Adrian groans. “Yes, there’s a lock. The key is on the same key ring you needed to get down here. I think it’s the black key,” he says.
He shows me the lock, and I turn the black key. As easily as I had entered the second stairwell, the key slides in, and the grey padlock falls to the ground, releasing Adrian from the pipe in the floor.
It almost feels as though the whole experience, from our wedding to now, has been some kind of cosmic joke, the screenplay of a vengeful, bored deity who has run out of pranks to play on its innocent people.
“Can you, uh, can you get up?” I ask Adrian, choosing my words carefully.
At first, he struggles, grasping for me as he stands up. He braces himself against the wall, slowly easing onto his feet.
“So, what happened? What did they do to you?” I ask, examining what appears to be a burn mark on his left forearm.
Adrian sighs. “At some points, it felt like they were doing anything they could just to fuck with me. They had everything that they needed, so it’s not like they had to interrogate me. They were just evil. Your father is fucking evil, Gabriella. I hope you know that.”
I take him by the arm and help him steady himself as we begin to walk down the eerie hallway, considering his words.
My family is evil.
All my life, I had chosen to remain under the naive assumption that their actions were for a greater good, a necessary evil. Now, having been on the receiving end of their wrath, I can’t help but wonder how many other innocent lives were taken, how many people were slaughtered just to maintain my family’s heir of control and power.
I think about my sisters, and while I do mourn them deeply, how much better would their lives have been, having seen an example made of me his way? To live in fear for the rest of their lives?
Need I remind myself that they died because of the family. I think of my poor mother, conceiving and birthing and raising three girls only to have them auctioned off like cattle, caught in the crosshairs of the family’s greed and avarice.
Benny’s face returns to me, the abject terror behind his stoney expressions, just a boy without a brother. And of course, I remember the days of pure joy spent with my father at the lakes in the summertime, in the days before I understood my lot in life, my purpose in his vile tapestry.
Adrian groans as we approach the stairs. “I really should have tried moving a bit more while they had me locked up,” he says, jaw clenched.
I watch him struggle up the stairs, and within my own injured, broken self, I struggle also. In this moment, I realize how defenseless we both are, both fragmented, overshadowed visages of our former selves. As we continue, all that we can do is hold tight to one another, gripping each other lest we collapse under our own weight.
“Would you believe me if I said I almost got somebody to help me kill my father, and then he gave me up to Michael?” I ask, smiling as I wince my way up the steps.
Adrian laughs, his unbroken ribs lending him to a proper, joyful laugh, rather than one of pain as I have had. “You know, maybe five weeks ago, I would have thought you were insane, but not so much now. Now I think anything is possible,” he says, the smile fading from his face, and I know; I know how he is feeling, the confusion and anger and hysterical ridiculousness of our lives has disintegrated into a heady combination of sorrow and dejection.
“Do you, uh, I hate to even ask,” he begins.
I glance at him, a brief reprieve from the mountain of stairs left for me to conquer. “What is it?” I ask.
He stops climbing for a bit and rests back against the rail. “Do you think anyone ever found Jonesey?” he asks.
My heart swells at the thought. Nobody has found Jonesey, and I sincerely doubt that anybody would have even noticed that he was gone. Even in death, he would be forgotten, his human form to not even be properly disposed of. I recoil at the thought.
As we begin to reach the top of the steps, the realization crashes over me like a tidal wave of regret and acute knowing. I will need to face the true nature of what I have done, and who it has turned me into. I have become calloused and cold-blooded, just like my father.
The lives I’ve taken hold the same value as the lives I mourn so much, and yet I can find only a deep hatred for them; to consider their value as equal to mine or Adrian’s or Jonesey’s feels performative, false, even downright disrespectful.
At the top of the stairs lies the unnamed man of whom I bludgeoned to death with a hammer. That same, unmoving alien mess that I have made of his face remains exactly as I left it.
Adrian discovers this at his own pace, and I can see the already-limited color drain from his face, the tepid air around us cloying heavily to his skin.
As we ascend, the air hangs heavy still with the fallout of my rage, my animalistic urges for survival, not to be survived. I’m finally able to assess the true extent of my atrocity. Bright red spatter rain down among the crisp white of the tile and walls, pools of blood running from each body like a sovereign lake of its own, a landscape of black, white, and sticky scarlet.
A part of me had somehow expected them all to be gone, for my sins to be washed away and wiped clean. Some twisted, fantastical, hopeful part of me expected that the righteousness of my actions and the end result of saving my husband’s life would warrant me some kind of amnesty with the universe, a pardon.
But here we are, surrounded by the carnage I created with my own hands.
“You really did this,” Adrian mutters, his gaze catatonic in nature.
“I had to, Adrian. You know I had to,” I say defensively, trying poorly to hide my chagrin at being questioned for my unplanned, necessary atrocity.
“I… I know. I just… are you alright? Maybe that’s stupid to ask,” he says, concern replacing horror as we continue through the house, leaving the bodies behind.
