by Seth Eden
My whole body got colder, and my mind went numb. I was responsible for vetting and implementing a GPS system that would allow us to track everyone within the organization with ease. Another thing Luca had inherited from my dad was his paranoia, not that it wasn’t well-placed in this kind of business. Was all of this my fault for overlooking a simple little feature?
“All it would have taken is one accidental button press,” Gabriel said.
“But none of us knew Marco’s address,” Ricky replied.
Gabriel nodded. “None of us do, but Marco does.”
It hit us like a freight train. Marco had a brand new baby, and even though he probably swapped his phone for a new one once he was placed in witness protection, I know the first thing I would have done to feel close to my family is download the app that tracked their movements. He handed the phone to Amanda, she absently pressed some buttons, and boom, his location is transmitted to someone else.
“Fuck!” Luca barked. He looked over at Gabriel. “Good work.”
Gabriel swallowed hard, sitting back in his chair. “Thanks.”
Luca turned to me, and I knew I was about to be torn open. “You had no idea this was a thing?”
“None. If it weren’t for the bleeding danger of it all, I’d actually think that was pretty cool,” I responded. “I don’t so much anymore.”
Luca sighed. “All right. Well, we need to get in touch with him, but we can’t do it on that phone. We all delete that app off of our phones, and Gabe, I need you to make sure the entire organization gets rid of it as well. You watch them delete the app. Alessandro, can you change the password?”
“I’ll deactivate the account right now,” I said. “No one will be able to get back in.”
Luca nodded, and I was kind of surprised he wasn’t angrier at my fuck up. “Ricky?”
“I’ll call him from a burner,” Ricky replied. “I’ll let him know he needs to delete the app immediately.”
“Tell him to change his phone,” I said, “and Kelly’s, too, probably.”
Ricky nodded. “Got it.”
Luca took a deep breath in and then let it out. “This is bad, but we can fix it. We just have to be more careful, okay?”
Ricky, Gabriel, and I were all looking at one another like we were in the twilight zone. In any other situation, I’d expect Luca to be burning with rage and screaming until he was red in the face. His new calm demeanor was shocking, if not a bit frightening.
“You okay?” Ricky asked.
Luca looked at me, his eyes dropping into mine. “Yeah. I just realized recently that it’s hard to be prepared for this stuff.”
Tectonic plates were shifting. It was just a simple conversation, nothing more than a shared moment of absent dreams between brothers, but it had altered a mindset, the exact same way it had with Willow. None of us really wanted to be here, but generations before us had walked us into hell and left us there to figure shit out. Luca did what my dad had never quite figured out how to do; he descended from his heavenly throne and became human like the rest of us.
Go figure.
“I’ll fix it,” I said finally.
“We’ll fix it,” Luca replied. He clapped his hands. “All right, go, we don’t have time to fuck around. Every second this issue is out there, it gets worse.” We all stood up, but as he typically did, Luca pointed at me. “Hang back.”
Was I going to get the proverbial ass-kicking now? Ricky and Gabriel left, and I sat back down in my chair.
Luca interlocked his fingers and pressed them to his lips. “Only our organization has access to that network on our app, right?”
“Right,” I replied.
“Can you still see everything everyone does?” he asked.
I nodded and pulled out my phone. “At the click of a button.”
“Check who Marco’s phone communicated with.”
I found the IP on our network that didn’t have a name attached to it and figured it was likely Marco’s phone. I traced back communications and found that that IP address had communicated via intercom with a different phone on our network.
“Horatio,” I replied, a driver in our ranks.
“There’s our mole,” Luca responded, and the next look he gave me was devoid of any of the warmth he’d just displayed. “We’re gonna have to teach him what happens to moles. Find out everything you can.”
15
Willow
Every day was a new adventure for me. I thought I’d be back in California after just a few days, and I was still in Philly two weeks later. I wondered what this girl was thinking, the version of me that had clearly taken over my body and was making all of the decisions. Sure, it had been nice hearing from Alessandro that he didn’t want the life anymore, but that didn’t really mean anything for me other than that, now, we were both reluctantly involved. Alessandro was still one phone call away from being dragged back into his family’s world, which meant I was still a single link away from the dark and dangerous organization I’d sworn to leave behind.
But the logical part of me had been locked in a cage by the part of me that was now rapidly remembering how good Alessandro was at sex, while the part of me that still had feelings for him poked at her with sticks.
I was still in bed with my laptop situated in my lap, sifting through purchase options for Sasha’s upcoming red carpet for the blockbuster movie she’d starred in. She typically liked four outfits for an event such as that one. One for the actual red carpet, one for the inner walk—a second carpet walk that the public didn’t typically see, where different celebrities and other people walking the red carpet could actually enjoy showing off their fashions and mingling with one another—a third one for the screening, which generally took place two or three hours after the red carpet, and a final one for the after-screening party.
