Soon enough, the fire of orgasm is lit under my skin. Adrian clasps his hand over my mouth as I moan, and I’m secretly disappointed that I wasn’t able to be louder. My breaths falter, and my head swims as I look up at the ceiling.
Suddenly, I’m overcome with embarrassment and shame. I’m disgusting! Jonesey is so innocent, and I hardly know him! Where did that come from?!
Chapter 8
Morning emerges after I’ve finally been able to drift to sleep for a few hours. We awaken to the sound of an ambulance and firetruck screaming down the road, tearing me from any dreams as I’m jerked from sleep, confused and shaken.
I turn to Adrian, who is sleeping like a rock, and laugh to myself at the contrast. It’s strange to me, learning so much about someone who I call my husband. I’ve had four weeks now to absorb as many of his idiosyncrasies as possible, and the more I see of him, the more I recognize the childlike playfulness behind his stoney persona.
He’s awfully cagey about his past, his childhood, or his family, which frustrates me to no end, since I’ve personally spilled my guts in every meaningful way, including physically.
Adrian turns sleepily toward me, blinking lazily as he takes in the sights and sounds of the real world. “Damn,” he says, “I’d kill a man for a breakfast burrito.”
He slowly picks himself up off the floor, running his fingers through his hair absent-mindedly. For a moment, all seems right with the world. The sun streams in through the east window, blanketing the carpet and illuminating the fibers.
I glance out the window, and I can see the ambulance unloading a team of controlled, frantic EMTs, cautiously approaching the house across from us. As the small swarm of people scatters, I can clearly see the battered body of a young child lying on the grass as his mother wails above him. My stomach drops as I see the team of EMTs struggle to handle the child delicately as his limbs fall slack from his body.
Behind me, I hear Jonesey approach, and I glance back at him with my eyes wide, feeling helpless and nauseated.
His face is grave as he leans against the door frame, gazing out the window at what is likely the worst day of that child’s life. He sighs deeply. “That kid’s dad just got out of prison. Talked about turning a new leaf and shit. His girlfriend waited for him for five years, talked about how he’s a good person with demons, all that kind of bullshit,” he says as he curls up on the corner of the couch.
“What a piece of shit,” Adrian interjects. “Why would she stay with him in the first place? That kid could die.”
Jonesey clenches his jaw, showing the rigid contour of his gaunt face. “My mom said the same thing about my dad,” Jonesey says, a fire growing behind his eyes. “Always said he was a good father, that he had a bad childhood, stuff like that. He’d beat the fuck out of me if I was wearing a color he didn’t like”. Jonesey pulls his feet up onto the couch, and for a moment it looks as though he’s attempting to cradle himself as he relives his terrible memories.
Watching him makes my heart hurt.
“What the fuck? That’s horrible, dude. Was he still doing that when I met you?” Adrian asks, oblivious to the invasive nature of his question.
Jonesey reaches over to the small table on the side of the couch and grabs a marijuana grinder. As he begins to twist the grinder, he glances out the window again at the horrendous scene outside. “My dad killed himself when I was nine, so that was a few years before I started at the academy. Fortunately, my mom was having an affair with a psychologist, so he got me into the gifted program at a private Catholic school. That’s how I got to the academy.” Jonesey trails off as he digs through an old cigar box for his rolling papers.
Adrian, once again without tact, decides to delve deeper. “Wait, so if your dad was dead and your mom was trailer trash, how did you get into the school? It cost like twenty grand a year to go there,” Adrian asks as he stares at Jonesey inquisitively.
Jonesey sighs deeply and mutters under his breath as he re-rolls his joint. “Yeah, so my dad offed himself after he found out that my mom was having an affair with a lawyer. The lawyer decided to marry my mom, and she became this uppity Real Housewife bitch that wanted me to feel even more ostracised than I already did. My step-dad’s kid had graduated from the academy and then joined the military, so clearly I needed to attend as well to help him forget that I wasn’t as well-bred as his son was,” he explains, lighting up his joint and taking a deep drag, stifling a cough in a pained manner.
