by Lisa Cardiff
Emilia
Part One
The Trassato Crime Family
Book #3
By Lisa Cardiff
Emilia
Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Cardiff.
All rights reserved.
First Print Edition: May 2017
Limitless Publishing, LLC
Kailua, HI 96734
www.limitlesspublishing.com
Formatting: Limitless Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1-64034-088-6
ISBN-10: 1-64034-088-2
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Table of Content
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
EPILOGUE
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CHAPTER ONE
Five years ago…
I flipped through page after page of paperwork in the file cabinet of my father’s intricately carved wooden desk, looking for evidence that would set me free. My father, Dominick Trassato, was the head of the family and not in the Leave it to Beaver sort of way. He was the godfather, the don, the boss, or whatever else people called him, of the Trassato Crime Family, and I detested him as much as I loved him.
My feelings weren’t always so convoluted. At one point, I would have professed to love him more than anyone in the world. Everything changed the night my mom died, though. She came home from a trip and they fought. From the banister overlooking the great room, I saw her smash framed pictures against the wall, throw pillows, and land punch after punch against my father’s chest. My mom wanted to divorce him and move to Chicago to live with family friends while she restarted her career. My father put her on notice that the only way out of the marriage was death.
Apparently she took his threat literally because the sound of sirens and people running through my house jarred me awake a few hours later. My mom died from an overdose of sleeping pills in the bathtub, and my life as I had known it was over.
No more laughter, no more family trips, no more family dinners.
Even though my days of hero worship had ended, my father still lorded over me and everyone else in our insular world. He reminded me of the sun with everyone orbiting around him. He had charisma, charm, and an indescribable something that sucked people in and made them jump to do his bidding. Unlike everyone else, I refused to bend to his will. I knew his plans for me, and I intended to fight him every step of the way.
I dedicated my spare time to finding ways to blackmail my father until he agreed to set me free, and here I was years later sifting through his office papers, taking pictures of things I thought would be useful.
The cord to my headphones snagged on the corner of the desk, yanking them from my ears. An ominous noise replaced the soothing melody of the sonata I was learning to play for my next performance.
Tap. Shuffle. Click.
Footsteps. Lots of them clipped over the tiled hallway outside of the home office, edging closer and closer. A suffocating tightness clamped around my ribcage, and my entire body freeze-framed with my hand still inside my dad’s filing cabinet. He told me he wouldn’t be home until after I went to bed.
My gaze skittered around the room wildly searching for a hiding place. Every inanimate object shuffled through my brain. Desk. Chair. Plant. Bookshelf. Coat rack. And then I saw it—my father’s built-in credenza. It spanned the front of his office beneath a wall of diamond shaped leaded glass windows overlooking our circular driveway now filled with two black cars. One belonged to my father. The other looked like my Uncle Angelo’s.
Crap!
Next came the voices, growing louder with every passing second, and effectively snapping me into action. I refocused my attention on the credenza. Drawers bookended a set of doors about three feet high and four feet wide.
I darted across the room, flung open one of the doors, and climbed inside face forward, curling my body around the reams of paper and boxes of office supplies. The instant the door opened, I shut myself inside, blanketing myself in darkness. My knees poked the underside of my chin, and the corner of a box bit into my hip. The space smelled of dust and oiled hinges.
My heart thudded with reckless abandon, and my blood whooshed through my brain in a crude interpretation of the theme song of Jaws. The uneven puffs of my exhalations were deafening in the confined space. I pinched my eyes closed and held my breath, drawing on every survival instinct to remain calm and motionless.
One chair skidded across the hardwood floor, then another.
“Do you want a drink?” my father’s deep voice boomed through the room, sending a shiver shooting between my shoulder blades.
“No drinks for me in the middle of the day. Helena rides my ass about everything these days. What about you, Sal?” the familiar voice of my Uncle Angelo volleyed back.
“Nah. I’m good. I gotta help my brother later,” Salvatore D’Amico answered, his honeyed rumble tiptoeing over my skin like a caress. No one had formally introduced me to him, but I’d eavesdropped on his conversations plenty of times. He was a relatively new soldier working under my uncle. Unlike some of the younger guys, who had big tempers and even bigger egos, Sal, as everyone called him, struck me as someone with a good head on his shoulders.
“You’re still helping your ma out?” my father asked.
“Yeah, when I can.”
I heard the lid pop off my father’s whiskey decanter, followed by the clink of glass knocking against glass.
“Good. Good. So what can I do for you?”
