Chapter 2: Dante

Present day …

I’d brought lilies today …

I brought lilies and cleared the grave of all the roses from Sunday.

I hated roses …

I may have seemed like an asshole for getting rid of them, but I couldn’t stand the fucking sight. Felt like a reminder of the roses her killer had used to surround her body.

It was a reminder to me that she was gone.

The people who came for her birthday memorial wouldn’t have known that detail. Since I did, I removed them all and left the tulips Ma had bought with a few other arrangements. I’d left the dahlias that I brought too. Christina had liked those. I remembered her telling me that after she had found out her favorite actress loved them.

Once I was done cleaning, I’d sat down on the patch of grass in front of the grave, and there I sat for the last three hours.

Just watching and looking, remembering ;lost in my memories.

There was a bench, but I liked sitting on the grass just like I used to with Christina when we were kids.

We’d sit in the park near where we lived, talking and playing around for hours. I was just trying to do that now. This was our time. I’d talk to her still and tell her what was going on with me.

Today I was quiet the whole time.

I’d sat and mostly gazed out in the open at the surroundings. We’d buried her near the lake that she had loved.

I’d bought the whole plot of land and sectioned it off for her, so it was hers. Surrounding it was a garden with sculptures of everything she loved. She’d wanted to be an artist.

Prior to her death, she was trying to figure things out, because Ma wanted her to study something useful like business or law. Christina was very passionate about art and I had told her to take some time to figure things out.

She took that to mean moving out of Ma’s after high school and going to live with Maria.

It was the moment, everything changed. That was her equivalent of going wild in college. She was like that for two years before I thought she had calmed down. She came to me wanting my opinion on whether or not she should go to art school.

I stared at the head stone trying to remember the day when she told me about that. I’d said yes, because while she might have loved art, I knew going away to school would have gotten her someplace better. Far away from the gangsters and the dangerous types I was starting to see her with.

That day was more of a blur now.

My heart broke every time I cast my memory back to that time and something faded. That was what happened though. Time blurred the memory. Some things that were once vivid in my mind were all shadows now.

Practically everything except that night when I had found Christina dead on the bed.

That memory was still bright and clear like it could have happened only yesterday. I had to remind myself that it was ten years ago.

However, by doing so, by reminding myself that it was a decade ago I remembered that I had failed as her brother and I hadn’t found justice.

I had never found her killer.

I hugged my knees to my chest and stared openly at the grave—her final resting place.

My last words in life to her were I’m done with you.

I never realized that was going to be the last time we’d speak. The last time she’d talk with me, the very last time I’d see her alive.

We’d had such a bad argument and I had foolishly used stupid reverse psychology on her, because I thought it would work. She knew how much I adored her, and she’d always come to me when she was younger. She got older though and things changed.

I didn’t know how ten years had passed so quickly. Year in, year out I hoped that something would come up, but there was nothing.

I was still looking and hadn’t given up. I had no plans to give up either, even though the police had done so years ago.

I still had guys searching while I continued my own investigation. The longer I looked and the harder I searched I knew that the person who had killed her must have been some kind of high power fucker.

Some high power fucker who wanted to teach her a lesson. She was pregnant and wanted to destroy him.

No one was that hard to find, and it was the evidence itself.

I kept seeing that damn coffee mug on the table of the penthouse suite. The coffee mug, the newspaper, the empty plate, and Christina’s purse. The person had been there, looked like they lived there, yet the cops said the place wasn’t registered to anyone. I knew all of it had to be bull shit.

Adding insult to injury not even Raphael was able to help. The man could move mountains, but not in that instance.

Couldn’t get a name. Couldn’t get shit.

Something like that should have been easy in our circles, unless the person you were looking for was a bigger fish than you. There were many categories of sharks in the sea, some were more vicious than others. Some had more power than others.

Obviously, that was what had happened here.

Even with all of my theories and assumptions I was still here years later with nothing.

Not even a lead.

It was a hard thing to accept.

Every year I came here I hoped to have better news, but all I had brought was flowers. I came with flowers and love.

Today’s visit hadn’t been planned. It just felt like I should come see her again. I was here at least once a month. In the beginning it was every day, then my friends weaned me down to a week, then the month.

I’d been a broken man trying to find a way back to myself.

The rumble of an engine pierced through the silence. I knew the sound all too well.

