Luka: Perfectly Damaged – a Bad Boy Mafia Romance

by Alice May Ball

  She lifted her phone and was about to call. “Wait,” I told her. “I’ll hear the voicemails he left, then I’ll call him.”

  Bruto’s first message just said, “Call me. You need to get back here.”

  She came close as I was listening, craned her head. I tilted the phone so she could hear better. My body felt like it expanded as she came nearer. My cock lengthened.

  The second message was four minutes after the first and it said, “Where the fuck have you gone, asshole? You’ve got a job to do. Get your ass back here. Stat.” And before he hung up he added, “And hers.”

  With my arm around Alexa, I felt strong and sure, like there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t face. She held herself, firm and resilient, like she was making herself strong as she leaned against me, yet still I felt her nervousness.

  She was apprehensive. I saw it as my job to give her reassurance. Let her feel that, whatever happened, I was there to back her up, to take care of her and to protect her.

  With her still leaning against me, even as she wrapped her gorgeous flesh in the fine cotton sheet, my cock still very much wanted a say in the proceedings. To make the call I had to move away, go and stand by the window.

  Bruto picked up. “Where the fuck are you?”

  I was glad he didn’t wait for an answer, because I wasn’t too sure what to give him. “You need to get her back here, and fast. You understand me?”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to keep the sullen reluctance out of my voice.

  “I understand she put on a bit of a show at the meet with the Russians.”

  “She was impressive.”

  “From what I hear, that would be the least of it. Is it true she took Petrov’s knife from him, stuck it in the table?”

  Where was Bruto getting his information? “She certainly knows how to make a point.” Was it the girl at the club, I wondered, or did he have someone inside Vassily’s crew?

  He said, “Good girl. Now, bring her back.”

  “She’s a bit whacked out, you know?”

  There was a hollow pause. “I’ll assume that I’m not hearing you right, Luka. And maybe you’re not hearing me, either. Do I need to tell you a second time?”

  “What’s happening, Bruto?”

  “What’s it to you what’s happening? Carm’s coming.” I didn’t know what he was talking about at first. I thought he said ‘Calm.’ Then I realized what he meant. I never heard him call Carmine Monreale ‘Carm’ before.

  Huddled in the sheet, Alexa had caught the sense of the conversation. Her eyes studied mine.

  I said, “Carmine’s coming now?”

  Bruto’s voice was a schoolyard sing-song, “Oh, I’m sorry, Luka, were you on your break? Were you on a roster for the early shift? Do you have a doctor’s appointment?”

  “Yeah, okay, Bruto. I get the point. I’m on my way.”

  “And bring her.” He hung up. I stared at the phone, then looked up at Alexa, in a ball with her arms around her knees and her face full of clouds.

  “Carmine Monreale?” Her eyebrows steepled, puzzled and fearful. “I heard you,” she said, an apologetic explanation.

  “You knew him from when you were little, right?”

  “‘Knew’ could be to stretch a point. I’d see him when he came to the house. He was always pretty nice to me, yeah.”

  “Did you call him ‘Uncle Carm’?”

  “No,” she laughed, “I didn’t call him ‘uncle’ anything. I think he’d have hated that.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but did you call him ‘Carm’?”

  “Nobody called him ‘Carm.’ My father called him ‘Carmine’ and so did I.”

  “It’s okay.” I tried to sound like I meant it. In this whole thing, she was all that I could see that was remotely okay. She looked afraid, but I’d take care of her. I wanted to tell her she didn’t need to worry, but there’s no way to say that without worrying a person more.

  We learned that in insurgent ops. There were times we’d have to crash someone’s house in the middle of the night. Whole villages, sometimes. Kids would wake. We might have to take the man of the house, sometimes the sons. Once it was two daughters.

  Handling the other people in a household, we learned the more you do to try and reassure them, the more afraid they get. Be clear, decisive, do what you have to do. Be responsible as much as you can, but be efficient. And be gone. The sooner you’re not there, the happier they’re all going to be.

  There wasn’t any point telling Alexa that a meeting with Carmine Monreale was going to be a walk in the park. Seemed like she knew him a lot better than I did, though, and from what I’d heard, he was most likely going to be good news for her.

  Word had come to me when I was told I’d be taking care of Fat Tony’s fiancée, “Watch your step and don’t mess up. Carmine will be watching.” With Tony gone, though, there would be some big changes in Carmine’s organization.

  It would be naive to assume that his top priority would be a girl he knew since she was a kid.

  I hated leaving the room. Somehow it felt like a little home we’d made. Somewhere that belonged to the two of us.

  In the elevator, she said quietly, “Next time, I’ll fight you off properly. I’ll make a better job of it.”