My uncle cleared his throat. “We ran into a little problem with Vito Stringari. He was—”
“He was short this month.”
“Yeah, and he still hasn’t paid last month.”
“Why are you bringing this petty shit to me?”
“Well, you know about his kid…”
I felt a tugging sensation on the bottom of my maxi dress. My hands traced the line of my dress, coming to a halt at the door, and that was when I realized my mistake. Somehow I closed it on the hem.
Oh, crap. This is bad. Really bad.
Every choppy mouthful of air was like sandpaper on my cotton-dry tongue. My heart pumped harder than before. A whirlwind of crazy outcomes danced through my head, each worse the last. I’d escaped my father’s notice for years, and explained away little inconsistencies with relative ease, but this…this would be unexplainable. His office was firmly planted in the no-go zone. I could count the number of times he told me not to go in here on five people’s hands and toes.
“Give him another month.” My father’s firm bark broke into the stream of deranged thoughts. “Is that it?”
“For now,” my uncle replied.
Chairs scraped across the floor again, and with each shuffled footstep out of the room, my muscles unwound fiber by fiber.
“Are you coming, Sal?” my uncle asked.
“I’ll catch up with you in a minute. I need to make a call.”
CHAPTER TWO
My body tensed like a bowstring in anticipation of the likely confrontation with Sal. Part of me wanted to leap out of the credenza and scream surprise!, like this was nothing more than a silly prank gone wrong, but my common sense kept me pinned inside the stifling cabinet. The tapping and pinging of his phone thundered through my ears, each one lulling me into believing he truly didn’t realize I was hiding in the room. Maybe he thought the material sticking out of the door was a random chunk of fabric.
I was dead wrong.
In slow motion, the door of the credenza crept open centimeter by centimeter, finally revealing Salvatore D’Amico. He stood squarely with his chin lowered and his black loafer-clad feet more than shoulder width apart. He stared down at me, capturing me in his gaze like the proverbial deer caught in headlights.
The air thickened, and I knew I needed to say something, anything really, except I couldn’t find my words. Until this point in time, I’d only seen this man from afar. Up close, he was devastating. Tall and lean, his runner’s build was evident even beneath the lines of his fitted black suit. His skin looked like the heavens had sprinkled it with gold dust. And his eyes…well, they reminded me of a kaleidoscope complete with swirls of cinnamon, honey, and speckles of sage, the right one slightly lighter than the left, or maybe it was a trick of the light.
“What are you doing in here?” Salvatore asked, the upward curl of his lips betraying the serious pitch of his voice.
“Oh, um…” I uncurled my legs and scrambled to my feet, careful not to flash my underwear. “I, um, well, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
I rolled my shoulders forward and dropped my chin. “It was stupid. I hid when I heard voices. My dad doesn’t like it when I come in here.”
“Then why were you in here?”
I scanned the room, searching for a plausible excuse. Any excuse. “Uhh…I was looking for a book.”
He rubbed his hand across his jaw, his expression inscrutable. “A book?”
“Yeah,” I bobbed my head up and down, “a book. I needed something to read. Ya’ know how my father hired someone to homeschool me?” At his uncomprehending look, I continued spewing bullshit. “Anyway, the tutor emailed me a reading assignment and I came in here to look for something. I already had one picked out when I heard you guys in the hall. I panicked and hid. It was stupid. I should’ve left.”
I smiled inwardly at my ability to come up with something that wasn’t a complete lie. Right after my mom died, my father pulled me out of school and hired a tutor, one I hadn’t seen or heard from since I passed my GED three months ago. Sal didn’t need to know about that though.
He strolled over to the bookcase and ran a finger along the spines of ten or so books. Without reading the titles, I knew the books were nothing a seventeen-year-old would read voluntarily: the history of winemaking, the fall of the Roman Empire, military strategy, plants, and so on, all of which supported the tutor assignment angle I had pitched him, at least in my mind.
“Which one were you going to read?”
“Any one of them. I’m a history buff and naturalist like my dad. So yeah, I thought I’d find something to occupy myself for the long weekend.” I sounded like a rambling idiot. I knew it, and judging from the growing smirk on his face, Sal knew it too. Even worse, I somehow managed to contradict my lie in the span of thirty seconds. I glanced over my shoulder, making sure my father wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity before inching my way to the fluted bookcase.
“I’m particularly interested in this one. I’m fascinated with anything dealing with, uh, this topic.” I pulled out a book and handed it to him, our fingers brushing for an instant, yet long enough to send a zinger of awareness up my arm.