It was a bike engine.

No … not just one, but two bikes. I knew who they belonged to.

Claudius and Gio.

Alex wouldn’t come because he’d think it was inappropriate.

He came on Sunday, because I needed them all here; my three best friends.

He wouldn’t come today. He wasn’t around at the time when Christina was alive. It was like our stories were similar, but not exactly the same and the differences were enough for him to realize he didn’t understand my pain.

The thing was I didn’t care about that, but I got it. It was a sort of respect.

The same sort of respect we showed each other in our personal life and business.

Claudius was the new boss. He was in charge now and us with him; the whole Chicago operation. Billions of dollars may be involved, but to me we were still The Four—Claudius Morientz’s men, the guys who got involved when shit was going down.

Gio, Alex, me, and …

Jude.

Jude was Alex’s brother. He was also a traitor. He was no longer with us in every sense of that word.

Alex killed him to save Claudius and that was possibly another reason why he wasn’t here today. It had happened over a year ago, but it was fresh death, and at his own hands—new pain. He’d had two older brothers and both of them were dead.

On Sunday when we were together it was in a crowd of my closest friends and family. We wouldn’t be talking out our pain.

Not like we would be today.

Claudius was the first to pull up. Both he and Gio were dressed in black leather biker jackets. Claudius took off his helmet first and his long black hair billowed in the wind.

Claudius was the boss, but when he came here like this he was just my friend. Gio took his helmet off too.

He was more of a brother than a friend to me. Most likely that was probably because our stories were the same. Someone killed his best friend and the killer was never found. No one knew who did it either. Same story as me.

We each bore a tattoo of a cross in memory of our fallen loved ones.

Claudius had his on his cheek, and like mine, both Gio and Alex bore theirs on their necks.

Death was what bonded us together. We’d been friends before, but death transformed us from the boys who’d loved motorcycles into men.

I watched the two approach and sit opposite me.

“How’d you know I’d be here?” I asked. Maybe it was a stupid question. With these guys I was like an open book and they knew me too well. Honestly sometimes they knew my mind even better than I did myself.

“That a question you actually want an answer for?” Claudius asked giving me a smirk and staring at me with his unusual colored eyes. One brown and the other blue.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“We didn’t think you’d want to be completely alone.” Gio offered and glanced over to Christina’s grave.

“I just wonder if the next ten years will be like this,” I said returning my gaze to the headstone. “Me sitting here feeling like a failure. Then it will be twenty years. I’m still looking for the mother fucker who killed her, but I … maybe I should just accept I’m not going to find him.”

“Don’t accept shit Dante. I’ll be the last person to ever tell you that.” Claudius stated.

I looked at him and took note of the seriousness in his expression. A little over a year ago he’d gotten vengeance on the man who’d murdered Marissa, his first wife. The killer was a man called Goliath. He was a black market trafficker who’d gotten involved in a deal to steal some nukes from Chicago.

The whole thing was potentially an example of things happening in the most unusual of ways. So, him telling me not to give up was because he knew what he was talking about.

“Me too,” Gio added. “I won’t tell you to give up, because I’m not giving up either. The similarities we share is that neither of us knows who took our people from us. We have no leads, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to find.”

“I won’t stop looking.” I said it more to Christina rather than them.

“And, we won’t stop helping you look either,” Claudius added. “We just need to find another avenue, which is what I did.”

I straightened. “What do you mean? What did you do?”

I was real interested to hear what he did that I hadn’t done yet.

“Last night I contacted a P.I., who deals with unsolved murders.” Claudius answered. “I know you’ve hired many people, but this guy is a disgraced ex-naval officer. Someone framed him awhile back for murdering his wife and he lost everything. He was exonerated, but never went back to the service. I figured he was worth a shot, because he owes no allegiance to anyone. A man like that will dig deep and won’t be afraid of what he finds. I think that’s what we need here.”

The thing I liked about Claudius was that he always spoke with wisdom and experience.

“Thank you. I don’t know how to thank you,” I replied.

“Don’t thank me yet. Let’s see what this guy is made of first. If we get results, then it’s a step in the right direction.”

I nodded and looked at them both. Something like hope sparked in me, waking up the fight in me to avenge Christina’s death.

I just needed a name.

Only a name and it would indeed be a step in the right direction.