John + Siena: The Complete Duet

by Bethany-Kris

  “It’s like a fucking pharmacy in here.”

  John heard his cousin, but he was too busy looking at the clock on the wall of his parents’ kitchen. That tick-tick-ticking was still counting down inside of him. A count down that had not yet reached the end. A count down that he did not know what exactly was counting down.

  He counted the numbers on the clock once, and then twice. He watched the second hand tick-tick-tick its way through another minute, and then two more.

  Time was passing.

  Time was moving.

  John felt suspended.

  Unmoved.

  Frozen.

  It was only when Andino sat at the other side of the table did John finally look at his cousin. How many days had it been since he last saw Andino? A few, maybe. Or could have been only one.

  John had no clue.

  Andino said nothing, simply stared at John for a long while. He didn’t press John to talk.

  For that, he was grateful. At the moment, he didn’t know exactly what he would say anyway.

  He remembered that over the last several months, Andino had been the one who stepped in time and time again to try and help John. He did so at the risk of himself, and without asking for anything in return.

  Even after everything that happened between Andino and John years ago, his cousin was still one of the only people John could count on. No matter what.

  And how had he repaid his cousin for that kind of loyalty?

  John pushed Andino away. He dropped the ball, and left Andino holding it. His cousin had cleaned up his messes over and over.

  The guilt growing inside John’s chest only compounded at those thoughts. It darkened his mind, and grew like tendrils inside of him to clench around his heart and squeeze tight. Those brief moments of lucidity and clear thoughts were quickly interrupted by something else entirely.

  It was easy then for words like worthless and useless to whisper through his mind. Those black, dark thoughts should have been a clue to John as to what he was now edging towards, but like everything else in his life, it was difficult to recognize.

  Spread out on the table were all the medications that had been prescribed to John over the last several months. He hadn’t realized just how many medications it actually was until his father dumped them out on the table.

  It damn near filled the whole thing.

  Three different mood stabilizers. Antidepressants. Antianxiety meds. A different dosage of Lithium for every month that he had been seeing Amelia.

  Andino was right.

  It did look like a pharmacy.

  “What is all this?” Andino asked.

  He gestured at the bottles of pills.

  John shrugged. “My meds.”

  Andino’s eyes widened at the admittance, but otherwise he gave nothing away as to how he felt. “You take all of them?”

  “No, maybe one or if it’s going badly—a lot of shit happening, you know what I mean?—then I might add another just to settle it out.”

  “Then why is there so many?”

  “Somebody thought I was a guinea pig.”

  Andino nodded. “Well, as long as it’s settled now.”

  “Something like that.”

  John could see that Andino wanted to ask more. He probably wasn’t satisfied with the lack of responses, or John’s unwillingness to talk.

  It wasn’t exactly purposeful. It wasn’t like John meant to be so quiet, or off-putting. At the moment, he simply had nothing else to say. He had other things to think about. He had memories that continued to stick to the back this mind like tar.

  Impossible to get off or shake, and burning him over and over again. It wouldn’t let him go, and instead, taunted him with the reality he had not been able to see before.

  Memories of those he trusted, and those he distrusted, had muddled together overtime. He had mistook his paranoia and his raging emotions, and directed them in the wrong place because of his own bias. He had assumed wrongly about those who had never given him a reason to think that way.

  It was a strange conclusion to come to.

  Yet, he knew that no one around him would hear him if he tried to explain. It was hard to hear John when he was manic. The rational side of him was often lost to the irrational. In violent outbursts, and rambling admissions.

  Who could make sense of that?

  He understood.

  He didn’t blame those around him. It wasn’t their fault. They could only deal with what was presented in front of them because they didn’t know what was hiding underneath.

  “You know now,” Andino said, “don’t you?”

  John looked up at his cousin. “Know what?”

  “That you can’t trust any of them.”

  “Not all.”

  Andino shook his head. “John, the Calabrese family has done nothing but try to ruin you, and the Marcellos. You see that now, don’t you? We’re damn near in an all-out war with them on the streets right now. This is exactly what they wanted from us. Matteo might as well have just fucking admitted it.”

  “Not all,” John said again.

  His cousin’s frustration grew, and with it, John’s irritation spiked up as well. It was another by-product of being in the state that he was. Conversations were not easy, and communication was made harder.

  He could talk and talk and talk for days like this, but it would still lead them in the same goddamn circle. That’s just how it was.

  John knew it, and it made him less willing to speak in the first place. Besides, he had said his piece. He said what he meant, and he meant what he said.

  He couldn’t help if Andino did not—or could not—understand John’s compromise.

  He didn’t blame any of them, though. None of them understood what it was like to be him.

  John couldn’t explain it.

  No matter how hard he tried.

