Ruthless Empire: A Dark Mafia Collection

by Seth Eden

  My heart began to race wildly. “Really?” I remembered that I had Alessandro’s card upstairs in my suitcase. “Should I call someone?” Ricky grabbed the doorknob and started to turn it, but I pulled him back. “What are you doing? If someone’s out there waiting to shoot you, you’re walking right into the trap.”

  Ricky looked over his shoulder at me. “I got this.”

  He continued to open the door, pulling it aside, leading with his gun. When the door was opened fully, he looked down and noticed a white box with a red ribbon on the doorstep. “Stand back.”

  I took several large steps back, even though it wouldn’t make much difference if it was a bomb or something. Ricky knelt down and tipped open the little card on top, and then I watched his whole body relax. He released the cock on his gun and returned it to his waistband.

  “It’s from Sandro.”

  “God, I feel like I’m gonna throw up.” I walked over to the package and picked it up, carrying it into the dining room with Ricky behind me. “You see, this is the shit I’m talking about. Do you know what happens when someone rings my doorbell when I’m in California? I open the door, they say here’s your Chinese ma’am, and then I pay them, and they leave. People shouldn’t live like this.”

  “Just open it,” Ricky said, sliding down into one of the dining room chairs and grabbing a napkin to wipe the sweat from his brow.

  I lifted the lid, and there was another note sitting on top of the white tissue paper inside. In a beautiful script, it read, I’ll pick you up tomorrow at eight. I removed the note and peeled back the tissue paper, and there was a pair of black, designer heels with ankle straps, a pair of tight-fitting, skinny slacks, and a black, double-breasted suit jacket with brass buttons.

  Ricky let out a whistle. “Wow, that looks nice.”

  “It is,” I confirmed. “This is, like, the in-style outfit right now. He did his research. I’m impressed.”

  “Tomorrow at eight, huh?” Ricky read the note. “Ha, you’ll be in bed by ten.”

  “Again,” I repeated. “I am your sister.”

  Ricky scrunched up his nose again. “Right. I keep forgetting.” He looked depressed again all of a sudden, and I laughed.

  He perked back up immediately. “I’m happy for you.”

  I held the suit coat up to my frame, knowing it was going to fit perfectly. “Thanks. I’m happy for me, too.”

  12

  Alessandro

  I’d stared down the barrels of guns in my past, and they didn’t make me as nervous as I was driving up to Willow’s house for our first date in six years. I’d planned it down to the minute and designed it with the hope that she would remember how great we were before. I wanted her to be nothing but happy for the next several hours, and maybe, just maybe, if I was lucky enough, by the end of the night, she’d be in love with me again and unable to imagine going back to a life without me. Despite the risk involved, I turned my phone off so I could pretend I wasn’t some mob prince in a royal family of death and doom. I was just a guy, madly in love with a girl, trying to show that girl that the reward was worth the risk.

  The car I’d chauffeured for the night pulled up in front of Willow’s family house, the one that my family gifted hers back when her dad started working for us. Obviously, only her mother and brother lived there now, with her dad in prison and her living in California, but while she was visiting, it was like she was living in Philly again, and everything was normal. That’s how I got the idea to recreate our first date. I kind of wished that her dad was sitting on the front stairs the same way he was when I came here for our first date, with a cigar carefully balanced between his lips and a black, magnum colt sitting in his lap. He didn’t say anything as poor, thirteen-year-old me climbed out of the car and walked up to the door with white roses in hand. He didn’t need to. The casual puffs of smoke and absent stare sang loudly, “I don’t care who you are. Hurt my baby girl, and I’ll hurt you.”

  He took the fall for a crime and was arrested later that year.

  Now it was adult me, dressed in my navy blue suit with a gray shirt beneath, a silver watch encircling my wrist, and my dad’s rings shimmering in the moonlight, praying that a single night would be enough.

