Maximo: A Second Chance Mafia Romance (Mob Daddies Book 3)

by Alexa Hart

  My boy. My Nic.

  He had inherited his mom’s blonde hair, but his eyes were all me. Hazel. Serious. When he told you a story, you knew he meant every word, and he was only four. We shared our intensity, and I found it reassuring that there was a piece of me in this world that was still 100% innocent.

  For now.

  I collapsed in a chair at the kitchen table, putting my face in my hands. It was getting worse – this anxiety or whatever it was.

  “Max, I’ll get it to ya. It’s a little late, that’s all. These are tough times. Max – Max, ya gotta understand...”

  I did understand. I understood that there was a type of pressure and responsibility being bequeathed to me by the business’s leaders that required a part of me to turn to stone and die. And I was more than aware that this particular part of me was something that I could never take back.

  “Max, cmon, man. You know you can – ”

  One second Frank had been begging, pleading with me, and then I saw the flash in his eyes as he realized that this wasn’t going to end well for him. Next, he was reaching for his gun with a mad man’s desperation – no warning, no clear thoughts. Johnny had shot him right between the eyes before he could even get it out of his pocket.

  And then I had just stood there, watching the life swiftly fade out of Frank’s eyes. Frank, whom I had known since childhood. Frank, who had smoked cigars with my father around tables full of cards and beer. Frank, with the deep belly laugh that could be heard echoing through the blocks of the neighborhood like a jolly, drunk Santa Claus.

  I wasn’t even gonna kill him. I wasn’t even gonna do that.

  But it had gone wrong that night. Sometimes things went wrong. And as Johnny told me later over straight shots of whiskey, “You roll with it, Max. You ain’t got no time to feel bad, you hear me?”

  I had been “rolling with it” for two weeks, and it didn’t seem that there was any way to avoid feeling bad. Bad wasn’t the right word for it anyway. It wasn’t even guilt or remorse; it was just this creeping sensation of being choked to death by hands I couldn’t see. These hands clenched mercilessly, forcing me to watch the replay of that night over and over until I couldn’t breathe and finally released me as some crippled, defenseless version of myself – gasping for air and head pounding.

  You ain’t got no time to feel bad.

  That much was true. All of the shipments were behind. Our suppliers were growing less and less dependable. Everyone knew Pop Angelone was dying, and it seemed that he was taking all forms of sanity with him. The cops were coming by the store much more frequently. I felt like I was sitting in a field, holding Pop while he died, and trying to fight off the vultures that would have him torn apart before he was even cold.

  These vultures weren’t scared of me like they had been of Pop, or even of my father way back when. I hadn’t proven myself to be much more than the kid son of a deceased boss, punking his way into power – power I hadn’t ever asked for. I had simply been given it.

  That had changed when Frank died. Word spread, and it spread fast. Mistakenly, everyone had assumed that I had pulled the trigger. Johnny, in his sixty-eight-year-old wisdom, had told me to let them believe it. He had said that I needed this, that it was a turning point.

  “Let them see you at Frankie’s funeral, standing there respectfully, watching the man you killed get lowered into the goddamn ground. Let them see you cold, kid. Show ‘em you ain’t going nowhere. Let ‘em think about the fact that you’ll take out one of your old man’s best friends if that’s what it takes. You need this, kid.”

  I had done as he said. I had stood there in the freezing wind, my best suit on, somber faced but absolutely no tears, becoming the ruthless monster that the business so badly needed right now. I had stared calmly at Frank’s coffin going six feet under, while the entire neighborhood watched.

  Now they knew Maximo Fanucci was in charge. Now they knew Maximo Fanucci wasn’t playin’ any more games. Now they knew Maximo Fanucci was a man – and a man you didn’t fuck with at that.

  I had properly assumed the role of “scary motherfucker”.

  Nic sighed in his sleep, disrupting my thoughts and making me smile sadly.

