Of volume lineage

I thought Angelo would kill himself rather than have his daughter taken from him. However, I had underestimated just how much cowardice ran in his veins. Angelo hated me, hated Vitale, but he resumed his job as capo and didn’t say anything about how I got my second daughter.

How easy crimes were forgotten in the face of power.

Angelo was weak. He didn’t deserve to raise a Lombardi princess.

The first day at home, Isabella cried nonstop and didn’t stop fussing for anyone. The second day the same, and the third and fourth. She wasn’t sweet or kind, she didn’t giggle or smile. No, my daughter was constantly scowling, constantly releasing her bowels, and seemed to enjoy making my life a living hell.

When she was five months old, I was bathing her and trying to get a smile. Most babies began smiling earlier but my daughter had a constant frown on her face. She splashed me with water, peed in the sink and then began crying when I tried to shampoo her hair.

I hated her, I realized in that moment. This changeling was not my Isabella, this creature was not my daughter.

This creature…This thing was no angel but rather a demon.

Isabella couldn’t fight back when I pushed her beneath the water. Her chubby little legs and fists kicked furiously, her body twisting in discomfort. It would be quicker if only she stopped moving–

“Mom, I’m home!”

I dragged her out from under the water, quickly towelling her dry. Isabella let out a banshee cry before falling strangely quiet. Not a minute later, Junior stepped into the kitchen, dirtied up from school. He gri

I thought about killing her a few more times after that. It wouldn’t be hard. Perhaps I could give her the same death as her mother, smothering her silently in her crib. I thought about dropping her, about leaving her to her own devices for a few hours. I even thought about putting some arsenic into her formula.

As Isabella got older, it became clearer and clearer to me that she wasn’t my daughter. She swore, and yelled, and shrieked. She bit me. She liked to be loud and get in trouble at school. When we told her to do something, she immediately did the opposite. There was nothing soft or gentle about her, she was brimstone and rage.

She…she was like me.

When she was seven, her teacher called me in a huff. In class, Isabella had been instructed to write about what she wanted to be when she was older. Most of the kids said astronaut or ballerina, cop, or princess. But not Isabella.

She wrote: When I grow up, I want to be terrifying.

It was in this moment I realized: I hadn’t brought my daughter back from the hospital.

I had brought me.

The next time, I looked in the mirror, the monster stared back. No longer caged by my ribs, but now it made a home in my eyes and mouth. Monster, monster, monster.

Twenty-four years later, I stared at my daughter across the table of the cabin. She was a wreck, psychically and emotionally. She had never been happier than she had been with the Viglianos, I knew that. I knew that she had loved them, loved them in way I had never loved anything.

And in that moment, watching her staring blankly at the wall, all the fight in her bones gone, I realized: I had never loved Isabella more than I did right now.

I kissed her hair the way I had seen other mothers do. She stared at me.

“Don’t worry, my perfect Isabella,” I whispered. “You will be grow up to be terrifying. I will train you, teach you. You can be the first Isabella, the only Isabella.”

Isabella sagged in my arms. I held her the same way I had when I had first met her.

Against her the crowd of her head, I whispered, “It’s time to take back what was stolen from us. It’s time to take back the Lombardi kingdom.”

To be continued…