My father pulled me from the smoke after the bomb. Too stunned to move, I just laid there, staring open-mouthed at the hole in the ground that had once been Samuel and his car. Even if I’d wanted to crawl away, my arms and legs were jelly. My father wrapped an arm around my waist and tried to walk me away, but he ended up having to carry me to the ambulance.
I’ve never been close to the violence of my father’s life. He kept me away from it in my childhood, and unlike Chiara, I had no interest in being involved with it in my teenage years. I focused on school and my future. I set my sights on getting away from the Bratva life even if I knew it wasn’t possible to entirely escape. I wanted distance, but that hard-earned distance had been cut away and blown to pieces in the past week. Whether
