by Lux Miller
“Noemi, I’m not trying to take your brother away from you. Either of them. I’m not trying to do anything other than survive in a world that isn’t fair. I know you miss your father. And I know you always will. It’s been ten years since mine died, and I still haven’t forgiven him for leaving me.”
I pause, inhaling and exhaling deeply as I wait to hear a response. When I hear none, I continue, “I didn’t have brothers who cared about me when my world fell apart. They may not be good at showing it, but Luca and Dante love you. They protect you because of that love. They don’t want to see you get hurt or destroyed the way they have seen countless other be eaten alive by the city that sins.”
I rub my fingers one last time over the dented and warped birdcage pendant and silently push it underneath the small crack between the bottom of the door and the floor. I push it just far enough under the door that the pendant disappears inside the room, but the chain remains on my side.
“It isn’t much, but it reminded me that no matter how oppressive the world may seem and no matter how small the cage may feel, that you can find beauty. They may clip your wings, but they can’t silence you.”
I hold my breath as I make my final plea to the little girl on the cusp of womanhood who is hurting on the other side of the door. Several dreadful moments of silence pass, then the chain disappears under the door. A couple of heartbeats later, I hear the lock on the door disengage.
Scrambling to my feet, I quickly turn the knob on the door and push it open. Standing just out of reach is Noemi, her eyes puffy and red and her cheeks streaked with tears. The chain hangs from her closed hand, but neither of us mentions the necklace. Instead she shoves the contents of her hand into the pocket of her jeans.
It’s disarming how much she looks like her mother, except her eyes. The painfully bright blue of her eyes is one-hundred percent her father eyes. She’s stunning, even as she swipes the back of her hand across her face and pretends that she wasn’t icing me out minutes ago.
I give her a small smile as an offering of peace. “I know you don’t have much here, but we’re similar to the same size. You’re welcome to anything in my closet.”
Noemi’s eyes light up for a moment. “Wait… do you have Royce creations in there?”
I chuckle and nod. “Quite a few of them actually. Most of them have only been worn once. The offer still stands. What’s mine is yours. For that matter, that should include Royce himself. He’s a total sweetheart. I bet he’d love to make something for you.”
Noemi shakes her head. “He’s too expensive for my budget.”
I raise one eyebrow at her and motion for her to follow me. She quietly follows behind me, her demeanor suddenly meek and nothing like the spewing hellcat she was just moments ago behind closed doors. I walk over to the bedside table and smile when I see that Luca has left his personal phone in the drawer. I pull it out and unlock it quickly.
Noemi’s eyes widen slightly as she watches me with Luca’s phone. I send a quick text and smirk when the phone almost immediately pings back with a response. “He has an opening tomorrow. But that won’t help us for tonight. Name a color and let me dazzle you.”
Noemi raises one eyebrow. “Turquoise.”
Nodding, I wave at her to follow me as I set the phone on the top of the bedside table and walk over to the closet I now share with Luca. I step into the closet and emerge several moments later with a pair of dresses.
One is a Maxi dress style that’s modest up top and has delicate florals embroidered into the crepe fabric. Around the waist is a gold belt that matches the iridescent stitched flowers that catch the light as the dress moves. The other looks like it was pulled straight out of a silent movie with its cut and style. Delicate cream-colored polka dots cascade over the soft fabric that hits just below my knees.
Noemi’s eyes are wide as she admires the two dresses. “I… these are gorgeous.”
Nodding, I laugh as I hand her the polka dot one. “Wear this one. It skews your eyes to an almost green color that’s enchanting. I have shoes to match. What size are you?”
Noemi shrugs as she looks down at her bare feet. “About a seven, I guess.”
I nod and slip back into the closet, producing a pair of cream-colored heels with a modest two inch heel and thin straps that crisscross over the ankle. I hand them to her along with the dress, and usher her out of the room and back toward hers. “These are a seven and a half, but I think they’ll work. I’ll wear the other dress and we can be a vision in turquoise together.”
Noemi can’t stifle the soft, but excited giggle that bubbles out of her mouth. She quickly recovers and her face returns to the same stoic expression that she wore before. But the damage is done. The smallest chink in her armor has shown itself to me, and I’m now determined to find a way to disarm her defenses...
EIGHTEEN
I duck just in time as a magazine sails over my head, its pages flapping like a bird taking flight. It narrowly misses whacking me as it lands with a thud on the floor beside me. I crane my head around on my neck and look at Noemi incredulously. She has the audacity to whistle softly and pretend to look at the ceiling.
“Really?”
She shrugs as she picks up another magazine and drops it into a box marked ‘Noemi.’ Yeah, like that isn’t completely obvious. I point at the offending former projectile and muse, “So that one can go in the garbage then?” Noemi shrugs, her eyes focused on something behind me. With a cough, I fling my hand behind me and scold, “Don’t you dare, Dante. I know where you sleep…”
A large shadow looms over me, stopping suddenly. I glance over my shoulder and smirk at Dante as I catch him red-handed about to smack me with a rolled-up magazine. “I’m not a puppy that peed on the carpet. There will be no smacking me with anything. Luca gave us six hours to get everything of importance out of here, and the two of you are wasting time playing games.”
