I sat there watching the crimson blood pool at her feet. I had never been that close to death. I hoped that maybe they could save her. But I was fifteen, and I knew better. There was nothing they could do. She was gone.
The cops arrived, and they found me huddled in the corner underneath my mother's mahogany desk hugging my knees to my face. I don’t know who called them. Who let them into the Gioti den. Why they didn’t just clean it up themselves, like they had a hundred times before.
Maybe that time was different.
I didn't even cry. I was too terrified to do anything but breathe. She was gone.
It changed my life. Everything I thought I knew was suddenly ripped away. Including Luka Gioti, the son of the mob boss. I had spent nights sitting alone with him, talking about every part of our lives. I held my breath when he spoke sometimes, because I was just so entranced. He told me all his stories, and even some that didn’t belong to him. Horrible things people had done to keep others safe. But that night, no one kept my mother safe.
No one.
I remembered them taking me away in the back of a cop car, and the last face of the Gioti family that I saw was Luka. He was just standing there with his hand up, waving goodbye.
If only I had known it was forever.
If only I had known that that was the last time I would ever see Luka Gioti, I would've told him.
I would've told him that I was madly and irrevocably in love with him.
But I couldn’t tell him that now.
Now that we were on opposite sides of a brewing war.
Of a life that was falling apart.
3
Luka
“Luka, so good to see you. You're looking fit, healthy even.”
I sat down across from my lawyer, a sleazy man named Richard that we kept on retainer. There was always somebody in jail in my family, or some FBI agent coming after us for money-laundering or something else that they thought they could tie to the family. But they never could. Richard may have been greasy and a little bit disgusting, but the man knew how to do his job. He was excellent at hiding secrets, a perfect lawyer for a mob family.
“I'm good, Richard, but a little confused. What the hell are you doing here?”
“Well, you know the little side project you've been having me work on for you, the one I'm not supposed to tell your father about?”
I sat up a little bit straighter in my seat. If he was coming here with information, I was ready to listen. “Yeah, what about it?”
Richard hunched over a bit, his tie touching the table. He looked both ways before speaking. “I found her. She's working at some little diner on the other side of town.”
Vienna.
A sense of calm washed over my body at the thought of her face. Those beautiful doe eyes, her flushed cheeks in the neon glow of the club. The way I remembered her. “She's in Baltimore? I swore they said they put her in the foster system so they took her out of the city. Witness protection program or some other bullshit.”
He shook his head. “I don't know, man, we never were able to find out what really happened to her. But she's here. I know that she never testified. From the information I was able to pull, she was under the desk the whole time and never saw who the shooter was. Without a witness, they could never make a solid case against her mother's killer.”
I didn't know that. I thought she was taken into witness protection because she was going to testify. “No, I just assumed. I tried to find her after she left, but there wasn't much. My father wanted to take care of her, because even if she wasn’t blood, she was family. He wanted to show her that she would never have to want anything for the rest of her life. But we could never find her.”
Richard nodded in understanding, pressing his lips together in a thin line. “The situation was terrible. It started that investigation against the family, people looking into books that were cooked. I mean, shit did spiral down to you landing here.”
It was true. I had taken the life of a man. He deserved it, though. He came after my family. He ripped Vienna away from me. She was only fifteen when her mother was killed. She must have been thrown into the foster system with no other family to speak of. My family had tried to find her; they didn't want her to feel alone. If there was one thing the mob was good at, it was taking care of our own. If she was placed in witness protection, then she would have completely vanished. There was no reaching her. Even our contacts with the Marshalls had no idea where she was. I hadn’t seen her in a decade.
She had been too young for me back then. I was seventeen and she was only fifteen, a baby. It wasn't right, the way I felt about her. It was one of the many reasons I'd hidden my feelings. But I didn't have to hide it anymore. Now that I knew where she was, I could tell her how I felt. About how I had killed for her. And how I would do it again if it ever came to it.