  “What next time? I only do one time.”

  She looked up at me. I said, “I’m the original ‘one and done’ guy.”

  Her eyelashes beat like butterfly wings. “But you aren’t.”

  “What?”

  The back of her hand grazed the stretched fabric at the front of my pants. It had ached so much and so long my mind had almost numbed to it. “Done,” she said. “You’re not done.”

  I swear, I thought my cock would grow teeth and bite its way out. Christ, my balls hurt.

  Luka held the door to the apartment open for me. Knowing that Tony wasn’t coming back, I kind of expected the place to be empty. It wasn’t. It was like one of Tony’s meets: full of guys preening their sleek hair, adjusting jewelry, and looking at their manicured nails.

  I recognized Massimo Ferraro, the hulking, thick-set man with a dark complexion and tight, gray curls. He was Tony’s opposite number, the family’s other underboss, as Tony had described them. There had always been a noisy rivalry between him and Tony.

  When Massimo wasn’t eyeing me like a filet steak, I saw him glower in Bruto’s direction. Behind him, with his hands clasped in front of him, was a bear of a man with dark skin and wiry black hair trimmed into a thick buzzcut. Over the top of his shades, his eyes were hard.

  In the big lounge area, Bruto sat at the head of the long table. Men with shades and black leather jackets lined the wall behind Carmine Monreale. The man himself stood like Old World aristocracy in a pale gray, silk suit. When he saw me, he opened his arms.

  “Alexa, bella! You look wonderful, tezora.” He’d called me that when I was little. It meant “treasure” and it always gave me a warm feeling to hear it. His smile lit the room, even under his shadowed face and his sharp, hawkish eyes. I went to him and he hugged me warmly. He held on for a long time. It was an affectionate hug, like a little girl would be glad to receive from an uncle.

  Not so much like that kind of hug I more often got from uncles when I was younger. Carmine was always different. When I said so to my father in private, though, he had always dismissed it saying, “Yeah, Carmine can be natural with everyone. It’s like that when you own everybody.”

  That had made me more guarded with Carmine, and I still never knew whether I was right to be or not. He was a big man in a major crime family—I knew that like everybody did—but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be decent to members of the family. Some of the bosses and capos were great family men. Some weren’t. Some you never really knew about.

  Carmine held me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes. “I know you’ll have heard about Tony.” He studied me. “It may not have been devastating news to you, Alexa. I understand that.” His eyes were kind and concerne
d. He looked sincere. But of course, they always do.

  At that moment, I blamed my father for sowing doubt in my mind so long ago. It had stopped me from being able to judge for myself. That was what I told myself, although Carmine wasn’t an easy man to read. And I never missed an opportunity to curse my father.

  “There will be changes, though, Alexa.” His eyes were on mine. My sense was that he was weighing my reaction. “You’ll be a part of the changes, come what may. You’re the responsibility of this part of the family now.”

  ‘Responsibility.’ When the ‘guys,’ as Tony called them, talked about responsibility, they were usually talking about either ownership or a problem. What they were responsible for belonged to them or they had to fix it. Was he telling me that I was owned now, even with Tony gone?

  The only thing worse would be if they saw me as a problem. When the problem was a person, there was only ever one kind of a solution.

  My eyes flicked to Bruto. He watched with a fierce attention. I wanted to see Luka, but he was somewhere behind me and I wasn’t sure it would be safe enough for me to turn away from Carmine.

  This meeting was obviously going to make a big difference as to how my future turned out, but I couldn’t keep my mind completely off the unfinished business with Luka. It was just perfect that I’d start feeling the way that I did about an archetypal ‘one and done’ guy.

  In a heartbeat, I’d slipped from being owned by a jealous man I hated to wishing for, craving a man who couldn’t care less what woman fulfilled his needs—just so long as it was never the same woman twice.

  The men sat around the table. Carmine said, “Sit on a stool at the breakfast bar, tezora. You can watch over us all.” I liked that he used the little Italian term. Even when I was little, I suspected that he called all little girls ‘treasure’ in the same way, but I still liked it.

  Massimo, as he was seating himself, threw hostile glances at Bruto. “Who’s this guy?” he spoke to Carmine, but he raised a hand to Bruto, then turned to face him. “Due respect, but you’re nobody here. You just arrived. It’s not only that you aren’t family—we don’t even know your family.”

  “Bruto brings with him certain skills,” Carmine said quietly. “He has expertise. We’re pleased to have a man with us with abilities to help us enhance and develop our range of activity.”

  “But Carm, I want the john fixed I get a plumber.” Massimo lifted his hand to Bruto again. “Due respect, but I don’t need a monkey with a spanner on the board of my company just so’s I can get my drains cleared.” Massimo’s men who stood around the wall all chuckled. All except the one with the buzzcut.