Jonesey grins at Adrian. “When I met you, I was only like, eleven. You were the only one who treated me like it was okay for me to be there.”
Adrian laughs. “Well, you were the only one who let me copy off you, so what choice did I have? I got into that school on a lacrosse scholarship. I didn’t even know that the Cold War was a thing until you mentioned it casually in class one time.”
Jonesey begins to laugh as he smokes, and he begins to snort and cough as his eyes fill with tears. “Wasn’t that for a test about the Cold War?!”
Adrian’s face turns red as Jonesey continues to laugh uncontrollably between coughs.
“Hey, we were gonna go grab some breakfast somewhere, you want anything? You can’t eat cold spaghetti forever, dude,” Adrian says, deflecting Jonesey’s comment about the Cold War and looking toward me.
“Oh, were we going to do that?” I ask.
Adrian nods his head emphatically.
Jonesey considers, narrowing his eyes as he feigns contemplation. “Surprise me, I guess? There’s a really great place down the street for breakfast, just don’t talk to the guy out front who says that he needs to borrow your phone,” Jonesey says as he tosses us his car keys.
Adrian and I pull our shoes on and head out to the car. The desolate November weather has cast a long shadow of grey across the sky, and the bitter winds serve to warn me that everything dies, everything turns cold.
We climb into the car, and I look back at the front door of Jonesey’s house, my heart heavy from his casual recollection of his childhood horror. “Do you think Jonesey is okay out here? Like, he doesn’t talk about having friends or anything,” I say, trailing off as I see the trash left behind from the EMTs on the front lawn opposite Jonesey’s house. Wrappers and tubing litter the grass like confetti for a horror show.
Adrian opens his mouth to answer, but pauses, grasping for the proper answer to my question. “Uhh, Jonesey’s had kind of a rough life. Like, I obviously don’t know the details, but it’s the way he acts and stuff, the things he says. I think it’s best to just let him be wherever he’s happy at this point,” he says.
I wrack my brain, trying and failing to come up with some kind of explanation. Why would anybody choose to move to a city like this? Why doesn’t he want to be with his family?
Family.
After the few short days we’ve spent in Camden, I’ve developed a false sense of safety from my own family. How can I criticize Jonesey for trying to escape if I myself have done the exact same?
We approach an old building with a sign in the window that says “we shall overcome” alongside a menu featuring things like breakfast potatoes and smoked brisket. We haven’t left Jonesey’s house since we arrived, and being back in the open creates a low vibration of panic in my belly.
Adrian steps up to the counter and orders an obscene amount of food. The prospect of eating it all both excites me and disgusts me at the same time. The spoiled brat in me wants a private brunch at a seaside lounge, complete with bottomless mimosas and a fruit platter.
I glance around the establishment at all of the people at the shabby tables with mismatched chairs, reading the newspaper without a care in the world. I felt shame wash over me as I imagine the lives they must have lived in a city like this, without the relative safeties and excess I’ve lived with as a mafia daughter. To lament the things you’ve taken for granted is an egregious cliche, but just this once, I truly feel it.
When Adrian and I get into the car, I notice a large white van with
dark windows parked at the corner of the street near a derelict auto repair shop. My heart jumps into my throat, a sensation that I’ve become more accustomed to than I had ever imagined I could in one lifetime. “Adrian!” I whisper harshly. “Could that be—?”
Just as I’m about to truly panic, an old woman emerges from the driver’s seat and opens the side door for a group of smiling, hyperactive children, all carrying pool toys or a bag of chips. I exhale deeply and begin to laugh hysterically as I watch them trot gleefully to the other side of the street past a sign that reads “Camden Community Pool”.
“Oh, Jesus,” I say as I continue to laugh. “It’s just an old lady with her daycare kids. God, I’m fucking paranoid.”
Adrian rolls his eyes and grins as we pull away.
“It’s not that paranoid, I guess. I mean, why wouldn’t either of our families have made any moves yet? It’s been a week, at least. I haven’t heard anything from anybody, not even my sisters,” I say.
