CASSIAN
Don Dante, my father, looked like a shadow of the man who'd raised me, coughing almost every motherfucking second since I arrived.
It was the cancer.
For the first time in my life, I was looking at something money could not bully into submission.
Everything, including women — except for one— could be bought as long as you had a black credit card and a fat account.
But cancer was a personal vendetta for the lives we'd taken. It was borderline more heartless and merciless than my ancestors.
In this world, it was the only sickness that refused to be bought, to be cornered, to be tamed.
It stole and stole until its victim became a walking dead, like the way Don Dante looked right now.
He looked like he'd aged fifty years forward since our last encounter: chapped lips, eyebrows gone, hair gone, and masked with a head warmer to cover what pride couldn't.
