Back then I only knew that my father was planning an alliance with a clan from Campania.
Their power was on the other end of Italy, but certain factors made the partnership highly advantageous for both families.
That was when Don De Rosa appeared in our house—the head of the Campania clan.
And the talks about uniting began.
But something like that is never done simply.
There are rules.
Since my father’s clan was the weaker one and the one that needed help, he had to give something in return.
For example, one of his children.
By the rules, children have always been the best possible guarantee of anything.
My father couldn’t give up my brother, of course.
He was the heir.
If my brother left the clan, my father would become weak.
And what would be the point of a truce that only created more problems?
But Don De Rosa was generous and agreed to take me.
My father resisted even that.
Despite the looming threat, it turned out he still wasn’t ready to part with his child.
He searched for other options.
Offered large sums of money.
Real estate.
And that was what shook me awake.
Powerfully.
Until that moment, I’d already started to feel like my family no longer needed me, but seeing that my father still valued me—even in the state I was in… I was still a child, but I decided to act like an adult.
I told my father myself that I was ready to go to Campania.
That I wanted to be useful, and that this was normal practice anyway.
Besides, there was no other choice.
If it wasn’t me, he’d have to give up my brother, and I loved him too much.
He had a different fate waiting for him.
I could see it was a hard decision for my father, but there really was no other way.
If I didn’t leave with Don De Rosa, the whole family could be finished.
And if everything went well and the partnership worked as planned, I would be safe.
Was I scared to leave?
Of course I was.
From childhood, they gently explained the rules of our world to us, and even then I understood that if something went wrong in that place, they would simply kill me.
But I believed in my father and in my family.
I knew everything would be all right.
And any fear was worth the way my family struggled to let me go.
The way they hugged me before I got into the car.
My mother crying again.
My brother begging me to stay, saying he’d figure something out.
And I was happy.
Truly.
For the first time I felt not like a defective cripple people could barely look at, but like part of the family.
Yeah.
Right.
I really have no right to complain.
Don De Rosa turned out to be a good man—as good as someone in his line of work can be.
The first year I lived in his house.
They tried to hide me just as carefully as my father had once hidden me from outsiders.
But Don De Rosa did it to avoid outrage and problems.
He’d accepted me as a guarantee of the truce, of course, but if his close associates saw the state I was in, they might start complaining that I wasn’t much of a guarantee at all.
As it was, life in Don De Rosa’s house was decent enough.
They gave me half a floor that only trusted maids were allowed into, and I remained under doctors’ supervision.
I even met Don De Rosa’s only son, Luciano.
We never became especially close, but he turned out to be kind too.
Sometimes he would come by and ask what I wanted for dinner.
Occasionally, walking past my room and hearing a crash, he would come in.
Seeing that I’d fallen after a failed attempt to reach the bathroom, he would pick me up and carry me where I needed to go—scolding me every time and telling me I should call the nanny.
He was only three years older than me, but he lectured me like an adult.
However, no matter how kind Don De Rosa and his son Luciano were, they hadn’t signed up to be my babysitters.
They had their own lives, responsibilities, ambitions, and work.
And when a year passed and it became clear that the alliance with my father was working well, Don De Rosa decided to send me to another family—one with whom he shared a distant blood connection.
He did it for my sake, too.
Although this family belonged to Don De Rosa’s clan, they were barely involved in its affairs.
More importantly, they lived in Naples, where they obviously couldn’t interfere in anything.
That territory belonged to another clan—the most powerful one in Campania.
The Camorra ruled Naples.
Of course it did.
It was the regional capital, after all.
In other words, they planned to send me to an ordinary family where I could live a quiet, peaceful life.
At least, that’s what they told me.
It was for my own good.
But most likely, being disabled had simply made me a burden in Don De Rosa’s household.
Just like my father before him, perhaps my presence had become too painful for him to bear.
Later, I realized that Don De Rosa had probably intended to do this from the very beginning.
Usually, when one don entrusted his child to another don, it involved a complete adoption.
The child took the new family’s surname and became part of that clan, accepting its traditions and rules.
But I never became a De Rosa.
Instead, I was sent to a distant relative’s family, where I’ve lived ever since.
Naturally, this had been done with my father’s permission.
He had allowed his own daughter—the child of the Don of Florence—to be handed over to a much lower-ranking family, effectively lowering my status.
Otherwise, he could have objected.
The rules clearly called for something entirely different.
And, honestly, I didn’t care about status.
But that was when I began noticing the first warning signs.
Once again, I got the feeling that people were simply trying to get rid of me.
Push me somewhere far away.
Put me somewhere they wouldn’t have to see me.
To some people, I was simply unpleasant to look at.
To others, I was a painful reminder of something terrible.
But damn it, I was neither of those things.
I was a person.
At the time, I accepted Don De Rosa’s decision as calmly as I could.
I even thanked him for caring about me.
First, I didn’t want anyone to see how much it was eating me up inside.
I was already a burden to everyone.
Second, everyone kept telling me the same thing: It was for my own good.
So I tried to tell myself the same thing.
I tried to believe that this really was an act of kindness from Don De Rosa and my father.
And that’s how I ended up in Naples.
In the Mariani family.
I took their surname and became a Mariani.
They probably hadn’t been eager to take me into their home, let alone give me their family name.
But their fear of Don De Rosa—and the generous allowance he’d promised to pay for my upkeep—left them with little choice but to agree.
At first, things were relatively normal.
If you could call it that.
Throughout all the years I lived in their house, my adoptive parents never once raised their voices at me, much less hit me.
They provided everything I needed.
I was never left wearing rags or going hungry.
Don De Rosa paid generously to make sure of that.
Things were much more complicated when it came to my adoptive siblings.
There were three of them: the eldest was a son, then came two daughters.
The youngest was the same age as me.
From the very beginning, I had a difficult relationship with my eldest stepsister.
Because of my physical limitations, her bedroom was given to me, while she was moved into a smaller room without a bathroom.
That alone was enough for her to hate me.
After that, she constantly followed our parents around, complaining and picking fights over it.