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Chevy waved at me with the spatula. “You got it.”
I went back out to the front and noticed the empty coffee pot. I walked up to the station and grabbed the coffee grounds from the cabinet below. The smell of the fresh grounds wafted over me as I waited for Mr. Herman’s order. I looked around the diner and sighed. The rest of my customers already had their meals. If more customers didn’t come in, today was going to be a very long day.
My eyes trailed over to the booth in front of me. In it sat a middle-aged gentleman reading the newspaper and quietly mumbling to himself.
“Anything interesting?”
He pulled down the paper just enough so that his eyes looked at me over the newsprint. “Just some gang banger being let out of prison. I don't even understand this. How do they let some asshole who killed somebody out? Isn’t he a danger to society?”
I shrugged. “I guess it's not really our choice. Or maybe he had a good reason for killing that person. Maybe they were worse than he was.”
I knew as soon as the words left my lips that I shouldn't have said it. The man looked at me with wide eyes. I hadn't been raised like this man. I was used to people killing other people for sport.
Sometimes I wondered if that made me a bad person.
My mother was an accountant, and she was very good at her job. Especially at covering up money that was not supposed to be there. She had handled the books for a very famous mob family in Baltimore. The Gioti family. She had done all of their accounting for most of my life. Growing up around the mob gave me a very different perspective on life.
And then one day, it was all over, and the life that I knew completely changed.
I remembered it like it was yesterday. We were sitting in the office below the club that the family owned. I was eating candy out of a fancy box by some famous chocolatier. It was the most amazing chocolate I had ever tasted. Each bite practically melted in my mouth. My mother and I would've never been able to afford luxuries like that had we not worked for the family. So I knew, even back then, that my mother working for them was a precious gift. I just didn't realize how precious her life was. I was licking excess chocolate off my fingers because it was a hot day, and they were melting in my hands when I heard the commotion outside the door. At first, it sounded just like any other argument, and I had heard them a thousand times before. I remembered not even reacting until my mother told me to climb under the desk.
“Why?”
Her face was so serious. “Vienna, just get under the desk right now.”
I dropped the box of chocolates on the floor and scurried under the desk, hiding next to her feet. Someone broke through the door just a minute later.
“I'll kill you for this, Gioti. I'll kill you and your whole fucking family. Especially that bitch.” I heard a man's yell from just a few feet away. And then the loud pop of a gun. I smacked my hand over my mouth so I wouldn't scream. They always taught me not to scream. There was another pop of the gun, and this time, I saw my mother’s legs lose tension as she slumped in her chair.
I didn't come out from under that desk for hours.
I sat there watching the crimson blood pool at her feet. I had never been that close to death. I hoped that maybe they could save her. But I was fifteen, and I knew better. There was nothing they co
uld do. She was gone.
The cops arrived, and they found me huddled in the corner underneath my mother's mahogany desk hugging my knees to my face. I don’t know who called them. Who let them into the Gioti den. Why they didn’t just clean it up themselves, like they had a hundred times before.
Maybe that time was different.
I didn't even cry. I was too terrified to do anything but breathe. She was gone.
It changed my life. Everything I thought I knew was suddenly ripped away. Including Luka Gioti, the son of the mob boss. I had spent nights sitting alone with him, talking about every part of our lives. I held my breath when he spoke sometimes, because I was just so entranced. He told me all his stories, and even some that didn’t belong to him. Horrible things people had done to keep others safe. But that night, no one kept my mother safe.
No one.
I remembered them taking me away in the back of a cop car, and the last face of the Gioti family that I saw was Luka. He was just standing there with his hand up, waving goodbye.
If only I had known it was forever.
If only I had known that that was the last time I would ever see Luka Gioti, I would've told him.
I would've told him that I was madly and irrevocably in love with him.
But I couldn’t tell him that now.
Now that we were on opposite sides of a brewing war.
Of a life that was falling apart.
