Ruthless Empire: A Dark Mafia Collection

by Seth Eden

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a whisper that carried miles in the quiet, serene night. “We should go.”

  “Can you help me?” I asked.

  Mira walked over. She saw the collection of items sitting in front of me and lifted them. She brought them over to the car and then returned, holding out a hand. I opened my mouth, but fear of what would come out closed it again. I took Mira’s hand, got to my feet, and walked over and climbed into the car. We backed out of our parking spot enough to pivot the car until it was facing the right direction. I watched Gabriel through the side-view mirror as his head dropped to his knees. His back started to rise and fall heavily. I cried to match his anguish, wishing that I’d told him I loved him.

  “Are you okay?” Mira asked.

  I shook my head. “No. I feel like I may be making a huge mistake.”

  24

  Gabriel

  I couldn’t begin to know how long I sat up on that hill. I didn’t know if I was hoping that if I sat there long enough, Stacy would come back, or maybe my dad, or maybe the world would just stop turning all together and end the skin-snatching, gut-wrenching torment that was thundering its way through me.

  There would never be another Stacy. I could search until I reached the end of our round earth, and there would never be another. I wouldn’t kid myself and think that there would be. I wouldn’t look. I would commit to memory as much as I could that silken blonde hair and those endless green eyes and her brighter-than-the-sun smile. I would pray for the nights I would find her in my dreams. I wouldn’t try to replace the piece of me that she took with her. That hole was too deep, too dark, too vast. It couldn’t be her, so I wanted nothing at all.

  In the end, it was a good thing. I could throw myself into the Varasso business because nothing scared me now. In the past month, my biggest fear had become watching her walk away. Now that I’d faced that and lived, Death himself could hold his scythe at my throat, and I wouldn’t flinch.

  When I brought myself to my feet, I didn’t bother with the blanket or retucking the chest away; I wouldn’t be back. If someone found my blanket and felt it was worth pilfering, good for them. Hopefully, they could bear the weight of daddy issues and heartbreak if they were going to cover themselves with it.

  The forty-five-minute drive back to our family estate felt like hours. I couldn’t drag my mind away from Stacy, and every time I thought about her, it brought me close to breaking again. I just wanted her in my arms again. We never did get to celebrate our confessed love for one another. Maybe that was for the best. If we’d gotten to cement things that way, I doubt I could have managed letting her leave. I would have grabbed her and held on until the world was crumbling around us. The fact that I made it back with her clawing at my brain was, was an absolute miracle.

  When I was turning into our driveway, it almost felt like a foreign, unfamiliar place. I’d left my brothers in the wreckage of the mess that I had made. I didn’t get to hear how they recovered, or if they ever did.

  I drove around the cul-de-sac and noticed that Molly’s car was still missing. I should have called her. On the way to the hill or the way back, I had plenty of time. I owed her the biggest apology for forcing Luca over the edge. I needed to tell her that I didn’t know the man wearing my skin in Luca’s office and beg her to come back so that she and Luca could make up. Maybe it was because Luca was the oldest and the head of the family, or maybe it was because I’d had to break up with Stacy, but Luca and Molly felt like the last stand. If they broke, everything else would break, and the pieces would be way too small to glue together again.

  I put my car in park and made a plan to call Molly first thing in the morning if she didn’t call tonight. I started to get out of the car and felt the weight of my gun press into the side of my hip. The butt of the gun felt heavier against me than I knew it to be. Being a Varasso meant trusting that my family wouldn’t hurt me. It meant earning their trust back, as well. I lifted it out of my waistband and leaned over to put it in the glove box when I noticed something that shook me to my core.

  All the lights in the estate were off.

  I scanned all the windows carefully, checking for any stretch of light or illumination that would suggest maybe we were just suddenly trying to save on our electricity bill, but not one single light was on. My father’s entire operation ran out of our estate. He couldn’t afford for our electricity to go down. He had backup generators in case the power went out, and he had backup generators for those backup generators.

  None of us slept on the same schedule. Luca often stayed up into the early hours of the morning, went to bed, and slept until noon. I usually had a religious eight-thirty bedtime and was up by five the next morning. When Alessandro and Marco were still around, their schedules changed by the day. Even if all of us were asleep, or none of us, we had round-the-clock staff. The foyer lights were almost always on, as were the ones in the kitchen. Total darkness meant something was wrong.

  I folded the glove box lid back into its place and kept my gun in my hand. I was pulling back to step out of my car when my car phone started to blare. In a panic, I slapped my hand down on the console, not intending to do anything specific besides stop the loud ringing. To my shock, the line picked up.

  “Gabriel?”

  I looked at my center console as if I’d see the face looking back at me. “Stace?”

  She sniffled. “Hi.”

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, wheeling down the volume button and cursing my truck for having a feature that kept the radio functioning after the car had been totally shut off. I was happy to hear her voice, but the timing couldn’t have been worse.

  “It’s fine. I want you to come over.”

  My heart leaped up into my throat. “What?”

  “I want to be with you. I love you.”

  “Stacy, are you sure you’re okay?”