“No, I’m not okay, Adrian. Now we have to try to get rid of the bodies, and neither of us will be able to move them and dispose of them in any meaningful way. Every step of the last two weeks has been nothing but running instead of thinking. I don’t know what to do at all,” I reply.
Adrian bites his lip, gazing pensively out the window to our right. “I think we need to burn the house down, Gabriella,” he says.
My blood freezes. The very idea of burning the house down sends the familiar chill of panic through me, down my spine, into the follicles and pores. A burning house, a literal and metaphorical giant, is too much to weigh on my shoulders. The very implication draws out a trembling in me, a deep sickness.
“Adrian, I don’t know if I can do that,” I plead, my words on the edge of tears, voice hitched in my throat.
“You’ve killed four people in the last 24 hours. You can burn a house down. We’ll do it together. You need to trust me,” he soothes. “I’m sure we can find some kind of firestarter here, we can cut the gas line and let it explode. Please, you need to trust me. Once we do this, we can run away to somewhere beautiful, somewhere far away from this horrible fucking place. We never need to look back. But you need to trust me,” he continues.
At the sound of his voice, his pure confidence and assurance, my fear begins to abate.
“You do understand that we absolutely need to do this, right? We don’t have the means of moving the bodies, and if this many murders get connected to your family, this entire horrible circumstance is going to be repeated, like, times ten. If we get connected to these murders that easily, we won’t be killed, we’ll be chopped to bits while we’re still alive. We’ll have our mouths sewn shut and filled with rotten fish heads. We cannot back out of this,” he continues. “What’s worse, burning the bodies and at least making it more difficult to get caught, or leaving them here on a silver platter for whoever happens to find them?”
I know he’s right, despite how insular the mafia feels so often, like its own ecosystem of resurging empires and fallen kings. It’s so easy to forget that we do, in fact, exist within the same space as the formal justice system,
where a string of related murders doesn’t go unsolved so easily.
“Okay,” I whisper, choking out the word.
I sigh heavily, and we both make our way to the back of the kitchen. I open the same drawer where I had found the hammer, and I fish around for a pack of matches. I’m able to locate some, and I take them out, showing them to Adrian.
“Okay, good. Now we need to light a match somewhere far away from the gas line, so we have enough time to get out before the house goes up in flames. Go light something and toss it upstairs, the butane will rise. If we’re able to just fucking push through it, we can get out the front door before it’s too late.” Adrian limps over to the back door, disappearing into the garage.
When he returns, he grips a bottle of lighter fluid in his right hand, an ironic and poignant statement as his burned flesh floats above it. His commanding presence snaps me back into the mindset I’ve made my home for the past two weeks, one of a predatory, violent nature. I feel like a viper, an apex killer without remorse, and the vehement tension within me is released forever, foaming at the mouth to burn this house to the ground.
Adrian hands me the bottle lighter fluid, and I take it delicately as though it were a sacred chalice or grenade.
I remove my jacket, and I douse one corner of it with the volatile liquid, ensuring to the best of my ability that I will not be caught in its fury. I hold the jacket above a newly lit match, born for destruction at my reckless whims.
The jacket lights slowly at first, the careful flame crawling haplessly about the fabric like a fevered vampire bat in the heat of the daytime sun. As I toss it over the banister, the flame meanders toward the fluid and sends the olive-colored fabric into a blaze of orange and purple.
While I had been tampering with my jacket, Adrian located the gas line behind the stove and cut it, the air reeking with the cloying warmth of sulfur.
“Okay, let’s go,” he says, and without hesitation, we run as quickly as we can toward the door, practically falling through it.
I kick it closed behind us, and the pure suspense of awaiting an explosion sends my synapses buzzing into near convulsion. We cling to each other, bracing for the impact. I feel as though I’m counting seconds until the blaze lights up behind me, and in the dark of the newly-fallen night, we can exist together only as innocent, unassuming bystanders.
Within forty seconds of staggered steps, we hear the house explode behind us, windows blown out by the blast, raining crystalline shards onto the ground beneath.
For a moment, we stop to gaze into the flames, the melted glass glowing as it pours slowly down to the grass. I wonder about the bodies, how their bloated flesh will melt just as easily, and I feel sick to my stomach at the thought.
With no getaway car, we are limited to only our broken feet as our escape. Despite the agony, the steady, red pulse in my bones, I feel free for the first time, like I’ve been lifted from a coma.
I feel so light.
As the house blazes, the beams cracking under the weight of its own tired body, giving into its own final resting place as I ascend into my own, my resting place above the ashes of my former self.
Chapter 21
Five weeks later, Adrian and I returned to Jonesey’s house in Camden. His body was gone, hardly a trace of his physical presence left; only blood stubbornly mingled with the fibers of the carpet.
All of his belongings were still intact. All of his posters were still lined the wall in the carefully erratic patterns that he had arranged them. His plants had withered, casting a thin shadow over the floor like a desolate winter forest. All of his meticulously organized spices were still intact.
I had known him so briefly, but his presence lingered in that house, weighing heavily on both Adrian and I as we collected some of his belongings.