“Yeah, you’re right. I feel like my mom should have at least tried to drag me back home by now,” Adrian says as I scroll through my phone, searching for an overlooked text or missed call.
“Sometimes, things like this take more planning than you might be accounting for, since you’ve never really been involved,” Adrian notes, once again choosing to undermine me absent-mindedly.
“You need to stop saying things like that, Adrian,” I snap. “You need to respect me more if I’m going to be your wife. I’m not a fucking kindergarten teacher, stop pretending that I have no idea what you’re talking about when you’re explaining something related to my family’s business.”
I curl up my hands into fists as I see him roll his eyes again.
“Look, I’m sorry that you feel like I’m undermining you, but until you’ve been on the front lines, you really have no place pretending that you’ve been in any real danger, especially as a girl. You’re basically a protected species. I know you’ve seen some shit, and I’m sorry about that, but some people see stuff like that ten times over in their lifetimes and they don’t get to live part-time in a Brownstone during spring break, okay?”
I’m furious at this point. How fucking dare he! I can’t believe he would speak of my traumas so casually, like I was broken up with at the homecoming dance instead of the daughter of a well-known, dangerous mob boss. How dare he assume that I’ve been nothing but a layabout for my whole life, as if I’ve never known or been involved in the fate of my own family!
As I’m about to retaliate, we pull up to Jonesey’s house, and that familiar burn of anxiety creeps along my nerves with no true threat in sight. Could it be vestigial from the scare at the restaurant? Am I really losing my mind?
Upon approaching the front door, my chest suddenly feels as if it’s about to cave in, like my heart is being vacuumed out of my throat. The bay window at the front of the house has been broken, and the door is slightly ajar. I step inside, and the glass from the window is scattered across the floor, forming a kaleidoscope of splinters and shards in the fading morning light. I feel as if my soul has separated from my body in an effort to protect itself from the impending horror I’m about to witness.
Adrian follows close behind me, and he wordlessly glances around the living room, both of us feeling as though we’ve witnessed the aftermath of an alien abduction. As Adrian steps carefully down the hall toward the kitchen, he stops abruptly in his tracks, and time stops.
Jonesey’s body lays broken and crippled on the tile, now slick with blood from a massive head wound at the base of his skull. His once golden curls lie matted with blood against his skin, cocaine-white and lifeless. His eyes are still open, a glaze of eternal sleep cast over the terror and fear that they communicate. A trail of red smears and spatters shows his hopeless descent to his untimely death, starting at the edge of the table and swirling frantically to the white cabinets where he failed to find leverage.
I drop to my knees in the pool of blood next to Jonesey, and all I can do is scream. I just scream, and I scream louder and louder as I pick up his limp head and cradle him in my arms, the boy with no family, the boy with so much to give the world.
Adrian punches the wall, somehow maintaining his performative masculinity even in the throes of grief.
I cannot get up.
I cannot leave Jonesey.
Every time I try to climb to my feet, the weight of his demise drags me back, and I know that this is all my fault. If I had just done as I was told, nobody would have gotten killed. And to think that they left him here! To send a message! They left his poor broken body alone in his house to send us a message!
I’ve decided to allow my rage to overcome me, and as I let it take over, I can feel it seize my judgment and take over like a parasite. No longer will I allow this brutality to control me in the name of fear and family honor. Of all the bloodshed, lives lost, and betrayal, this will be their last. Their hubris has lost control.
“I can’t,” Adrian begins, but he cannot finish as he gazes at Jonesey’s body again. A wall has gone up in him, one that no amount of soothing or coddling will break down. His best friend in this world spent his last moments terrified, alone, and in pain.
Adrian finally allows himself to break down. I’ve never seen a man wail in sorrow the way he does. It reminds me of the mother from this morning, holding her baby as he loses the fight for his life. Adrian collapses next to me, and we cave into each other, sobbing hysterically.
My eyes are swollen and heavy as I sit alone on Jonesey’s couch, my mind floating away as I sink deeper and deeper into a fugue state. Night has fallen, and the now familiar buzzing of unrest and chaos in the city has become drowned out by the cacophony of thoughts and erratic emotions that flood the fibers and pathways of my brain.