  I was just a dad. The only thing scary about me was the fact that I was in charge of something I had no desire to run. It didn’t bode well for the business – not that anyone knew.

  I was just a dad with a sweet little kid, a hellion of an ex-girlfriend up in Jersey, and recurring nightmares. I was a 27-year-old kid with a kid.

  The rest of this bullshit was something else – someone else.

  I had fallen asleep in the reclining chair facing the couch. Staring at Nic and his shaggy little head, I’d been able to relax and finally doze off. That was until my mother came barging into the house, arms full of grocery bags.

  Elena Fanucci was a lot of things, but she most certainly was not scared of her son. “Up! Alzati, ragazzo mio! Get up! There are more bags in the car, Maximo! Nicola is asleep? He will never go to bed tonight! You can’t let him sleep midday, Maximo! Up! Nicola! Nonnina is here!”

  My father, when he was alive, had a special nickname for my mother that he used often, and affectionately. He called her his piccolo tornado. Little tornado. I didn’t think a more accurate description of my mother could possibly exist. She was always in motion – no idling, no braking. Elena Fanucci had things to do, and she was going to do them.

  I gave her a tight squeeze and obediently retrieved the rest of her haul. She had made a habit of doing this – showing up with absolutely no warning, armed with enough provisions to survive an apocalypse. Ever since I had bought my own house, she had become more than convinced that I was in no way capable of caring for myself or Nic properly. I wasn’t sure she would ever forgive me for no longer living under her roof, eating her meals, and letting her do my laundry.

  We had adjusted, however. This was the new norm. She now had two houses to take care of, and as long as I could accept that, she could let it slide that I had left her to die alone in the Fanucci home.

  A fresh spread of food soon overtook the kitchen table, and Nic didn’t hold back from attacking all of the goods his Nonni had laid out. He was small. His appetite was not.

  “You look flushed, Maximo. Are you not feeling well? You’ve been busy. You’ve been entirely too busy!” Her dark eyes were piercing into me, digging up any truths that I had failed to mention since she saw me last.

  “I’m just a little tired, Ma. You know. Just a lot going on,” I protested calmly, playfully tossing a cracker at Nic when she had turned away.

  “Maximo! You teach him that, he’ll be throwing food at school, getting detentions, running with the troublemakers!” She really missed nothing, my mother. But I saw the corners of her mouth fighting off a smile as Nic pelted me back with a cheese block. She refocused her gaze on me, once again serious. “It is overwhelming for you. I remember your papa, around your age, suffering a similar pain. You are in charge now, Maximo. It will make you a man, but it will not be easy. You can do it because it is in you, as it was in him. Your father was strong. You are strong, ragazzo mio. There is nothing my boy cannot do.”

  All of this was said with unflinching certainty and motherly love. My mother was fully aware – fully aware – of the business and my position in it. Aside from Johnny and Dario Angelone, she was the only other soul who knew that I had not killed Frank. And furthermore, she knew I was internally struggling to accept that Frank had died at all. Her unwavering confidence in me should have been comforting.

  I had found it disturbed me all the more.

  “It will be okay, Ma. I’ll be okay,” I assured her, smiling and patting her hand.

  “You will be okay, Maximo,” she agreed, now grabbing my giant hand with her tiny one and squeezing fiercely. “Pop Angelone. He is not so okay. You need to pay your respects, Maximo. Visit him soon. He’s not predicted to make it through the month. It is all very sad.” She shook her head, and I k
new she was fighting tears. My mother and Pop had always been very close, especially after my father died. I suspected on some level they were in love but had never acted on it out of respect. We didn’t do that here. We didn’t cross those lines.

  “I will stop by, Mama. You know I will,” I spoke quietly, noticing Nic eyeing his Nonni inquisitively. He instinctively felt her pain.

  What my mother failed to realize was that I saw Pop nearly every day. Dario had been my best friend since we were small kids, and these days he was also my right-hand man. He was one of the only people who I could talk both business and personal matters with, without carefully separating the two. We didn’t have that luxury, he and I. We’d been born directly into the melded fusion of them both.