We flew out to Oregon a few days later, a small bundle of Jonesey’s things tucked away in Adrian’s carry-on. We watched the world pass below us in silence as we traveled, reveling in the normalcy of jet lag and petulant crying children. Even the terrible coffee felt like coming home, in a way.
Before we fled for Oregon, we both checked into a hospital in Maine to be evaluated for our injuries. I required some physical therapy in order to correct a persistent limp I had developed from the onslaught of fractures I had endured at the hands of Michael and his small army.
When we returned, I made the decision to return to my parents’ home for some kind of closure, if even just to see the outside. When we reached the house, neither of my parents were anywhere to be found, and later on, I learned that an investigation was opened against my father for the murders of Micah and Benny, as well as the house fire that had been connected to his organized criminal activity.
Later, we arrived in Oregon, and we decided to drive out to bury Jonesey’s belongings beneath the sequoia, far away from any of the people or places that had given him so much trouble while he had joined us on the mortal coil. The day that we had chosen to bury him, or at least these remnants of him, was overcast; the hills were quiet, yet restless in their never-ending season of life, one that we both hoped to align with Jonesey’s memory.
After finding a spot near a ravine, we chose an item to bury and one to burn. We settled on burying the sweatshirt we had found from the academy, and chose to burn the poster for La Planete Sauvage. It was Adrian’s idea, something to cast him into the aether, something to ground him to us.
We buried the sweatshirt first, under the last redwood before the cutoff into the turbulent, angry water beneath us. There was nobody to bother us, nobody to question what the hell we were doing. We were finally able to properly mourn in the nearest capacity to true grief that we could muster.
We lit the poster ablaze, and the flame consumed the paper almost immediately, sending glowing ashes into the wind, over the water, and back into the earth from where all life comes.
The moment felt ethereal, deeply spiritual. There was no noise, and the silence was almost deafening as I closed my eyes to imagine how many lives have been taken by people like Michael, like my father. The longer I considered it, truly attempting to understand, the loss felt insurmountable, and my heart felt like it would cave in.
Adrian and I were able to find normal jobs, forever abandoning the life of organized crime that we had been molded into, the life that was ingrained into our worldview since we were children.
Some nights, one of us would wake up, thrashing and screaming as we relived our terror, our peculiar nightmare of a past that only those who have experienced it can truly understand.
After a few months of acclimating to the life of a boring, poor couple in our twenties, being alive finally felt so light, so unbound by constant anxiety. When we first arrived in our quiet neighborhood, each distant siren or backfiring vehicle sent me into a feedback loop of hysterics, forcing me to crawl to the floor and cry, begging nobody, in particular, to allow me to stay alive.
Though he had the chance, Adrian chose never to contact his family after the incident. Likewise, his family never attempted to find us, and for the first time in our lives, we felt as though we could speak and behave like regular human beings instead of pre-programmed automatons for the greater good of the Family.
Once we finally settled in, we were able to resume right where we had left off, falling asleep in each other’s arms after we made love like it was our last night on earth.
After about a year or so, I noticed that I had been beginning my days vomiting into the sink each morning when I did my skincare routine. At first, I was terrified that I had developed ovarian cancer, like my grandmother had died of shortly after I was born.
Before I had given myself a moment to think at all, I had cursed god for ending my life so quickly after all I had endured at the hands of the mafia. Little did I know, one of mine and Adrian’s nights of passionate sex had ended up creating a Third, a new somebody.
I was terrified, and initially, I felt I wasn’t ready, but night after night of sleeplessness and heated tear
s, I couldn’t imagine not bringing a new life into this world after all those that I had taken. How could I deny this tiny being, this Someone, the experience that I could never have had growing up? Somehow, the universe had granted me the privilege of giving the gift of a truly happy life to somebody. I needed to take it.
We named her Cambria. She had her father’s lips and wild green eyes, and from the very moment she was born, I knew she was a fighter, a force to be reckoned with. She would never allow herself to be somebody’s princess to save, a prize to be exchanged for a dowry. Before she could even speak, I was proud of her; those defiant eyes of hers, unyielding and powerful enough to speak for her lack of verbal ability.
Immediately, Adrian fell in love with her, completely overcome by tidal waves of pure affection when she did so much as blink at him, and this made me love him even more.
I would watch her sleep some nights, and on rare occasions, the weight of her existence proved too much for my heart to bear, and she would break me; those delicate lashes swept closed over her perfect alabaster skin. I would practically crawl into the nearest bathroom and stifle sobs that I thought were deep and tumultuous enough to stop my heart. We needed to show her the power of the beauty in the world, completely set apart from the evil we had known.
And with time, we did.
The End.
More From After Midnight Publishing
Honey
He’s twice my age, ridiculously handsome, and filthy rich.
It sounds like I found my happily ever after, except that I didn’t.
I don’t really know him, but that’s beside the point.
He’s my husband now, and he expects me to serve him like a king.
But I’m not that easy, and I’m not going to drop to my knees at his command.
It’ll take a lot more than an arranged marriage with a mafia boss to break me.
Carter
She thinks this is about her.
It’s not.
Broken King: An Arranged Marriage Mafia Romance Page 12