Dante narrows his eyes at me, but I can see a soft tint of red creeping along his cheeks. He nods and drops the magazine back onto a pile of discarded mail and holds both of his hands up. “Fair enough. It’s not like anybody is really going to benefit from these trashy magazines.”
Noemi scoffs. “They’re not trashy!”
Dante chuckles as he kicks one across the room to her. The headlines emblazoned across the front are all about sex, and how to better pleasure your man. He points at it with a smirk and accuses, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were preparing for a lot more than a party on your birthday.”
It’s Noemi’s turn to blush, and she snatches the magazine off the floor and drops it into the box. “Ugh, you are such an—
Dante nods and rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah… I’m an asshole. I know.”
“Dante Lorenzo Barresi! Language!”
Dante heaves a heavy sigh and responds to the disembodied voice that floats up the hallway from the back bedrooms, “Yeah, yeah Momma… I know. You’re gonna get after me with the soap and wash out my dirty mouth. That’s a losing battle…”
Bianca pokes her head out of one of the rooms and stares Dante down with an icy glare. “Don’t tempt me. There’s a brand new bottle of liquid soap in the bathroom.”
Even I shudder at Bianca’s threat. Having your mouth washed out with soap is an old-fashioned method of punishment, but liquid soap? Dang, that’s harsh! The scary part is, I don’t doubt that she’d do it, either. She may be diminutive, but no man crosses Bianca Barresi when she lays down the law.
Dante rolls his eyes, but his body shudders enough that he can’t hide it. He holds a hand up in Bianca’s direction. “Just tell me what you need to pack from the kitchen. I can’t imagine it’d be much since Luca has a state of the art kitchen at your disposal.”
Bianca grumbles as she walks up the hallway, wiping her hands on a pair of faded, dirty jeans. It’s the most dressed-down I think I’ve ever seen her and, strangely, it suits her. She seems calmer and less stressed without all of the finery. The basic black tee and
kerchief tied around her hair make her look disarmingly peaceful.
Behind Bianca, Mike pokes his head out of the bedroom where they’ve been sorting through Matteo’s personal effects that were left at the house. It’s a job nobody particularly wanted to do, but one that Bianca volunteered to do. Finding himself unneeded in the living room, Mike joined her over an hour ago. It’s been nothing but silence interspersed with the occasional sound of scraping and a drill, presumably removing screws from the wall where pictures once hung.
I peek around Bianca and Dante as they converse and catch Mike’s gaze. I stand up off the floor and wipe off my knees, then slip down the hallway. Mike motions for me to come on in, and he walks over to the edge of the bed and sits down. His enormous frame takes up half of the end of the bed.
He’s tall and broad and built like a linebacker. Mike’s not a man that I’d ever want to piss off. I’ve really only ever seen him in a decent mood, but I imagine it must be a terrifying sight to see a man this intimidating in a bad one. I bet he’d have even the toughest men shaking in their boots if he showed up with a thunderous expression on his face.
Right now, he looks defeated. He sighs heavily as I step into the room and rubs his hands over his face. His expression is guarded, but I can tell that something is eating him up inside. I tilt my head to the side as he pulls a framed picture into his lap from where it’s sitting on the bed beside him.
He turns it around so I can see it and sighs, “Time can be such a sneaky enemy. It’s like you’re a young man gaining footing in the world and you blink and everything’s changed. This doesn’t feel like it was thirty years ago, but it was.”
I walk over to him cautiously and hold my hand out for the picture. He gently sets the framed black and white photo into my hands, and I narrow my eyes as I gaze at it. There are three men in the photo, all dressed to the nines and looking intimidating.
It’s easy to tell that the one in the middle is Matteo. Despite my barely knowing the man and having only met him a few times, looking at this picture is like looking at Luca. He’s the spitting image of his father, though he’s likely a bit bigger than Matteo was here. The men who flank Matteo on either side look so much alike, you’d never convince me they were anything other than brothers.
I glance up at Mike and arch an eyebrow as I ask, “Is this you?”
Mike nods. “It is. And my brother Marco. I think you met him briefly on the day… well, you know. This was taken in the chaos of the aftermath of a mob job gone horribly wrong. Marco’s a few years older than me and he was working as a bouncer at one of the local clubs. It’s surprising how many of us have history in the city’s bars. It’s largely why I avoid them now. The gateway to hell, I always said.
“I was tending bar while Marco served as the head of security. It wasn’t ideal, but it was enough to keep us in a one bedroom apartment. I know all too well what it’s like to be one paycheck from the streets.”
He looks at me pointedly and continues, “Though I can’t imagine what it must be like to stand on the cliff of homelessness and be pushed. Marco and me, we lost our parents young. They ended up on the wrong end of a mafia shakedown, and we found ourselves orphaned. We weren’t kids anymore, but it didn’t make it any easier to wake up one day and have everything you’ve ever known ripped away from you.”