  It was often easier, and much more peaceful, to talk things over at the Angelone household away from other business associates. No games, no candy coating – Dario and I communicated with an honesty that was sorely lacking in the business these days. It had taken me years to enter that house without the stabbing agony that accompanied it. Memories of Natalia were everywhere. Every room, every piece of furniture – she saturated her family’s home with her presence, while simultaneously staying thousands of miles away.

  Over time, the ferocity of my longing for her had subdued itself to a dull ache. I could sit on the Angelone couch in the Angelone living room and almost smile when I thought of Nat, and all of the times she had sat right there beside me.

  She was my “one”. She was my “one that got away”. And I couldn’t blame her for leaving. She had always deserved more than I or anyone else in the neighborhood was capable of giving her.

  Sweet Natalia...

  Almost as though she could read my mind, my mother broke the silence with her most tender of tones. “Are you ready to see her, Maximo? She will come for the funeral. She must. She loves her father. And he adores her...” Again, I thought Ma was going to cry.

  Terror raced through my bones at her words, and I realized I hadn’t allowed myself to even begin to think about Natalia returning home ever, for anything.

  “I think I’m goin’ for a run, Ma. Could you stay with Nic a little while?” I was up and moving, retreating to my bedroom and changing clothing swiftly. I had to get out. I had to get air.

  “You always did think you could run that girl off, Max. It never worked, you know,” Ma spoke kindly through the closed door of my room, seemingly lost in her own heartbreak.

  I whipped the door open, meeting her eyes with my own, and joining our sorrows briefly. “Well. Gotta keep tryin’ anyhow, right Ma?”

  She smiled faintly, nodding.

  I planted a kiss on her forehead, did the same to Nic, and got the fuck out of the house.

  The neighborhood’s park had never been anything to brag about. It was maybe twenty acres, with a couple of ancient playgrounds dotting the sides, one pond, and a plethora of trees surrounded by untended overgrowth. Aside from some childhood memories, there wasn’t a lot to be said for it.

  It’s saving grace for me was the paved path that wound in and around the withering scenery, eventually making one big circle and giving me enough road to work up a sweat – and work out a problem. I had been running this course for over ten years. It stayed the same.

  I could appreciate that.

  Nat and I had run it together – first as friends, then as much more than that – so many times that it seemed to belong to us. No one else used it. No one else cared to. After she left, I had stopped my park runs altogether. The gym had treadmills, and I was there a few times a week anyway. I couldn’t even look at the park in passing.

  That first year was the hardest. When Natalia left, she was really gone. No phone calls, no texts, no emails, no anything – she wanted a clean cut and she made one. It was the only way we’d be able to truly get over “us”, she had said.

  My feet were hitting the pavement in smooth, steady pounds. The snow was only trampled down by the occasional passerby, and of course, me. I had come back to this trail eventually. It was still hers. It was still mine. But I had accepted long ago that it would never be “ours” again.

  Five days a week I ran, and five days a week thoughts of Nat rolled over me like thunderclouds. Sometimes they just kept rolling away and I could run in peace. Other days they seemed to multiply and compound upon themselves, and by the time I ran out of the park heading for my house, Natalia was all I could see.

  Ma was right. I had never been able to run her off – and I had spent six years trying to. It was just one of those things, I had decided. My father used to say “E fatta.” when a problem existed that simply could not be solved.

  “It is done.”

  And it was.

  Breathe in – pound, pound – breathe out... pound, pound... Breathe in –

  It couldn’t have been anyone else. I nearly tripped over my own feet coming to a short stop on the path, staring at her from a safe yet telling distance. It had to be her. No one else came to this park – certainly not in January. And no one else gave two damns about that shitty, worn-out gazebo except for the little girl who had left her dead mother flowers in that pond faithfully, year after year... Until that girl had left forever, that is.