  The door opened, and where I expected Willow to be standing, Ricky was looking back at me with his signature, slanted grin. He had a beer in his hand and was dressed fairly casually in a pair of jeans and a black t-shirt.

  “Hey!” he held up his beer. “Willow will be down in a second.”

  I leaned against the door to the car with the bouquet of roses in my hand. “How is she? I mean, like, how do you think this is gonna go?”

  “You’re on the right track, I know that. She’s been smiling like a dope all day long.” A hand came flying in from beyond the door’s frame and whacked Ricky on the back of the head. “Ow!”

  “Shut your mouth and go away.”

  Ricky stepped out of the doorway, and Willow stepped into his place. The sight of her took my breath away. She had her hair down, cascading across her shoulders with wisps of her bangs hanging down into her stunning, blue eyes. She was dressed in the outfit that I bought her, a sign that she must have found it fashionable because she never left the house in something that wasn’t. I was glad to see she’d skipped wearing any sort of blouse under the jacket, simply letting it rest in a V down her collarbone with a crest of cleavage just above the buttons. The pants chiseled out her shapely thighs, and she was wearing the three-inch heels with the strap around the ankle. She was perfection walking. My Willow. Thank you, Lord.

  I walked up to her and held out my hand, and she set hers gently inside. I kissed her knuckles before handing over the white roses. Her small smile grew, and she took them, reaching back to set them inside the door frame, where Ricky’s phantom hand met her and retrieved them. She shut the door, and then we walked down the steps to the car.

  The chauffeur helped us in the car, and then we were off toward our first stop, a restaurant outside of the city, modeled after a Japanese zen garden. It was decorated with dozens of fake cherry blossom trees and had rock gardens scattered around. She’d seen it on a T.V. show and wanted to go, so I decided to take her there for our first time out. Most young pre-teens in love did movies and dinner at an Applebee’s, but even back then, I knew Willow was worth way more than that.

  We were seated at our table, where two glasses of wine were already waiting for us, unlike the glasses of water we’d had back in the day.

  “Well, I guess coming back after ten years has its perks,” Willow joked, tipping her wine glass to her mouth after we ordered our food.

  “Yeah,” I said with a laugh, “it didn’t even occur to me that we can eat anything on the menu now. We were too young for anything simmered in liquor last time.” I took my own drink, still unable to believe I was sitting across from Willow once again. “Do you remember when we first came here? I was trying to act like I was so mature and confident, but when I opened the menu, my head exploded.”

  “You didn’t realize that most of the menu was authentic Japanese dishes and had no idea what to order. Try though you might to be fancy, you were still a snot-nosed little brat looking for mac and cheese.” Willow laughed, and it was music to my ears. “That was hysterical.”

  “Do you remember how I asked you out?” I inquired, intentionally trying to get Willow to a reminiscent place.

  She nodded. “You said,” she cleared her throat and dropped her voice, “‘Uh, do you wanna go out? For real this time.’”

  I nearly spit my wine out. I had totally forgotten about the for real this time part. Back when Willow and I were barely old enough to understand the concept of dating, my brothers, knowing I had a crush on her, dared me to ask her out. I puffed out my chest, walked up to her, and asked her to go out with me, and she was so bewildered that I was afraid she was going to say no. I coughed out something about joking before running away quicker than a speeding bullet.

  “How embar
rassing,” I murmured. “Why would you ever agree to go out with me?”

  “I thought it was cute,” Willow replied. “You were so nervous that it looked like you were going to throw up all over me.”

  “Man, I’m so glad I didn’t.”

  I looked into her eyes, and she looked back into mine, and it was like nothing had changed. We were sitting in an alternate reality where she never asked me to make a choice. These entire six years, we’d been together, and we were just two people, very much in love, chasing the days of our youth at the restaurant where we had our first date.

  “So, give me the highlights,” I started again after a while. “Top five things that have happened to you in the past six years. Go.”

