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Rafe
Moretti company ballet was the best in the city, or so I’d heard. I had little time for hobbies. Mauro Luciano was the godfather of this lousy city, and I was his son. One of four and the only bastard among them. I was the spare to the great and infamous Luciano brothers, and to be frank, that suited me fine. I was better suited to the shadows, at any rate. Limelight wasn’t my thing. Despite my lack of legitimate status, I held my own in the family, and I enjoyed the wealth and power of my position. I was the darkness at my brothers’ backs, the one who didn’t have to worry about losing face.
La Ombra. The shadow.
The Lucianos were one of the city's oldest and most established mafia families. My father had also expanded to more legitimate means of business as fronts and as their own enterprises. I found my calling in those advances, in the world of tech and investment. Despite that, Mauro Luciano was old-school. I might wear a suit and work at a desk most of the week, but when my father called and sent me a name, I couldn’t refuse him. Besides, the scumbags who dabbled in our world and tried to play us deserved every single broken bone they got.
Tonight’s job was Hugh James, a privately educated, insufferable lout and millionaire son. He had a mistress and a wife. He’d assaulted a woman walking home from the subway on Monday night, then threatened her not to go to the police with pictures he’d taken of the incident. He had also attempted to default on a gambling loan from one of our fine, underground establishments and promised to go to the police if pursued.
He deserved what was coming to him tonight.
He was attending the ballet this evening, one of the many pure-bred activities he indulged in to play the part of a man of culture. In reality, he was more of a lap dance in a private room, sucking blow off some poor dancer’s butt kind of guy. Hugh was pathetic. At his age, he should know better.
The theatre was packed,and I settled in my seat with little enthusiasm. Truthfully, the things that should be interesting or exciting in my life were dulling little by little. The season's shifting didn’t reach me. A stunning view or studying a talented painting didn’t excite me. Even the alluring smile of a beautiful woman tasted like ash in my mouth. The world hadn’t changed. The problem was me. At the ripe old age of thirty-seven, I was beyond jaded with this city and my life in it. I expected this performance to be no different.
It was the first time I’d watched ballet in a long while, and I expected to be thoroughly bored within the first ten minutes. As a boy, I’d come to this same theatre with my mother. She’d gazed in awe at the costumes and dancers. Dressed in her finest, she’d gone out, proud to be among the city’s illustrious patrons of the arts. I hadn’t hated it; it had just been boring to my ten-year-old self.
One day, we’d met my father. I only ever saw him on a Sunday after church. He’d come to the small Italian immigrant neighborhood where my mother and I lived and had lunch.Pollo arrosto. After, he and my mother disappeared into her bedroom as I sat and watched the football on a grainy black and white set. Sometimes, he’d sit with me before it was over. He’d shout and cuss at the screen in Italian while my mother fluttered around making coffee. Those were her happy days. Until that night at the ballet. He’d been there with another woman and other children. He didn’t greet us or even look at my mother. I’d understood then that my mother and I weren’t really Mauro’s family.
We had never gone to the ballet again.
Tonight, I’d expected the air of the theater to stir those painful memories, but the jaded layers of cold cynicism inside me lay untouched. I was so far gone into the hazy nihilism inside that it barely registered. I didn’t expect that to change, but then, I’d never expected any of the huge, defining moments of my life before they happened.
I was seated behind Hugh. I enjoyed stalking my prey on the night of their judgment. I had a near-perfect view of the stage, and my program creased in my hands when I saw her. A young dancer stepping onto the stage with her slender body arched in a perfectly upright posture, her arms waving over her head. Her body bent like a reed, supple and sublime. I felt it then. A stirring in those icy, frozen depths inside me where others housed a soul. Her presence was like a foghorn in the placid air of the theater. Like a bomb going off. Like a siren screeching for attention.
I searched the paper in my hand for her name.
Elena Morova.
Elena.
She was young—I could discern that much—and oh so determined. She danced onto the stage as if the audience had offended her, and she was here for payback. Chin raised, her eyes flashed fire at all who watched, daring them not to admire her perfect position and supple grace. I sat up straighter in my seat, and somehow the movement seemed to pull her eyes. She looked at me, her gaze fixed on mine as she began to pirouette, keeping me as her balancing point. I was pinned to my chair by that look. Transfixed. Spellbound.
She danced on, moving her body in ways I didn’t know were possible. I wondered if it caused her pain to contort herself so unnaturally while moving rapidly, spinning fearlessly, throwing her lithe body into leaps that would scare lesser mortals.
She was utterly captivating. When she left the stage, applause thundered out of the crowd. Hugh James stood up before me, clapping enthusiastically while I tried to gather my wits.
Oh, that was right.
She was his mistress.
She was the reason we were both here.