Sasha was a hard woman to nail down sometimes. She went through more trends than the fashion industry. On occasion, she preferred to be a trailblazer, stepping out in fashions no one had ever seen before and setting the trend. Other times, she liked to be on par with everyone else, wearing what was in season. Sometimes she wanted to purposely be behind the ball, wearing last season’s fashions as if to say she does what she wants. She’d shied away from doing anything too camp, which was good because I honestly didn’t understand it.
I closed my web browser and opened up my video chat app. I pressed Sasha’s number and smiled at her profile picture of us wearing oversized hats with puckered lips. I missed her.
The video feed went live, and Sasha appeared on the other side. “Oh my god, is that Willow Morietti? How long has it been, three years? Four?”
“Thank god you are in drama,” I groaned back.
Sasha giggled. “Hi!”
“Hey! Did you dye your hair?” Her typically feathery blonde hair was now a turquoise blue color.
She touched it. “Did I?”
“The least you could have done was tell me, Sash. I’m shopping for you right now!” I rolled my eyes, mentally crossing out all of the green and orange numbers I’d added to my list of potentials. They’d never go.
“Hey, I dyed my hair, like, a week ago, and I’ve put about twelve million pictures on my Instagram. Is it my fault that you’ve been ignoring me like a poor beggar child?” She threw the back of her hand to her forehead. “Oh, woe is me. My best friend doesn’t love me anymore.”
“You are terrible.” I laughed. “I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner, though. Things got complicated fast around here.”
“Well, can’t say you didn’t see that coming,” she responded. “What’s going on? How’s Alessandro?” she said his name with a thick Italian accent.
“He’s good. Really good.”
Sasha squealed and clapped her hands. “I knew it. I fucking knew you were gonna sleep with him.”
“We’ve been dating, too, I guess. He recreated our first date a week ago, and we’ve been out a few times since then.” I was desperately trying to stifle the wide
grin on my face, but thinking of Alessandro pasted it there without my say so.
“Look at you, you’re glowing!” she chuckled. “Just make sure he knows no proposing until I clear it.”
My eyes and nose flared. “Proposal? What are you talking about? Once I come back to California, this will all be over again.”
“What are you talking about? You clearly still have feelings for him. Just be with him. Don’t think about it so much. If you fall back in love, you fall back in love.”
It didn’t sound awful when said so simply. I probably was falling for Alessandro again. Hell, I never got up after falling for him the first time. Still, the facts remained the same. Alessandro was deeply rooted in the organization, and that wasn’t likely to change. “I can’t, Sasha. I’m just setting myself up for heartbreak again. He’s still involved in his family’s business, more so now that his dad is gone. I can’t do this life. I just can’t.”
“You’re overthinking it,” Sasha said. “Everyone has different circumstances, but when two people love each other as deeply as you two do, that’s not something that should be ignored. The universe isn’t going to send you someone else like that. Most people don’t even get one. I promise you, babe, if you come running back to California without giving that a solid chance, you’re going to regret it.”
I took Sasha’s words seriously because she wasn’t usually a serious person. Whenever she got that little hike to her eyebrows, and her blue eyes were near vibrating with resolve, I knew she meant business.
“I’ll think about it,” I replied.
“No!” she bellowed. “Don’t think, just do.”
Don’t think, just do.
That could be the mantra of my relationship with Alessandro.
“Okay,” I responded. “Okay. Now, let’s talk fashion since you fucked everything up with your adorable blue hair.”
I talked to Sasha for another couple of hours. She was my rock whenever I felt like I was floating too far away. I had Bella here in Philly, and I’d seen her a few more times, but she could get as carried away as I could. Sasha was good at keeping my feet on the ground and forcing me to look at something from a different angle. I wanted nothing more than to be with Alessandro. Maybe that was all that it took. Maybe I needed to go all-in on that thought and let the universe do the rest of the work. Who knew, it might reward me for finally letting go of all the things I tried to control in my life. I could benefit from just making a decision one way or the other instead of going back and forth. It seemed like everything in my life had always been that way.
I wanted black and white, but I only ever got shades of gray.
Parents who loved me, supposedly, but had other things they dedicated the bulk of their energy to. A twin brother who could be my best friend one day, and one of those guys that I hated the next. A boyfriend who loved me to the very tips of my fingers, but there was still something that could take him from me at a moment’s notice, and often did. It was like purchasing. Some dresses went better with hair but were a worse combination with the skin tone. Some did a great job of making someone short look much taller, but it also made them look heftier than they were.
I wanted black and white, but I only ever got shades of gray.
Maybe that’s why I leaned toward a very definitive fashion sense. Black or white, that’s what I preferred. It was the one thing I could control. The one decision I could make without considering the pros and cons. If I wanted to wear black clothes, I simply did, and that was it. It didn’t demand years of thought. I didn’t take a step outside and walk around for twenty minutes just to see how I felt in the clothes before actually going anywhere in them. They were clothes, and it wasn’t that important, and somehow that comforted me. Decisions that don’t have life-changing consequences; I didn’t get enough of those in my life.
