Page 52 of The Mafia’s Fiancee

Chapter 19

Luke

When another man rushedup to join the fight, I growled and wondered when I’d get lucky. When something could go right, for a change. It turned out that moment was now.

This newcomer hurried close to fight with me. He didn’t enter the foray to further stack the odds against me. He fought back these Giordino assholes who thought it would be fun to attack Jimmy and goad me into proving myself.

It was just as well that this man came to my assistance when he did. One of the guards whipped out a gun while another brought a knife into the fight.

I dropped the man with the knife. The thug with the gun didn’t get far. This other guy who helped me shot him first.

Turning slowly, still in a crouch from kicking the last man standing so hard that he cracked his head against a low guardrail near a nasty dumpster, I looked up at Sean. The capo who was supposed to be Jimmy’s assistant.

I heaved out a long exhale. Peering up at him, I strained to catch my breath.

“Thanks, Sean,” I said, meaning it. I wasn’t here to worry about my ego. I’d take all the help I could get.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. I came when John called—the guard back there at the accident. He said you headed this way and...” He sighed, looking down at Jimmy still on the ground. “He’s still tied up back there, but I drove another way. We need to go.”

I winced as I straightened. “We need to find my mother.”

He nodded, helping Jimmy up. “But she’s not here. That was what I was doing, following the leads Leo called in. He wasn’t mistaken. The Giordinos captured Nina. But they handed her off to someone else.”

“Fuck.”

I missed my simpler life, where all I had to worry about before was if she had her medications and affording them. Limping toward Jimmy, I helped Sean get him upright. I’d have to carry him out of here. He was half asleep from that last hit to his head. One of the guards had kicked him when he was down, and I wasn’t quick enough to stop the hit.

“I couldn’t keep him safe,” I said as Sean and I worked together to get my uncle off the ground. “They got him in the head.”

“You can’t save everyone, Luke,” he coached. His tone was firm and kind, not scolding. “I recall the first time you saved someone.”

“You mean the first life I took?” I raised my brows. Up close, as we teamed up to move my uncle, I saw him clearer. He’d aged. So had I. But Sean had the same features that stood out to me the day we met.

“He had to die,” Sean said, referring to the rapist I’d killed. “That’s just life.”

“Or death?” I quipped wryly.

On my walk home from working at the Tropican, the under-the-table gigs I had to make money for Mom, I came across a man raping a young woman in the alley. I was filled with such rage at him controlling her that I attacked him. I hadn’t been able to stop though, too furious and determined to finish him off. The thought of him doing this again, to another woman, pushed me to kill him. I was just a teen though, a minor, a child, really, but it didn’t hold me back from killing that rapist.

That was where Sean came in. He spotted me from a distance, hearing the sounds of the struggle and hurrying to save me. As soon as he realized what was going on, he helped me clean the blood off my fists and remarked that I was a brave boy.

We never spoke about that incident since then, but the next time I saw him, he had Jimmy with him. Because I’d proven how hard of a fighter I could be, intervening to help a stranger in the alley, he thought I warranted an introduction to Jimmy, who took me under his wing and trained me to be the fighter I was now.

“You didn’t just happen upon me in that alley, did you?” I asked, realizing some seventeen years too late that it couldn’t have been a coincidence for Sean to be in that alley that day.

Holding up Jimmy between us, we moved him toward the SUV Sean drove.

“No. I didn’t,” Sean replied. “Ever since your birth, Jimmy wanted to keep an eye on you. When you got older, and started working, it was too easy for you to slip past. Like that day in the alley. I was rushing to check in on Jimmy’s behalf and arrived too late.”

I let that sink in. It felt weird to think that I had a guardian angel all this time, but now knowing Sean and Jimmy were Rossini mafia men, that term didn’t apply all too well.

A guardian...demon?

“I was the one who suggested we train you to fight.”

Sean had been involved in the beginning. This man, alongside Jimmy and others who were likely Rossini soldiers, had begun the art of morphing me into a fighter, not just a killer.

Over the years, as I got better and faster, Sean slunk out of sight and was less involved. Like Ben and his workers said that time at the club, Sean used to be a familiar face in the fighting circles, but he retreated gradually.