  But she was here. That was her dark brown hair blowing in the relentless wind. It was just as long as ever and it had to be her. It had to be. I walked closer, leaving the running path, hearing my heartbeat pounding in my own ears.

  “Natalia?”

  Chapter 3

  Natalia

  “You can’t do this, Nat. You won’t. I know you. You won’t do this!”

  Max was grabbing my arm, and I heard a desperation in his voice that I had never heard before. I wrenched my arm away from him, angry now. And the anger was better. It was a short reprieve from the heartache that was pulling me violently through the ground with the promise of no tomorrow. The anger was good.

  “Don’t tell me what I will and won’t do! I AM doing this, Max! I’m leaving! I’m fucking done with this place!” I had screamed it at him, only inches away from his face. I knew my eyes were full of tears, but I hadn’t been prepared to see that his were too.

  Those beautiful hazel eyes... They were enough in and of themselves to cause the frantic, panicking thought that maybe I was wrong. Maybe this wasn’t the only way. Maybe you’ll never love anyone again like you love Max.

  He had put his hands on my cheeks – gently – and pressed his forehead into mine. I could hear him struggling to control his breathing. I knew he hadn’t believed that this day would ever come.

  I hadn’t believed it myself.

  I had been in love with Maximo Fanucci since I was fifteen years old. We had grown up together in the neighborhood, gone to school together since kindergarten, and shared the inexplicable bond of being “business kids”. Though Dario was a year younger, he had been an ever present third wheel to our friendship; and as we grew, the three of us became tighter than steel.

  I could never have pin-pointed the exact moment that I started seeing Max differently. He had been such a constant part of my life that I almost felt I had another brother – at the very least, an extraordinarily close best friend. But his smiles had stopped being just smiles. His eyes had stopped being just eyes. If he gave me a friendly pat on the back or brushed up against me a little too closely, I found I had developed a very electric, powerful response to his touch.

  Being a gangly, awkward teenage girl, it had horrified me at first. I was so embarrassed to feel what I was feeling that I had actually started to avoid him. I slipped out of the house when he would stop by to hang. I let Dario answer the phone every single time it rang, scared that I’d be forced to act normal and make small talk with Max. I made an actual effort to spend time with the girls at school, whom I had never quite been able to bond with in any real way.

  Max had not appreciated this. He had finally decided to address the situation head on – in true Maximo Fanucci fashion, and barged into the Angelone home one Sunday afte
rnoon when I had failed to accompany Dario to our notoriously regular matinee meet-up.

  His shaggy hair completely out of control, he had dramatically thrown his arms in the air. “What did I DO, Nat? WHAT?” And immediately I was crying, despising my teenage self more than ever before, and certain the world was ending.

  But then he had hugged me. And then he kissed my forehead. And then he kissed my lips. And I had understood immediately that I wasn’t the only one who had experienced a shift in feelings.

  After that, we had never looked back. We were inseparable in an even stronger way, and all of the forces of nature couldn’t have torn us apart. Dario had accepted the change between his sister and his best friend in his typical, light-hearted way; and life in the neighborhood had continued on for the three of us like some type of magical, adolescent clockwork.

  Even as we graduated and became adults, the loyalty and the love remained Herculean. I had opted to start a psychology program upstate, but faithfully drove home every single weekend to be with Max. He and my brother applied to the local community college to earn their business degrees – a source of many inside jokes amongst our inner circle – and the future seemed written in the stars.

  I hadn’t realized how the time I spent away from the neighborhood – away from the business – would affect me. My views on my father’s occupation, which had always been realistic but indifferent, now became mildly hostile. I was learning so much about the human brain – how the mind works – and it finally occurred to me that I had perhaps been dealt a shitty hand by being born into such an organization. I felt tethered to something I had neither chosen nor would choose if given the chance.

  And I had not been given the chance.

  My father had taken my change of heart in stride. Tearing up ever so slightly, he had taken my face in his hands and said, “Natalia, you were born free as a bird. Fly to your dreams, my love.”