Gio staggered the rest of the way home, clutching his stomach with tears in his eyes. While his mother comforted him, Mario went into the next room and made several phone calls.
Two days later, when Gio came home from school, his father took him firmly by the shoulder and led him out to the garage without a word. The men who'd attacked him were gagged and taped to chairs, their eyes bulging with fright. Bruno and Julius were standing behind them menacingly.
“These morons broke the rules,” Mario said. “They had a grievance with me, and rather than settle it between men, they chose to make their point by involving a child. We won't kill them, since they didn't take a life. We aren't animals, after all. But still, they must be punished. I want you to be the one who punishes them.” And with that, Mario put a baseball bat in Gio's hands and stepped back.
Gio looked at the men and thought about how it would feel to hurt them in return for what they'd done to him. He knew he should have been excited, but instead, all he felt was scared and sick.
“I don't want to,” Gio mumbled, staring at the floor.
Mario stepped forward again and took Gio by the shoulders. “That's your choice,” he said, “but before you make it, understand—if you decide to leave their punishment to others rather than dispensing it yourself as is your right, then you will forfeit your rightful place in this family. You will always be my child, but for the rest of your life, you will never know real power. You will be someone to be sheltered and protected, instead of someone to be respected and feared.”
Gio considered this for a long moment. He didn't fully comprehend what his father was telling him, but he knew that if he made the wrong decision, he would never find another way to earn Mario's pride or acceptance. No matter how old he got, he would always be an outsider in his own family, someone to be casually banished to another room while the real men made the real choices.
He would always be seen as weak.
So Gio took a step forward, raised the bat, and brought it down as hard as he could on his attackers' arms and shoulders and heads, again and again. He heard the sound of bones breaking, and the wet thwack of flesh pulverized to pulp, like a meat tenderizer coming down on a piece of steak. His eyes filled with tears and his breath came in ragged gasps until his father pulled the bat away and embraced him warmly.
“Good!” Mario laughed, the tang of his aftershave filling Gio's nostrils. “Well done, Gio! That's my boy. You've taken an important first step today. Now it's time to reward yourself.”
And as Bruno and Julius loaded the bleeding, moaning bodies into the trunk of a car to be delivered God-knew-where, Mario called for a limo and took Gio to a brothel on the South Side. As they stood in the parlor, Mario ordered the women to line up so Gio could choose one he liked.
“Remember, whoever you choose, she's yours for the rest of the night,” Mario told Gio. “You can do anything you want with her, anything at all, and she can't refuse. Understand?”
Gio understood. And as he chose a woman named Gilda and followed her into her room, he felt the quivering fear in his gut giving way to a hot miasma of hatred and disgust. He loathed himself for feeling so shaky and terrified by his own actions in the garage earlier and for his moment of helpless indecision. He was filled with a sudden urge to take it out on Gilda.
Someone he'd never met now offered to fulfill his every fantasy, and he wanted to hurt her. He wanted to make her feel as small and helpless as he had felt. If he couldn't take pleasure in terrorizing other men, at least he could take out his rage on her.
Gio had never considered harming a woman before in his life, but over the next three hours, he choked, whipped, brutalized, and humiliated Gilda in every way he could think of. Every new act of terror he carried out on her made him feel stronger.
More like a man.
And no matter what he did to her, no matter how much genuine pain and fright he saw in her eyes, she kept on taking it and letting him do more and more, until finally, the fury inside him was all used up and he felt something like peace.
He felt like a god—dangerous and unpredictable, unmoved by the pleas and suffering of those under his power, able to inflict pain or end it at a whim.
After that, there were many more times when Mario involved Gio in his criminal activities, and after each time, they went to the same brothel and Gio indulged his darkest desires again. When the visits with his father became more infrequent, Gio started going to the brothel on his own after every successful crime he committed.
Then he started to go in between crimes, during times when he was stressed or horny or even just bored. After a while, he found himself no longer satisfied by whores, and he began seeking out underground sex parties so he could explore his urges among people who were more experienced. He became a regular in the scene.