  She chuckled. “I’m fine. I’m the best that I’ve ever been because I met you.”

  The images of her bruises skipped across my mind. “That’s not true.”

  “It is.” She sniffled again. “I know that something bad happened, but I’ll just be more prepared. You can teach me how to protect myself. We’ll figure it out. You said Luca’s wife joined the business. Maybe I—”

  “No,” I cut her off. “I won’t drag you into this.”

  “It’s too late for that,” she replied.

  I was still staring at my darkened house for any signs of movement while trying to listen to Stacy. I got a nasty flashback of talking to Stacy instead of meeting with Anthony Carducci. If I’d been on time, Stacy wouldn’t be broken right now. I couldn’t make the same mistake twice.

  “Stace, I have to go.”

  “No, Gabriel. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I shot back quickly. “I want to be with you. If that’s what you want, we can figure it out, but right now, I have to go. I think my family may be in trouble.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The house is dark. The house is never dark.”

  “You should call the police.”

  I snickered at her ignorance. “You don’t call the police in my business, beautiful.” I looked at the console again. “Hey, listen, if I never see you again, know that I love you so much.”

  “Gabriel. Do not hang up this phone. Do not go in that house.”

  “I have to. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  “Gabriel—”

  I hit the button to end the call, and the car fell silent.

  I climbed out, shut the door quietly, and started my slow ascent up the front steps. I opened the front door, knowing it’d be unlocked. We usually had air-tight security hanging around every corner, so there was no reason to lock it, but there were no guards present. In fact, there was no one at all. There was almost always sound in our estate. The sounds of cleaning staff fluttering around, Luca conducting meetings, some of the lower-ranks talking about some matter or another. Just like the Varasso estate was ne
ver dark, it was also never silent.

  I cocked my gun and made my way up the first flight of stairs. All of the doors I could see were open, and the lights were off. I was considering journeying down the row when I noticed the spill of lights at the top of the next flight of stairs. It was faint, not something I would have been able to see from outside, and was likely coming from Luca’s office. He only had back-facing windows. I crawled up the second flight of stairs and followed the thin stream of light down the hallway, down to Luca’s door.

  Something told me not to knock. The last time I entered, I’d barged in and pointed a gun at Alessandro, but this time, I got a sinking feeling that I’d be alerting my presence when I shouldn’t. As quietly as I could, I wrapped my free hand around the door’s handle. My stealth wasn’t entirely necessary. It was a massive office, but it wasn’t so big that if I opened the door, I wouldn’t be seen.

  All at once, I was transported back in time to the moment I found out exactly what kind of business the Varasso family was really in. Most people in our line of work had fronts for their shady dealings. My dad did a little bit of everything, but one of his sweetest ventures was a southern border drug hive, the one Molly now ran. Runners would travel from one end to the other of an endlessly twisted cavern of underground hallways, transporting drugs back and forth. He’d called this leg of his business many things, but he most often referred to it as the beehive. Young Gabriel heard his father talking about bees and believed that our family was in the honey business. I didn’t understand what was so lucrative about something I could go out and find in any hive, but I didn’t question it. My father told me not to.

  I was already older than my brothers were when they first started learning the business at ten. I was coming up on my twelfth birthday and still didn’t understand what qualified Luca, Marco, and Alessandro to work with the honey when I still couldn’t. My dad would never admit it, but I believed he was considering not dragging me in. Maybe my life changed that day I crawled out of bed, looking for him one quiet, wintry morning. It was still before sunrise, and though my pre-teen self could still sleep until someone was throwing lunch at my head, on occasion, I would wake up before the birds. My dad had brought me to the hill for the first time the day before, so we’d done a bit of bonding, and I wanted to see him.

  I didn’t know when my dad slept because he was always in his office. Even in the wee hours of the morning, when everyone else was snoozing away, apart from the overnight crew, I knew I would find my dad in his office or not find him at all. I snuck up the stairs quietly, so as not to wake up my brothers’ mom. She already hated me enough, and she wasn’t a morning person. I tiptoed down this same, mostly dark hallway, towards the same thin veil of light seeping out from under the door. I was going to knock and announce myself when I heard my dad’s thundering voice roar out.

  “What do you mean they found the hive?” he barked. “Where are the bees?”

  He was silent, but then he growled again. “How many did we lose?”

  His hand slammed on his desk a few seconds later and scared me half-to-death. “I promised the Binachis twenty kilos of that cocaine. If I don’t have it within seventy-two hours, I’m holding you personally responsible. Do you understand?” He let out a muddy chuckle. “I knew you would.”

  I was so stricken with shock that I didn’t hear my dad’s heavy footsteps make their way to the door. When he pulled the door open, I crawled on my hands backward until I was bumping into the wall. I expected him to be mad at me for eavesdropping, but instead, he just perched himself against the doorframe and crossed his arms.

  He looked down at me with a devilish grin. “Are you ready to learn what it really means to be a Varasso?”