  Willow let out a puff of air while her eyes scanned the ceiling, searching for an answer. “Let’s see. Well, the biggest thing, obviously, is work. After I graduated, I was able to snag an internship with a major designing firm in L.A., thanks to Sasha.”

  “Sasha Love, right? She’s an A-lister!”

  “Yeah, she’s also a dork,” she snorted. “I miss her, though. It’ll be nice to get home and see her again. She’s been calling me like crazy.”

  Get home. Right. We were not in an alternate reality. We were in the version of reality we’d always been in, the one where Willow would be gone again in a few days if our date didn’t go well. I tried to ignore the emptying of my stomach at the thought.

  Just get her to stay.

  “Number two?” I pressed on.

  “Number two would definitely be living in Los Angeles in general. I mean, you think Philly’s bustling. That city never shuts down. There’s always someone doing something. Most places don’t even have a closing time. You want burgers delivered to your door with margaritas on the side? L.A. can do that.”

  “Sounds like my kind of city,” I responded.

  She nodded cheerily. “You’d love it there. I live right by this place, it’s called a tech farm. I didn’t know those were things, but apparently, it’s where a lot of the city’s technical control centers are housed. I walked through there once, and it made my brain hurt. You’d probably have a field day, though.”

  “Probably.” I could see in her eyes the tinge of hopefulness that things might fall the other way. That I would tell her I made a mistake not picking her all those years ago, and that I wanted to go back to L.A. with her. Knowing that she might immediately accept if I did made me want to do it.

  “Three?” I had to get off the subject, or I was going to cave and go on the run.

  “Three…” Willow was thinking long and hard. Her brows were knit together as she searched her brain for anything. Finally, she let out a strained chuckle. “I guess I don’t have a three. I pretty much only work, eat, and sleep.”

  “You, too, huh?” I said. It felt like the realization was washing over Willow as she said it. Apparently, she hadn’t been living a life of glamour and excitement in L.A. She was only hiding there. “Are you happy there?”

  Willow was slightly taken aback. “Of course I’m happy there. Why?”

  “Philly misses you,” I responded. “I miss you.” Willow took a distracting drink of her wine, not responding. “Do you miss me?”

  Willow set her glass down. “Of course I miss you.” I was kind of surprised by how she was immediately honest. “But we can’t, Sandro.”

  “Why can’t we?” I asked. “We’re supposed to be together.”

  “There was a time when I thought that, too, but you have this life that you’re committed to living, and I don’t want to be a part of it,” she explained with sadness in her eyes. “You don’t think there were literally hundreds of times I wanted to pick up the phone and call you in the last six years? To hear your voice?” My chest constricted. She really did feel the same as me. “I kept telling myself that, eventually, I would get over it. Eventually, you’d only be some guy I’d dated, and I could move on, but I couldn’t move on, Sandro.”

  She looked on the brink of tears.

  “Me neither.” I shook my head. “Some people move on while they’re still in relationships, Willow. If it’s so serious for us, we shouldn’t ignore that.”

  “Come to L.A. with me.” Her expression was the same serious and pleading expression she’d given me when she said the same thing to me six years ago. “Move into my place. Ricky can come, too. I’ve got three bedrooms. I want to be with you, Alessandro.”

  I closed my eyes and basked in the moment. That’s what I’d been waiting to hear. I wanted to hear those words more than anything every day since she’d left for California. My throat burned as I heard them because I knew what my response was going to be.

  The same one that disappointed her six years ago.

  I thought about Marco and his family being threatened, and I thought about Luca and Gabriel trying to hold down the fort on their own. I thought about the Binachis finding any excuse they could to hurt my family in every conceivable way possible, and as much as I wished I could, as much as I wanted to hang up my suits and go be some domestic husband in a suburb in L.A., my ties wouldn’t allow it.

  “Yeah,” Willow said before I could respond. “I figured as much.” She shifted, and I almost thought she was going to get up and leave, but she took another drink of her wine, emptying the glass.