“Emilia. That’s your name, right?” He studied the book cover and slanted his head to me. My knees wobbled when I caught a hint of his scent—earthy, woody, with notes of cedar. Did he have to smell good too?
“Yep. That’s me. Emilia.”
“So birds. That’s your thing, huh?”
Birds? What the hell was he talking about? Ever since I watched that stupid Alfred Hitchcock film four or five years ago, I was deathly afraid of the winged creatures. Birds, bugs, bats—all of them creeped me the fuck out. My attention dipped to the book title, and my stomach plummeted. Merda.
“Uh huh. I love bird watching. It’s my thing. I’m even having a bird themed birthday party next month. You know, birds on my cake, bird figurine party favors, feather boas, plastic pink flamingos, bird nests in…well, everywhere really.” I checked the urge to shiver.
He wiped a hand over his mouth, clearly hiding a grin because even I couldn’t deny I sounded like a total weirdo. “Tell me how old you’re going to be again?”
“Eighteen.”
“An almost eighteen-year-old bird lover. Interesting hobby you got there. You must be one of the cool kids.”
“Well how old are you?”
“Twenty-one in a couple of months.”
“Tsk. Tsk. Only twenty and already living a life of crime. Your mom must be so proud.”
The study door opened, and I hitched a breath, preparing for a whole new kind of trouble. I should have gotten the heck out of here a long time ago instead of letting Sal distract me.
“Sal, Angelo is ready to head out.” My dad’s bushy brows slammed together and his lips curled into his mouth at the sight of me. “What are you doing in here, Emilia? You know this room is off limits.”
“Uh…” My mind scrambled for a response.
“Emilia dropped in to invite me to her bird-themed birthday party next month.”
“She did?” my dad said, his eyes narrowing fractionally. He knew I hated birds. I had a lot explaining to do.
“Um, yeah. I know Gian and Carmela are coming, but it’d be nice to have other youngish people there.”
“All right, then.” Sal handed me the bird book. “I don’t want to keep Angelo waiting. I’ll see you later.”
When the door closed behind him, I flinched. Sal’s presence had sheltered me from my father’s unpredictable temper. Now I was on my own, which didn’t bode well for me.
“I better get going. I have to prepare for my piano lessons tomorrow.” I shoved the bird book back in its place on the shelf.
“Why were you in my study?”
“I was talking to Sal. He seems nice. What’s his story?”
“Don’t worry about things that don’t affect you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He ran his finger along the edge of his desk. “Just keep your head down and don’t ask questions about things you don’t understand.”
I shrugged, tamping down the rage building inside of me. My father did everything in his power to keep me in the dark. Too bad for him, because I had no intention of strolling blindly into anything.
“Whatever.”
I took two steps toward the door and my dad called out to me. “A bird theme? Really, Emilia? Is that the best you could come up with?”
I shrugged nonchalantly and my body relaxed, realizing he wasn’t goin
g to press the issue. “It’s about time I got over my fear of birds, don’t you think? Besides, Sal seems nice. I like him.”
“If you say so.”
CHAPTER THREE
In the past month, I’d seen Sal twice in passing since the incident in my father’s study. We exchanged simple greetings and a little bit of witty banter, nothing of importance or meaning, though. Given I didn’t have a legitimate reason to talk to him, I had no reason to expect anything else. That didn’t get in the way of the annoying habit I developed recently that consisted of reliving every shared look and touch and twisting it into something significant. Not that anyone could fault me. A cloistered nun had more freedom than me, so Sal popping in and out of my life was akin to offering a glass of water to someone dying of thirst.
The biggest question lingering was why Sal had covered for me. Granted, he didn’t outright lie to my dad. I considered it more of an omission. My father wouldn’t care about the semantics, and Sal would be in deep shit if my dad discovered he hadn’t been entirely forthright.
My dad turned on some music and faint notes of Frank Sinatra floated through the air. You’d think he would play something more age appropriate for my birthday, but no, not my father. Everything revolved around him and what he liked. I glared at the clock on my phone, willing the minutes to pass. I couldn’t stop thinking about whether Sal would make an appearance.
God, I wanted him to. He’d become my dirty little obsession. Rather than practice for my upcoming recital, I daydreamed about Sal showing up, whisking me off to some secluded location and confessing he liked me and wanted to spend time with me. This wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for most eighteen-year-olds, except I wasn’t like the rest of the girls my age.