  I nodded because I’d only ever been an outsider. I hoped that learning the business would make my brothers respect me, but it only made them resent me more, at least the older two. I could even see Alessandro looking at me with envy out of the corner of his eye. I never knew if it was because they thought I shouldn’t be entitled to the business as a half-breed or because they knew my relationship with our dad was vastly different from theirs, but I spent my entire life chasing their approval. Approval I would never truly get.

  Still, as I perched my gun against the wood of my dad’s office door, I knew what had to be done if there was a threat inside the office. I had spent a long time keeping my hands clean of the destruction Varassos left everywhere they went, but if I needed to shoot to protect my family, I would do so without hesitation.

  I opened the door and, to my surprise, just Luca was sitting inside. I could barely see the top of his head poking out over the top of the imposing chair because he had his back to the door and he was looking out the window. I brought my gun down. “Jeez, total darkness is a little brooding for a fight with your wife, don’t you think?”

  The chair slowly turned, and chills peppered over my skin. It wasn’t Luca, at all.

  Dario Binachi flashed me a toothy grin, rivaled only by the glint across the pistol he was aiming right at me. He and both of his sons were supposed to be in prison. Why was he sitting in Luca’s office chair?

  “Dario.”

  “Gabriel Varasso.” The voice crashed into me like an eighteen-wheeler. It was one of the voices I’d heard across Stacy’s door the night she was attacked. “How nice of you to join us.”

  “Us?” It was all I got out before I felt something slam against my head, and my world turned to darkness.

  25

  Gabriel

  I opened my eyes and felt a gentle breeze sliding over my body. The bed I was in was unfamiliar to me, but it still hugged me like a warm embrace. I stretched my hands above my head and jumped a little at the shifting next to me. I looked over, and Stacy was laying there beside me. There was nothing but her lightly tanned skin against the white comforter that was gathered around us, and she was breathing in and out gently. I scratched the back of her head lightly before leaning down to kiss her. Though I would find her beautiful in any condition, her unbroken, unbruised skin made me smile. I wanted to run my lips over it, kiss it, feel it. I wanted her to know, with my hands bending against all the curves of her body, that for as long as we both lived, I would never let harm befall her again.

  The sun peeked over a blanket of blue stretching out infinitely into the horizon, and I knew she’d have words for being awoken so early, but we had an endless amount of time to sleep. Something in my body compelled me to spend as much wide-eyed time with her as possible. I didn’t want her to slip through my fingers again. I wanted to feel her against me, around me. If it killed me, that’d be fine, as long as it was her. As long as it was real.

  I shifted my way further into the bed until my face was at hers. I pecked her on her nose, on her cheeks, on her lips, and on her chin. She twisted next to me, and a smile curved up her cheeks. I kissed each of the corners, and then I tried to put a kiss on every freckle.

  “You’ll dry your mouth out doing that,” she joked.

  “I don’t care.” I took her lips against mine. “Are you complaining?”

  She shook her head. “Never with you.”

  I grinned. “Then, should I continue?”

  Her eyes peeled open, those jewel-cut emerald eyes dancing over me enough to boil me down to nothing.

  “I would say yes,” she said, “but I don’t know how much time we have.”

  I tilted my head, and she laughed.

  “Don’t tell me you forgot. We’re meeting your family in,”—she reached behind her and lifted her cell phone off the bedside table—“half an hour.”

  I let out a long, drawn-out moan. “I don’t wanna.”

  Her fingers threaded into my hair. “I know, but after this, we have nothing else planned for the rest of the day. We can do whatever we want,” she said and leaned a bit closer to me, “however many times.”

  “Um, if you’re trying to convince me not to do it right now, you’re failing.”

  Stacy giggled then rolled
away from me, and I threw a tiny temper-tantrum in the form of chucking one of my pillows across the room. She laughed.

  “That was mature.” She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Her long, blemishless back flashed at me, beckoning me towards it like the long, curling fingers of steam over a cartoon pie. “Why didn’t my alarm go off?”

  “Beats me.” I was already closing the distance between us and sliding my hand over her back. “Let’s just not go.”

  Stacy stood up off the bed, so I threw another pillow. She chuckled as she turned to face me, but now all the best parts were looking at me, and I glared at her. “You’re doing this on purpose.”

  “Am not,” she said, but she sashayed her hips as she made her way over to a suitcase on a simple table in one corner. “Look, you were the one who arranged this whole family vacation and wanted to do one family breakfast. Your brothers hated you for it, so the least we can do is not be late.”

  I kicked my legs, watching the blanket twist and turn around them. “But, I wanna have sex with my hot girlfriend.”

  Stacy laughed. “Later.” She pulled a white dress from the suitcase and then lifted out a pair of black slacks and a dark blue tank top and chucked them at me. “Here. You don’t have to be fancy.”

  “But I like being fancy,” I grumbled like a bratty child.

  She turned and flashed a warning look at me, so I turned and climbed off the other side of the bed and quickly pulled on the clothes she’d thrown over. I slid on a pair of shoes that I had waiting near the sliding glass door across from the bed. I looked out the glass door. Rolling waves turned to white foam at the edge of the beach, and the water carried out towards the blue sky so far that if there was anything else around us, it didn’t exist as far as we were concerned.