I’m taken down a rabbit hole of memories, reminders of what my life was like as a child before the mafia had taken over and engulfed me. I float listlessly through the echoes of childhood birthday parties, family vacations, and middle school dances. I remember the summers spent napping on the living room floor as my mother folded laundry.
Now I sit alone as my husband mourns his best friend, somebody who had the potential to help change the world with his intelligence and bright disposition.
Will his family ever come looking for him?
Does anybody care about Jonesey?
I don’t even know his real name, but I feel compelled to avenge him against my own family, the family that sold me in order to secure their precarious empire of organized crime. I’ve been a pawn to them, an asset, a business transaction.
Adrian creeps into the living room, his shadow crossing through the streetlight like an eyeless demon. “We can’t leave his body here,” he says in a low voice.
With that, I stifle a sob, no more tears left to cry. “We can’t call anybody! We’re trapped!” I shout, my voice breaking.
Adrian exhales deeply. “Well then what the fuck do you propose we do, Gabriella? Your father had a twenty-year-old kid murdered. Someone he didn’t even know. He left this mess for us to deal with because he isn’t afraid of consequences. You need to quit acting like such a dead weight and help me move this goddamn body!” Adrian barks.
I stand to my feet quickly. “You are such a fucking. . . you’re a fucking bloodless cunt, Adrian! I’m trying to process the fact that my own father had somebody killed to get even with me for refusing to leave you, okay? This is literally all my fault! If I had just chosen to pack my shit and never see you again, Jonesey would still be alive and happy doing fuck-all like he was before! All this has happened because I chose you, not my family, not the easy road. So keep your fucking mouth shut, or I swear to god I’ll make you regret it, Adrian!”
Adrian chuckles. “You think I’m trying to prevent you from processing it? Jesus, Gabbi! This isn’t walking in on your parents having sex! Your dad was showing Jonesey mercy by killing him in cold blood! What’s he gonna do to us when he finds us? He could have acid thrown in our faces o
r, or… he could chop off our hands and let rabid hamsters eat the stubs! You knew the potential for fallout if you chose me, so stop making this about your heroic quest for love or whatever the fuck.”
Before I can retaliate, we both turn to the front door, where we hear the door handle rattling. My skin turns cold, and Adrian motions aggressively to stay quiet.
After about ten seconds of rattling, there’s a brief silence. All I can hear is my heartbeat in my ears, deafening me. I turn to speak to Adrian when the door handle is kicked across the floor, the door swinging wide as it splinters. Four men dressed in all black enter, each pointing a machine gun at our faces.
My vision swims, and I fight to stay conscious as one of the men begins to shout.
“Stay down! Both of you stay down!” one of the men screams, baring his teeth like a lion.
Adrian and I slowly make our way to the floor, trembling hands in the air.
The leader of the armed men steps forward, pointing his gun directly at Adrian’s forehead. He looks to be about forty, and his eyes are an inhuman, icy grey, as if god himself knew he would be a natural-born killer.
Adrian glares up at the leader, making direct eye contact, unafraid.
“Didn’t take very long to find you two,” he snarls. “You didn’t go very far. I almost overestimated how smart you were. Fucking idiots,” he continues, grinning.
With their guns trained on Adrian and me, the leader takes a step back and begins to pace casually around the room, feigning interest in the various items strewn about the room. “You chose a pretty fuckin’ weird dude to hole up with, that’s for sure. Did you give him a taste of your girl’s pussy in exchange for an air mattress? That’s low, even for me,” the leader says, picking up Jonesey’s bong and swirling his finger around the rim.
“Don’t talk about either of them that way,” Adrian starts, holding himself back from attacking one of the men against his better judgment.
I look over to him, and I see something that I haven’t ever seen in him before: helplessness. The bravado and confidence I have grown used to in him have vanished, only to be replaced by someone who appears to be two seconds away from begging the men to kill him.
Broken King: An Arranged Marriage Mafia Romance Page 5