  Mania for John was a vicious bitch. It manifested in so many different forms that it was sometimes hard to keep track. One day he could be highly productive, and laughing because he was almost high with the way he felt. The world seemed to move so fast around him on those days. The next day, he could be so low that the only thing he felt was right was lashing out at anyone he could reach.

  It was violent.

  It was mean.

  It was nasty.

  He knew after it was all said and done, and the dust cleared, that for those around him, his mania could be terrifying.

  It was every reason why Cella and Liliana no longer made any effort to have a relationship with John. They had been some of the first people to experience the way his mania manifested in horrible ways. Like a tornado, he had ripped through their lives when they should have been doing anything but trying to hide from their older brother.

  Instead of having happy memories of years that should have been good, they were tainted and colored dark. Too many moments of peace when John had been stable, and then bouts of chaos when his mania came out to play.

  His sisters never spoke as adults about how their brother’s episodes had affected them when they were younger; they simply kept a distance. They didn’t allow him into their lives beyond the shallow surface, and they didn’t intrude on his life, either.

  It also taught others in John’s family that when the mania darkened, it was better to step away unless they could handle what it might throw at them.

  “John, listen—”

  “I’m not taking those fucking pills!”

  Lucian shot his wife a look from the side. Jordyn wrung her hands together from the kitchen’s entryway, however, she didn’t step in more than she already had. Her worry was as clear as day, but so was her fear.

  Of what might come next.

  Of what John might do next.

  Of what her son might say next.

  This was not the first time.

  It would not be the last time.

  It could never be the last time. John’s brain was wired this way. He was who he was, and eventually, he
always came back to this manic stage.

  It would break, sure.

  He would have moments of peace, yes. A long spread of time when he was right and good again. He always came back to this, eventually. It was the one thing he could bank on in his life.

  “Jordyn, go.”

  Lucian’s order drifted over deaf ears. John’s mother didn’t move an inch. Unlike a lot of the women in his life, his mother was one who was unafraid of him in his mania a good portion of the time. She always faced it head-on, but with soothing words and a comforting touch.

  He heard her. He felt her.

  It just didn’t help.

  “I want to go home,” John snarled at his father.

  Lucian didn’t blink in the face of his son’s rage. “You can’t.”

  “I’ve been here long enough!”

  “You’ve been here a day.”

  John felt like someone had punched him in the throat.

  A day.

  That was all.

  A single day felt like weeks to John. Time was bleeding together, and he was missing it. Time was running out to fix the things he had somehow missed, and he was letting it.

  “I’m not taking those pills,” he repeated.

  Lucian frowned. “They could help stabilize you a little more until we get you in with someone else.”

  No, they wouldn’t.

  They would make his mania worse now.

  Lithium had to be stopped when other antipsychotics were introduced. Otherwise, more meds needed to be added to the regime to balance out the counter effects of the mix. That only led John into the fog that had gotten him into this mess in the first place.

  No, he wasn’t doing that again.

  “If you won’t take meds, then I need you to stay,” his father said. “I can’t let you—”

  “Because you don’t get it,” John hurled at his father. “You don’t give a shit what it will do, or how it will change what’s going on in my head right now.”

  He couldn’t forget.

  He couldn’t afford to forget anything right now.

  “John, you have to let us take care—”

  “I don’t have to do fucking anything!”

  Lucian stepped forward at John’s rage, but all he saw was a threat coming at him. One that was meant to hold him back, and stop him from finishing what had started decades and decades before.

  They would lock him in.

  They would hold him back.

  He needed to do this.

  They wouldn’t understand.

  The second Lucian grabbed ahold of John, he snapped. What control he had over himself was gone. It had already been holding on by a thin thread as it was. He shoved his father hard, and didn’t even feel the slightest flicker of guilt when Lucian slammed into the kitchen island.

  He heard his mother’s gasp, and his father’s curse.

  Still, he knew what he had to do.

  The clock was still ticking.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  Counting down …

  John grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair before he darted past his mother in the entryway. Her shout echoed from behind him. His father’s footsteps reverberated down the hall.

  Lucian wasn’t fast enough. He had never been able to catch John once his son made the choice to run.

  John snatched the keys from the glass bowl on the table near the front door. Keys for a black Mercedes SUV belonging to his father. It wouldn’t be the first time John had stolen one of his father’s cars.

  “John!”

  The front door slammed behind him. He didn’t even feel the cold wind as it wrapped around him. Inside, he was a fire burning out of control.

  A raging devastation ready to ruin.

  John was already pulling out of the driveway by the time his father had come out of the house. In the rearview mirror, he saw Lucian toss his hands up high. Exhaustion and wariness stared back in his father’s eyes.

  He knew that look well.

  This could be a tiring state.

  John was tiring.

  The lights of the highway bled together. Like a scene from a fast-moving movie, it felt just as surreal.

  John pulled the phone from his pocket, and turned the device on for the first time in he didn’t know how long.

