No Boundaries(57)

They certainly weren't Vienna.

As we walked the rest of the way to the conference rooms, I wondered what she was doing. Who she was with. Was she safe? I had spent hundreds of nights dreaming about her. Dreaming about what I would do when I saw her again. How I would take her and make her mine. It was one of the only things that kept me sane in this place. I would give anything to have those hazel eyes on me again.





2





Vienna





“Welcome to the Starlight, what can I get for ya?”

I said that same phrase at least fifty times a day. I hated working at a restaurant, but at least for the most part, people were nice. The smell of fryer grease on my clothes, however, I would still be able to smell once I was dead.

The elderly gentleman smiled up at me. “The regular, darlin’. You on your own today? It's busy in here.”

I scribbled down two eggs, white toast, and three slices of bacon on my waitress pad before I smiled back at him. “Yep it's just me. Leah will be in later though, so when you come back for dinner tonight, you'll see her.”

“Nope. It's Wednesday, I’ll eat at the senior center. Then we get to play bingo.”

Mr. Herman, I loved that old geezer. He always tipped the waitresses well, and he was sweet to us. Sweetness to a waitress could go a long way, especially in our diner. We treated him like family.

“That's right, I didn't even realize it was Wednesday. I'll get your breakfast for you.”

I brushed my hands on my apron as I walked into the back. “New order!” I yelled as I slapped my order paper down on the counter. “It's Mr. Herman's, so make it quick.”

Chevy waved at me with the spatula. “You got it.”

I went back out to the front and noticed the empty coffee pot. I walked up to the station and grabbed the coffee grounds from the cabinet below. The smell of the fresh grounds wafted over me as I waited for Mr. Herman’s order. I looked around the diner and sighed. The rest of my customers already had their meals. If more customers didn’t come in, today was going to be a very long day.

My eyes trailed over to the booth in front of me. In it sat a middle-aged gentleman reading the newspaper and quietly mumbling to himself.

“Anything interesting?”

He pulled down the paper just enough so that his eyes looked at me over the newsprint. “Just some gang banger being let out of prison. I don't even understand this. How do they let some asshole who killed somebody out? Isn’t he a danger to society?”

I shrugged. “I guess it's not really our choice. Or maybe he had a good reason for killing that person. Maybe they were worse than he was.”

I knew as soon as the words left my lips that I shouldn't have said it. The man looked at me with wide eyes. I hadn't been raised like this man. I was used to people killing other people for sport.

Sometimes I wondered if that made me a bad person.

My mother was an accountant, and she was very good at her job. Especially at covering up money that was not supposed to be there. She had handled the books for a very famous mob family in Baltimore. The Gioti family. She had done all of their accounting for most of my life. Growing up around the mob gave me a very different perspective on life.

And then one day, it was all over, and the life that I knew completely changed.

I remembered it like it was yesterday. We were sitting in the office below the club that the family owned. I was eating candy out of a fancy box by some famous chocolatier. It was the most amazing chocolate I had ever tasted. Each bite practically melted in my mouth. My mother and I would've never been able to afford luxuries like that had we not worked for the family. So I knew, even back then, that my mother working for them was a precious gift. I just didn't realize how precious her life was. I was licking excess chocolate off my fingers because it was a hot day, and they were melting in my hands when I heard the commotion outside the door. At first, it sounded just like any other argument, and I had heard them a thousand times before. I remembered not even reacting until my mother told me to climb under the desk.

“Why?”

Her face was so serious. “Vienna, just get under the desk right now.”

I dropped the box of chocolates on the floor and scurried under the desk, hiding next to her feet. Someone broke through the door just a minute later.

“I'll kill you for this, Gioti. I'll kill you and your whole fucking family. Especially that bitch.” I heard a man's yell from just a few feet away. And then the loud pop of a gun. I smacked my hand over my mouth so I wouldn't scream. They always taught me not to scream. There was another pop of the gun, and this time, I saw my mother’s legs lose tension as she slumped in her chair.

I didn't come out from under that desk for hours.