as he stood there alone, he could remember clear as day the first time Vico had brought him down there, explaining the untold lengths the tunnels reached and what they would do with them one day. Lorenzo had only been seventeen, still wet behind the ears, but so eager to please the Capecchi mafia boss.

It would have been nice to still have the old man around. He could use a bit of advice in that moment, and no one gave it quite like Vico had. Puffing on a cigar as he laughed at your troubles but still gave some words of wisdom. At least, that’s how he had been with Lorenzo. He felt a moment of guilt, silently cursing himself for having not been around when Vico had died. For letting someone like Herrero be the one to swoop in and pick up the Capecchi mafia. That was what he got for attending that stupid university, for falling in love with some stupid woman, letting her convince him to start a family together. He’d been a fool to do what he’d done, and look where it got him.

He was an Underboss to an ignorant bastard, and took orders from a man that embodied English arrogance.

Hearing the echoing of footsteps, Lorenzo didn’t so much as glance at who’d found him pacing between buildings. “If this can wait, I suggest it does.”

[viacapecchi-blog]

Something had followed them, from Sicily to Rome, rushing through the halls of the place where Ciro had nearly bled out and rising from the catacombs, to Las Vegas and Shanghai and back again to being held in her brother’s hands. Something she couldn’t name, but something she knew so well it felt almost comfortable sitting on her shoulders, pushing her into the dark. Violetta watched her father for a moment, her hands folded neatly in front of her, not quite ready to answer his almost-question. He would never ask.

They found him here before, and she could feel him as she had gotten too close and if she had been stronger she might have emptied the flask she still carried, the cold metal strapped to her thigh as a reminder. She didn’t know what Lorenzo Capecchi, so daring and handsome and so criminal, the Sicilian, the mafioso, would do if she started drinking again. She didn’t know what her father would do either, but surely they were two separate people. Ciro had proved that.

“The boy, the one who stabbed Ciro —” the one I shot — “Did you find him?”

She should have waited.

[vclentins]

It was five o’clock somewhere and hey — that was good enough for Santino. They said day drinking was a dangerous game, but then again, so was Russian Roulette where there were still more than enough Russians to play it. Raking a sun-kissed hand through his hair, he’d unknowingly left a perfect and beautiful chestnut colored lock on his forehead, one that would now tragically occupy the thoughts of some unlucky woman all day. With a stretch of his arm, he grabbed his water bottle which, not shockingly, was not full of water and wolfed some down only to find that, weirdly enough, it was. His eyebrows became knitted together. But how could that be possible? There wasn’t a single drop in there; the entire filled to the brim with v o d k a. Thinking perhaps it was just an off moment, Tino another swig only to come to the very same conclusion: water without a shadow of doubt. But not one to let things bother him, he was ready to cut his losses when out of the corner of his eye he saw something that left his eyes impossibly wide. And so as not to waste a moment, the youngest Capecchi sauntered over to the other figure, masking his nerves by turning his charm level up to broil. 

“Scusi, but I think we’ve accidentally exchanged water bottles.” Tino mused with a lovely, apologetic smile as effortless as air, immediately noticing the similarities in their containers. “Would you mind if we switched back?”

[viacapecchi-blog]

“Se, m’â scusari ” she said, holding his bottle with one finger in the little plastic loop that held it closed. She could drop it, and say ‘ops’, as if she cared what the contents were. She knew. He had always had miserable taste, vodka, or it could be gin, since it was clear, he would never dare touch Sambuca. That was hers alone. Violetta wasn’t going to drink from it to see if she was right. She knew enough to know that she didn’t like what he meant to drink. 

She switched from their father’s precious Sicilian to her Roman-accented Italian. “I didn’t have any water. You must have taken someone else’s, Tini.” Unsurprising, if he was drinking in the piazza before it emptied. Still, she would lay next to him, certain she had missed him, even if he was a stronzo for drinking now, for drinking next to her, while he waited for her, when he knew — che cazzo? — a shadow during January, but still her baby brother, the only one of her siblings she could call that. Even if he was so tall now, and she had always been so small.

“You should be in school,” Violetta said, automatically, as if she had finished her own degree, as if any of them could be scholars, “Not stealing water from dehydrated tourists.”