“We were pinching pennies, but we still didn’t have two nickels to rub together. We paid the bills, but there wasn’t anything else to be had. I was about your age when that changed. The debonair son of the New Orleans Mafia strode into our bar with an offer we couldn’t refuse.
“He’d watched Marco in action with unruly patrons, and though he’d never seen me do much more that sling a liquor bottle around, he knew we came as package deal. And as an incentive, he dropped the gift-wrapped opportunity for revenge in our laps. He knew who’d been responsible for our parents’ deaths, and all we had to do to join the greatest brotherhood known to man was take them out.
“Seemed easy enough. He gave each of us an untraceable pistol. Serial numbers had been etched clean. Told us that the world would be at our feet once we’d completed the hit. His only stipulation for the job was that there couldn’t be any witnesses.
“So we took the job. When you have nothing to lose, you’re willing to hedge it all on opportunity. So we snuck into the business that Matteo had directed us to… and we shot the men responsible for our parents’ deaths. They begged us for mercy, even as we pressed our pistols to their foreheads. Once we’d emptied our clips, my worst nightmare came true.”
Mike sighs softly as I hand the picture back to him. He shakes his head, obviously trying to clear a memory that won’t go away. “You don’t need to know the gory details of the biggest mistake of my life, but yes… this is Marco and I in the picture with Matteo. This was taken right around the time Luca was born.
“Marco was born for this lifestyle. He flourished under Matteo’s reign and became a murderous henchman that was feared in the underground for his ruthless ambiguity. Matteo sent him on the dirty jobs, because my brother sold his soul to the devil to be at Matteo’s side. And Matteo rewarded him with gifts of money, cars, women… and a promotion he couldn’t refuse.
“When Luca was four and Bianca was pregnant with Dante, somebody attempted a hit on them. The Barresi bloodshed was thwarted, but only barely. Matteo immediately assigned Marco to his personal guard and me to protect Bianca and the children. Marco gloated and announced that he’d truly become what he set out to be - at the right hand of New Orleans’ most-feared man.”
I shudder slightly and sit down beside Mike, picking up another picture. It’s clearly of Bianca, because she hasn’t changed a bit. She was young and beautiful then, and she’s regal and beautiful now. It appears as if she had the fountain of youth in her backyard. Sitting on Bianca’s lap is a scrappy looking little boy with wild, unruly dark curls. Nestled in her arms is a bundle of angry fists and thick, dark hair.
Mike smiles as he runs his finger lovingly across the picture. “They became my life. It was my job to protect them at all costs, up to and including my life. And so, I’ve served the family for over thirty years. In the shadows, but never out of sight. When Luca moved out of the family home at the age of seventeen, he requested I stay on with him, so I followed him.
“Marco scoffed at the idea of me toiling away my life as a glorified babysitter, but I was an Italian-American boy with a limited education and no prospects for bettering myself beyond my capabilities. I’m no idiot, but I’m a simple man from a simple family.
“And I’ll admit, I’ve come to care for the children as I would my own. I never met anyone who could tear me away from my duty, and so I never had children of my own. Luca, Dante, and much later Noemi, became my surrogate children, and I protected them with my life. A life I would have and still would lay down for theirs, no questions asked.”
A soft voice from the doorway captures both mine and Mike’s attention. “Mike, you know that we’ve always considered you family. That doesn’t change just because Matteo is gone. You don’t give yourself enough credit. You were instrumental in Luca and Dante becoming the men they are today. Without you, they’d have become two more lost boys in a sea of young men that this family has broken and destroyed.”
Mike looks up at Bianca standing in the doorway and bows his head in a sign of reverence, “I beg your pardon ma’am, but I’ve done them no favors. I’ve failed you in my quest to protect them from their legacy.”
Bianca sighs and pads softly over to Mike, kneeling down in front of him. She rests one hand on his and shakes her head. “That’s where you’re wrong. If my husband had had his way, they’d have become soldiers with no soul. They may not be angels, but they’re not the demons they could have been without your influence.
“Destiny is unforgiving. You’ve done so much more for them, but even if all you did was help them maintain a shred of their humanity, then that’s a life you can hang your hat on. I owe you my eternal gr
atitude.”
I clear my throat slightly, feeling slightly uncomfortable with the scene before me. I nod my head at Mike and Bianca and rush out, “I’m gonna… go help Noemi…”
I tear out of the room before either of them can protest and wander into what I presume to be Noemi’s bedroom. It’s covered with magazine cutouts and posters of various bands and movie stars. It screams teenager in the worst way, but that’s not unexpected. What IS unexpected is the stack of books in the corner of the room.
The thick hardback books must number in the dozens, all neatly stacked in rows that consume the entire corner. Noemi’s head bounces up from the books as I enter the room. She smiles sheepishly as she lifts a pile and drops them down into the box with a thud. She motions to the others and sighs, “Aside from my clothes, I think these are what I’d call essentials.”
I walk over tentatively and sit down beside her, pulling a stack over toward myself. I turn the books so that the spines are facing me and run my index finger slowly down the tower, reading off the names of the authors as I go, “Tennyson, Eyre, Tolkien, Shakespeare…?”