  Massimo was like a tethered, angry bull. He took a moment to speak. A couple of breaths drew in through his nose first and he worked his jaw. “Carm, due respect, okay? You make the calls. All I’m saying, who is this guy, why are we making a space at the table for him?”

  Carmine turned to face Massimo and lowered his voice. “Easy, Mass. Bruto is a made guy.” The tension in the room was unbearable. My eyes went up to Luka, but his were so shadowed I couldn’t read him. I couldn’t even tell for sure that he saw me.

  “Yeah,” Massimo said, “a made guy from East Bumfuck, Flyover County.” As Massimo’s men laughed quietly, Bruto rose in his chair.

  Carmine lifted both hands. Bruto reluctantly sat back down and Massimo sank a little deeper in his seat. I held my breath. Nobody said anything. After a tense moment, Massimo said, “Well, Carm, it’s your call.” Carmine’s head inclined the tiniest amount.

  Bruto said, “Okay, the girl.”

  Carmine studied him for a moment. “Bruto, I just gave you an endorsement.” Bruto made a respectful nod. Carmine said, “I don’t know how manners run in Flyover,” and he paused. Nobody laughed this time. “But out here, we show respect to women. And I set the agenda.”

  Bruto said, “Carm, we all know the form. She’s been close, you know? Meetings that have been right here. She knows faces, names. Some details maybe. We can’t just turn her loose.”

  “So, you think I that should give her to you, Bruto?”

  “Hey!” Massimo said, “He’s going to walk in here, take Tony’s turf, take his woman? Is he going to be going around scooping up all of Tony’s dues and tastes?”

  Carmine’s eyes stayed on Bruto. Massimo said, “Are we losing all the work that was Tony’s to the man from Bumfuck?”

  I thought about the Russians in the club the night before. Were these men really any scarier than them? I knew that in a very important way, they were. But I also knew that if I stopped to think, I couldn’t act, so I took the chance. I couldn’t help looking at Luka before I stood, but only for a momentary flash.

  I couldn’t afford to be drawing my strength from him. I had to find it in myself. But that moment, the spark of contact, it made all the difference.

  Quickly, I strode around the table, grateful for the sharp sound of my heels. The clothes and my hair weren’t going to work on my behalf like they did in Hotsteppa’s, and the light wasn’t going to help me out. What I lost from the Mafia Donna, I would have to try to make up with a kind of a tough waif character.

  As I tried to think myself into it, all the images seemed uncomfortably close to Smart, Sassy Whore. I didn’t want them to see me that way. These men would all have dealt with dozens of whores, both as customers and as proprietors. I thought about Carmine Monreale, my only possible ally at the table.

  I wondered if I could pull off something aristocratic. Not too aloof, not entitled, but accustomed to privilege. An easy authority. Like a highly paid supermodel. A girl who’d gotten what she wanted since she was a baby. Came from old money. Sway the hips, loose. Not trying too hard. It seemed like it could be a powerful image. And I didn’t have anything else.

  I put an edge on my voice. “I’m not a truck full of cigarettes or a brick of coke.” I looked right down at Massimo. “I’m not a trafficked whore, either.” I turned to look into Bruto’s face. “And I’m not an asset that you’re going to inherit just because Tony went out on a slippery deck when you took him night fishing in the Hudson.”

  The men drew breath, but I could see Massimo growing pale over his cheekbones and reddening up from his neck. I went on before either one of them could start up.

  “If you have to keep me on the inside, I’ll accept that, but you keep me as a member.” I thought I caught a twinkle in Carmine’s eye, but I knew that I couldn’t count on it. “A participating member. Ask Vassily if I was able to represent this...” I wasn’t sure what I should call them. “...this consortium. If you’re bringing seats to the table, then you’d better get one for me.”

  They were quiet. I wanted so very much to look into Luka’s eyes. Ask him silently, “Did I get away with it? Are they going to kill me now?” But I had to hold the attention of the men, draw what I could from their eyes and show them that however dangerous they were, I could look them in the face.

  Massimo was rising. He waved a finger in my direction and said, “Furio.”

  The big guy with the buzzcut started toward me. Just in front of Furio, Luka hardly seemed to move at all to jam his elbow back into the man’s gut. He bent forward and Luka’s fist slammed up into his throat.

  I tried not to flinch and not to show the clamoring tension that I felt inside. Staying still was as much as I could do.

  With his foot locked behind the man’s leg Luka pulled him down hard. He put his knee on Furio’s back and his hand on the nape of the big man’s neck as he spoke into his ear. Furio nodded twice and he stayed down where he was.