#look finally

In the late 19th century, roughly 13,000 Italians immigrated to Mexico. As the years went by, nearly half of these immigrants returned back to Italy, or continued onto the United States. Once such family was the Vicario family, who formally hailed from Sicily. While many of those families have since assimilated into Mexican culture, the Vicario family stayed rooted in their ways, despite that their bloodlines had changed with several marriages and births. They continued to have strong contact with their distant relatives who still remained in Italy. As times changed, they eventually immigrated to New York City in the 1920s, where the Italian Mafia was just beginning. It would be another thirty years before the Vicario family took power of the Italian Mafia from it’s founders, and another thirty before a very specific chain of power was broken. 

Since its founding, the title of Don of the Italian Mafia has been passed down seamlessly from first born son to first born son. This was how it had always been, used as a show of power and a means of keeping the Family within the family. But, in the 1980s, the heir of the mafia — Orlando Vicario — had an affair just six months after his wedding to Nadia Hernandez, resulting in the birth of his bastard son, Nicollo. Known as an abusive, easily tempered man, Nadia did nothing to stop her new husband from taking in his illigentamant son in. It came as no surprise that the young woman kept her mouth shut on the matter, despite the ache it caused her. 

Two years later, Nadia would give birth to Orlando’s only technical legitimate son. This son would eventually become more fearsome than his father, but the monster was once a child. 

In his early years, it quickly became evident that Orlando favored his older half brother, and it was he who he would pass on command, despite the fact that Nicollo was born out of wedlock. Dante was treated horribly by his father, and in turn, Nicollo — both abused him physically and mentally at every opportunity they could, while his mother Nadia remained passive and did nothing but make excuses for Orlando.

Having inherited his father’s temper, it was as if it had been destined that Orlando was murdered by the son who he so poorly treated. But that? It would come later. As the boy became a man, Dante was treated as a grunt more than the son of a Don, forced to do his father’s dirty work in ways most men didn’t. Dante killed his first man by the time he was seventeen. Soon, the number grew. The more he was exposed to the violence of the mafia and the abuse of his father and brother, the more a dark cloud began to take hold of him. Slowly but surely, this darkness would consume him completely, and a voice began whispering in his head that he could end it all — become heir to the Mafia, because it was he who was Orlando’s son, not Nicollo. He had killed before — he sometimes forgot how many --  and he could surely do it again. All it takes is a bullet, it would whisper, wounding its way tighter and tighter around him. But, while the darkness had fully taken root by the time he was twenty, one of the few people he trusted introducted him to the woman who would eventually become the love of his life. Cassandra introduced her as Carina Delgarrd, a business major at the Melbourne Institute who had gotten in on a scholarship rather than money or fame. 

While Cassandra was known to be able to keep Dante’s demon at bay, it was Carina who could almost make it vanish completely. She pushed Dante to be a better man, to show his father he deserved the Mafia more than his worm of a half brother. But even as Dante outshown Nicollo, Orlando continued is abuse and beatings, ignoring any and all progress and benefits Dante brought to the table. 

Eventually, Dante snapped. In a meeting that involved most of the Family — his father’s closest friends, his uncles, his brother — and included Dante, his mother, and Carina, everything went red when Orlando named Nicollo the heir despite the work Dante had done. With a fresh blackeye still branding his face, the voice came back in full force, seeming to scream and whisper at the same time for him to do it. Dante’s gun loosed six bullets before he even processed what had happened. In September of 2009 — just six months after proposing to Carina — Dante Vicario murdered his father, mother, three of his uncles, and Carina. Carina, the only one who kept him calm, and who had unknowingly been carrying their child. 

After Carina’s death, Dante became a new person entirely. Done with fighting off the demon, his rageful outbursts were even worse than his father’s before him, and Dante was never afraid to end a life. Nicollo somehow survived the shooting, for reasons unknown. Dante allowed him to live, so long as he give him the mafia and do as he was bid. A true coward in the end, Nicollo agreed — begging to be spared — and would eventually become a chip in securing the loyalty of the Ivanov family... though karma would eventually come back to haunt him in the form of a shoot out that resulted in his death without Dante having to lift a finger.