I’d thought of little else than Alessandro since he first asked me on that fake date when we were ten. Fourteen years later, he still occupied more of my brain space than anything else. I needed to make a choice. Either I needed to give a relationship with Alessandro another go, or I needed to say goodbye to him, pack my things, go back to California, and put this all behind me for good.
16
Alessandro
I was running around my house like a chicken with his head cut off.
Willow’s coming over.
I wanted everything to be perfect, and I was definitely running the risk of having some of the house staff poisoning my next meal. She’d been to my house before, so I couldn’t quite find the source of the fear with her coming over this time. Was it because I knew there was a higher concentration of organization radiation here than anywhere else? Was it because Luca had been so hot and cold lately that there wasn’t really any way to tell how he was going to react to seeing her again after so long? Was it because my dad wasn’t there to slap me on my back and tell me to man up and that Willow was a woman that would hit the bricks the second she saw weakness? Maybe it was a seven-layer cake of all of my and my family’s biggest issues perfectly baked with a gun-toting stripper on the inside, waiting to pop out the second Willow was sitting down to eat.
The current stage for my whirlwind was the kitchen. Anna and Antonio, Luca’s children, were sitting at the table coloring, while the Queen herself was standing at the six-burner stove, throwing together a lunch that I trusted only her with. I kept flying by her, looking over her shoulder and asking if she needed anything until she finally held a butcher knife out at me.
“Stop it. You’re making me nervous, and I never get nervous,” she chided. “Go sit with the kids. I’ve got this.”
I went over and sunk down into one of the faded wood seats next to Anna, who was scribbling a tornado of color onto the piece of paper in front of her. My leg was bouncing, but in an attempt to calm my nerves, I leaned over her and looked down at the picture.
“What’s this, pumpkin?” I asked.
She held it up, proudly holding it out to me. “Unco Sandro!”
Molly sputtered out a laugh, hunching over the food.
I stared at the wild collision and indirect patterns of the color lines. I feel attacked. “That’s very accurate, angel.”
Anna put it down with pride and continued to mix in colors until the page had nearly no white left. Very accurate.
“So how long did you date this girl?” Molly asked.
“I took her on our first date when we were thirteen. She broke up with me right after we turned eighteen, so five years that first time,” I explained, chuckling at Antonio rolling crayons around his page, putting together as accurate a portrait of his uncle as his sister had.
“That’s a long time for being so young. Luca said that you guys broke up because she asked you to pick between her and the family?” Molly asked, a point of judgment in her voice.
“Well, she asked me to pick between her and the life,” I replied, “but, you know. The two are one and the same around here.”
“No truer words,” Molly said. “I don’t get it. If she doesn’t want to be involved, why did she date you for five years?”
It was a difficult concept for Molly to grasp after having gone from being a kidnap victim to grasping Luca’s world by the reins to the point that she rivaled him in position and reputation. My mom had never taken the front-seat driver position that Molly took when she fell for Luca. Molly was headstrong, wanted to make herself useful, and found that she had something of a knack for being a straight-up Mob Queen. She could crack the whip on grown-ass men like she had her degree in that, not the culinary arts. She ran the drug tunneling branch of our business and still found time to be a wife and mother. To say she was a superwoman would be an understatement. Still, it kept her from seeing how someone else would struggle to do what she had done so easily. For her, loving Luca meant accepting the organization. It was a different school of thought.
“She’s in a unique situation,” I explained. “Her dad worked for my dad since she was very young. When she wa
s thirteen, my dad settled a personal matter in the way that my dad did, but there was bad blood between them, so he got sloppy. In the end, there wasn’t any way for them to get out clean, and someone had to take the fall. That person was Willow’s dad.”
“Wow, that is rough,” Molly responded. “I guess I can see it, then. She was already into you, but then this huge thing happened. She tried to forget it, but by the time she got to college, she realized there was no other way.”
“Pretty much.”
“Well, your dad was going to shoot me directly in the face for saying some mean things about him on the internet, so you’ll have to excuse me if I bond with her over what a fucking dick he was.” She seethed the last bit through her teeth.
“Go for it,” I said with a smile. “She’d welcome it, I’m sure.”
There were times I wished that Willow would share that philosophy; what you see is what you get, dings and all. If she was even half-willing to come around to the idea of my family’s business, we’d be in good shape. She didn’t have to dive into the deep end like Molly did, but she could have a passive acceptance.
But then I would think about this rose and its thorns and realize that any sane person would shy away from it. It worked out for Luca that Molly was so willing to take the bull by its horns, but the fact that she was might have been a red flag to someone else. The side of Willow that refused to get anywhere near our world was the human side of her, and it was beautiful. It helped me remember that I wasn’t always standing behind bulletproof glass.
“Da!” Antonio shouted.
“Hey, bud!” Luca walked over and kissed Antonio on the head and then went over to Anna and gave her one as well. “Hi, baby. This is a nice picture.”
“Unco Sandro,” she replied, and Luca snorted.
“It certainly is.” He gave her another kiss and then put a hand on my head and ruffled it like some sort of proud dad. “Hey.”