  “I’m sorry,” I responded. “This time it’s different. I wish I could go with you back to Cali, Willow. There is literally not a single thing that I want more in my entire life.”

  Willow’s eyes widened a little. “Really?”

  “Really. If I didn’t think it would put you in danger, I would drop everything right now. I wouldn’t even have a second thought. I’d buy us some house right outside the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles, you could keep working, I’d maybe go for an I.T. degree or something. Fuck,” I hissed, “that tech farm sounds like heaven right about now.”

  Willow crossed her arms. “Are things really that bad?”

  “Haven’t they always been? You were right to leave this shit behind. I don’t blame you for that. I never have. Back when you first hit me with that ultimatum, all I could think was, how could she ask me to choose like that? But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. This world isn’t for people who are happy and in love. This world is for miserable people with a death wish.” Suddenly I was venting when I didn’t mean to, all of my feelings about the life and Willow spilling out all at once. “Sorry.” When Willow didn’t say anything, I looked up to gauge her response, and there were tears bunched in the corners of her eyes and a small grin on her face. I reached across the table and flicked them away with my thumb. “What, baby?”

  “I thought this world meant more to you than me,” she said at a near whisper. “I thought that’s why you couldn’t leave it behind.”

  I pressed my palm to her cheek. “Nothing means more to me than you.”

  Willow smiled, and I watched true relief wash over her. I felt like such an idiot. All I had to do was make her feel loved. She didn’t want this life, and I didn’t want it for her, but knowing that it was something I had to do versus something I wanted to do made her feel differently. It was eye-opening.

  Our food finally came, and the rest of the date was like something out of a romance movie. We’d taken a sledgehammer to the cement wall that circumstance had built between us, and it was like we were us again. We talked about everything we could imagine. We remembered old dates, talked about where our friends from high school were now, and I even got to gush about my Anna and Antonio. I took out pictures and showed her, and she cooed at how much they looked like Luca. I talked about Molly and how she made Luca into a better man, and I talked about Gabriel and how he was struggling with the business and probably needed to get out more than I did. Willow took everything in stride, listening to me the way she did when we were dating in high school, being there for me with each passing second.

  She told me all about her house in L.A., and we joked about what it would be like for me to
live there with her, how her neighbors would probably hate us, and we’d need to move sooner rather than later to enjoy some privacy. I wished for it so badly. If I had a genie and could wish for three things, I would wish for that three times, and I told her so.

  After dinner, I took her to walk along a river closeby. She always loved being outside in the fresh air. She wasn’t a camper, but every time any of our dates ended with us sitting outside, snuggled together under a blanket, looking up at the night sky, that was when she was happiest. I didn’t want the date to end, and if the look of disappointment on Willow’s face when I suggested I get her home was any indicator, she didn’t want it to, either.

  I kissed the back of her hand before helping her into the car, and she responded by pulling herself up to kiss me.

  “Let’s go home,” she said, and the phrase covered me like a warm, heated blanket.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Let’s.”

  13

  Willow

  Disappointment was already hanging all around me as the car turned onto my mother’s property. I didn’t expect our date to go the way that it did. Alessandro was honest and open with me, and hearing that he wanted out of the life the same way I wanted him out gave me hope that maybe, someday, things would work out. If he could manage an escape from under his brother and this crushing pressure he felt to be loyal to his family, he could move to L.A., and we could be together.

  Imagining it made me want it even more.

  “What are you thinking about?” Alessandro asked, pushing a few locks of my hair back behind my ear.

  “You,” I replied honestly, and we left it at that.

  The car pulled to a stop, and the chauffeur got out, coming around to let me out of the car. Alessandro slid out after me, and we walked up to the door. I turned around, prepared to say something, but Alessandro cut me off with a kiss. His arms coiled around me and pulled me close, and my arms pulled at his waist, trying to get him even closer. Maybe if I pulled hard enough, we’d never have to part ways again.