Page 46 of Heart Of A Goon II

My wife.

When people met the bubbly woman with glasses that was as warm as pie, then met her colder than ice husband, they questioned how we were a match? I loved watching them try and figure the shit out like it was their business.

We just worked.

Nothing mattered when I was with her. I found myself rushing from work trips to make it home to her. No bed felt comfortable unless she was lying right next to me. Wonder was used to giving everything to everyone, and no one ever tried to give her the world.

None of that shit mattered in this moment.

Someone decided they hated me enough to take her away from me, and because they tried, I needed to wipe their existence from the earth.

“You hear me?” Don pulled me from my thoughts.

I was in the midst of getting fitted for my suit. Don was my twin in every way but brains. The man still couldn’t figure out why we called his nephew Dennis.

Fucking shame.

My mind couldn’t even focus on anything this past week. This wasn’t some shit that I took lightly. Someone tried to end me at his engagement party. Someone wanted my head.

They almost had it.

When I thought my wife was on the floor dead, I couldn’t breathe. Everything moved slow and the smell of gun smoke started choking me. I’ve always known I had a target on my back, which is why I moved the way that I did. It was another thing witnessing it and having my wife caught in the crossfire.

Her life could have been ended, and it would have been my fault. The shit bothered me immensely. It kept me awake at night, haunting me every second of the day.

“Luci landed and is in route to us,” he repeated himself, once he realized that I wasn’t going to ask him to.

I nodded my head.

Luci Caselli.

Correction: Lucipher Caselli.

My cousin from my mother’s side. The Caselli family wasn’t completely extinct. The more skeletons I pulled out the closet, the more I discovered that we had a bit of family everywhere. Our grandmother just chose herself and cut them off because they were toxic.

From what I heard.

By the time my mother had married my father and then had us, she wasn’t connected to anyone on her family’s side. Which made it easy for her to hide a mother that we never knew was alive.

Scotsman was a small town, and my mother never really spoke about where she came from. As far as we knew, it had always been just her and her mother, and from what she told me, she was dead.

Shit.

I mean, in a way she was practically dead to her. She wasn’t the same woman who had raised her, and now she had the mental capacity of a child. I guess it was easier to pretend she was gone than to admit what the truth actually was.

Back then, as far as I knew, my mother was the only child. There was never any talk about having uncles and aunts. She never spoke about her family and poured everything into her children and her husband.

The one thing she always instilled into me was that I was to keep us together should anything happen to her or my father. She made me promised that we would stick together.

I kept that promise, Ma.

After I found out that my grandmother was alive, I started uncovering a lot of shit about my mother’s family.

One of the things I found out was that my grandmother had a child when she was thirteen. It was a secret among the family, and nobody ever spoke about it. The child in question was sent to New York and raised as a distant relative.

My mother knew about her older cousin, Cyrus, but not that he was her brother. She never knew that her mother had a child before her, and it was hidden from her and most of the family. Scotsman was filled with a bunch of distant relatives that never left, so it was easy to piece things together from those that were living.

I used Bruster to piece together some missing pieces that didn’t make sense to me. My uncle passed away from cancer a year before I found out about him. I learned that he had a son, and his son had been right under my nose the entire time.