Becoming the Hitman (Zanetti Famiglia #5) - Hayley Faiman Page 0,1

shower and go to bed. She doesn’t speak, not a single word.

The next morning my mother is dead. She swallowed a bunch of pills and my father found her in her bed, a note on his cold pillowcase. When he was calling a cleanup crew to take care of her, I stole the note.

I didn’t cry, not a single tear as I read it. I never cried, actually. She confessed her love for him, then said she knew he’d kill her and she wasn’t going to let him have that kind of power over her. She wrote to him that she hoped he’d take me to Italy one day to visit the village where she was born.

She also asked him if there was a single shred of love for her in his body not to allow me to become a Made Man. She asked him to allow me to choose my bride. To go to college, to get a real job, and to find a nice woman to love and build a life with.

My mother’s words fell on deaf ears. I started doing jobs for my father the month after we buried her in a small, famiglia owned cemetery. It was also when I lost the gentle touch of a woman who loved me, and I was thrust into the cruel, hard world of men.

No longer a boy, the moment I turned thirteen my father made sure that I was strong. He put me to the tests of men. When he discovered how good of a shot I was at the gun range, that was when he decided I would be a Button Man.

From the age of fourteen, my life was shooting, practicing, and the famiglia. Nothing else existed, not until my father allowed it to. Even then, I was controlled down to when I was going to lose my virginity and to what whore, picked out by my father.

The day I killed him was the first day that I had smiled since before my mother died.

SIOBAHN

“When you fall in love and get married, will you let me come and live with you?” Emilyn asks.

I laugh, rolling to my side to look over to her from across the small room. She’s ten and I’m fifteen. Right now, she wants this, but by the time I’m married, she’ll be looking to get married herself, I’m sure.

“You won’t want to be with me, Emi. You’ll have your own man, want your own family,” I whisper.

She laughs, shaking her head. “Never,” she breathes. “I’ll always want to be with my sister. My best friend.”

Her eyes drift closed slowly and I wonder if that’s true. Will she always want to be with me? The thought should annoy me. It probably annoys most siblings, but Emilyn is different. She’s five years younger than me, but I’m not sure if she realizes that.

She thinks we’re the same age, she isn’t an immature baby, never was. She’s tall and lean, she’s smart, but mostly she’s kind and sweet. She’s going to be so much prettier than me when she gets older. She’s already less awkward than I am even now.

Emilyn Doyle is going to be a force to be reckoned with. I for one can’t wait to see her life unfold. When it does, it is going to be pure magic.

The next day all of those thoughts that I fell asleep to, all those happy and warm fuzzy feelings, they disappear. Because Emilyn never makes it home after school. In fact, she never even made it to school.

Nobody knew it at the time, nobody was home to answer the robocall of her absence. Nobody knew until she’d already been missing nine hours.

Not a single bloody person knew my sweet sister had disappeared. Vanished. No ransom calls, not that we had anything to give even if they had.

No threats.

Nothing.

Just Emilyn, gone.

My entire world crashed around me that day. My mother fell apart and had to be hospitalized over and over and over again throughout the years. My da lost his job, lost his drive. We searched for hours, days, months, and then years for Emilyn and nothing was ever unturned. Not a single shred of evidence, not even a theory of where she could have gone.

Nothing.

At sixteen, I was unable to keep up with any kind of schooling, so I went into an apprenticeship to become a hairdresser. I found my passion in that. Probably because I had spent my entire childhood with my own real-life dolly to