  Too long.

  He dialed a number. One he would have never called otherwise.

  The man answered cheerfully. Like he had everything to be happy about.

  “You said I could talk,” John said into the phone. “Whenever, right?”

  TWENTY

  Siena’s gaze drifted between the screen in front of her, and Kev sitting across the desk. Something on her brother’s phone had become extremely interesting to him, but she didn’t know what exactly it was.

  Still, she couldn’t ignore how heavy her stomach felt. Like a dead weight had come along to sit down and make itself at home. Nothing she did was getting rid of the dreadful feeling.

  Her gaze darted to the landline on the corner of the desk. More than once since she had arrived at the restaurant, she had considered trying to make a call. Yet, every time she attempted to do just that, her efforts were thwarted by one of her brothers coming in the office.

  Even when Darren had left for a couple of hours earlier, and Kev stepped out for a smoke, the enforcer came inside to sit with Siena while she worked.

  For some reason, they were keeping a very close eye on her.

  She couldn’t breathe loudly without one of them looking at her.

  What were they planning?

  What was going on?

  Nothing good, she suspected.

  “What are you doing?” her brother asked.

  Siena looked at Kev again. “Working.”

  “Then, why are you sitting there doing nothing?”

  Jesus Christ.

  She couldn’t even be still without one of them suspecting something was up.

  She knew it then …

  Something was definitely about to happen.

  Siena just wished she knew what it was.

  “Do you want to stare at a computer screen for hours on end, and sit in this uncomfortable chair without barely moving at all? I can’t take a minute to stretch my fingers and blink?”

  Kev cocked a brow. “As long as that’s all you do.”

  Asshole.

  Siena kept her thoughts inside her head, but barely. If only she could get a couple of minutes alone, then she might be able to send out a call from the landline.

  Something to warn John that her brothers and father were planning an attack on him. One that would push his family in to a war with the Calabrese.

  Who else would tell them?

  Kev stayed sitting in the chair across from Siena’s desk. He wasn’t moving an inch. The longer she stared at her brother, silently willing him to even get up and use the damn bathroom while Darren had stepped out, the more pissed off she became.

  Siena’s mouth opened to tell her brother off just for existing. Darren slid into the office, and stopped her from saying anything. The grin he sported was downright smug.

  If not altogether evil.

  “Well?” Kev asked.

  Darren nodded. “Yeah, it’s happening.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Dad got a call. By tomorrow, this city is not going to know what hit it.”

  Kev returned his brother’s grin. “About damn time.”

  “The Calabrese have waited a long time for this day.”

  Siena tried to remain calm as she listened to the conversation between her brothers. She didn’t let a single emotion crack through her calm facade. If Kev or Darren thought Siena was planning something, or was even a little too interested in their conversation, she had no doubt they would lock her in even more than they already had.

  At the moment, it was a risk she was not willing to take.

  Sure, they didn’t mention any names, and were careful about details. It didn’t matter. It was enough fo
r her to figure out something bad was going to happen.

  Something between the Marcello and Calabrese families.

  Something that probably involved John.

  And she just couldn’t allow that to happen.

  “Does he want us to head over there just in case?” Kev asked.

  Darren shrugged, and dropped into the chair beside his older brother. “No, he’s sure he can handle it alone. He did mention something else, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I guess you-know-who is sounding even more unstable today.”

  Two pairs of blue eyes drifted in Siena’s direction. Her gaze was firmly stuck on the computer screen in front of her, but she still saw her brothers’ passing glance out of the corner of her eye.

  That confirmed it.

  Without any doubt.

  They were talking about John.

  They were planning something.

  Tonight.

  Siena’s fingers drifted over the keys on the keyboard. Random letters and numbers appeared in the tables, but didn’t actually make any sense. She only wanted her brothers to think she was working, after all.

  The two continued talking, albeit quieter than before. It was hard for Siena to discern their conversation, so she opted to continue typing.

  Not for long, though.

  When she thought Kev and Darren were too distracted in their conversation, she took the risk of standing from her chair.

  Neither one of her brothers missed it.

  “Where the fuck are you going?” Kev asked.

  Siena didn’t hesitate. “To the bathroom. I have to change my tam—”

  At just the suggestion she was on her period—she hadn’t had a period since starting the shot two years ago—both of her brothers looked like she had smacked them in the face with a shovel.

  Had it been any other time, she might have laughed.

  “Go, then.”

  Darren scowled. “But hurry up and finish here, Siena. We have other shit to do tonight.”

  For the first time all day, Siena was out of her brothers’ sights. The bathroom was at the very end of the hallway. There was a men’s and women’s, but no private bathroom for the employees.

  The restaurant had closed about an hour ago, and Siena was grateful. She pushed a hand against the bathroom door as she passed it by to make it sound like she had gone in.