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1
Mare
Five years later…
“Damn, it’s coming down hard out there, isn’t it?”
I huffed and shoved my short blonde hair back from my face, my fingers tapping on the front door glass.If this Uber could hurry the hell up, that’d be great,I thought in irritation, my eyes scanning through the windows of the classy Italian restaurant I worked at.
“You got a ride, Mary?” Donald Brutello—the owner’s son—asked from behind me. My lips thinned at hearing my new name.Mary Peterson, awoman who lived alone, kept her head down, and tried to work enough so she could pay rent.
Bored, lonely, surviving despite everything.
“Yeah,” I answered finally, mentally shaking the string of negative thoughts from my mind. Unfortunately, though, I could feel him move closer, his hand hovering just over the small of my back. I sidled away before he could touch me, my head tilting as if I was trying to make out shapes through the downpour outside. The move helped me control the retort that wanted to escape. The slightly overweight perv really irritated me, but I needed this job so I bit my tongue.
“There’s my ride,” I said only a moment later when a set of headlights flashed over the front of the building, my cell buzzing in my hand. “See ya tomorrow, Donny.”
Before he could stop me, I yanked open the door and darted into the rain. I’d rather drown like a wet rat than stand another second in that skeevy dick’s presence.Goddammit, I wish Charlotte hadn’t ditched her shift as second closer tonight.With Donny closing down the restaurant, I’d had to endure a good thirty minutes of his eye-fucking and lip-licking before I had finished everything I needed to in order to get out. As it was, I was leaving a good ten minutes early. Guess luck was on my side for once. Either that or the thought of spending more time with Donald Brutello kicked my ass into gear. It was safe to say it was probably the latter.
I ran to the small but newer sedan waiting for me, holding my thin coat over my aged and worn backpack as I slid into the backseat, slamming the car door behind me with a sigh. Ubers were cheaper than taxis, but I really wished this thunderstorm had chosen a better time to hit. Brutello’s was only about two miles from my apartment and walking was always cheaper.
A year of financial help from the government hadn’t done much, not in the long run anyway. It was a good starting point, and in the beginning, I thought I could truly start over. Went to community college, had a place to live, got a part time job … all was good for a time. Living expenses added up, though. Tuition. Rent. Utilities. It hadn’t mattered that I’d been given a new start, even debt built up after a while if one couldn’t keep up. Credit cards maxed out. School loans in deferral. I’d done what I could and survived. That was all it was now, a fight for survival.
Even with the financial assistance from the program, I was, for lack of a better term, abandoned to my own devices. They’d dropped me off in St. Louis five years ago and never looked back. I’d served my purpose. Every so often, I’d get a call—something short and untraceable—from my handler. They kept up the pretense of wanting me alive, but according to them, I wasn’t in any danger. To everyone else, my father had moved on and so should I. I hoped like hell that was true.
I shook myself mentally, dislodging the thoughts and memories plaguing me. Watching the rain trail over the windows of Brutello’s, I waited impatiently to get back to my studio so I could relax for the night. Because that was what my life had become. Wake up. Work. Go home. Try to relax and forget. Go to bed. Do it all over again the next day. Even on birthdays, everything remained the same.
“Thanks,” I muttered, handing a tip over as I clambered out of the car a few minutes later while it idled in front of the crumbling Victorian.
“Jack, you dumb bastard! What the hell—”
I flinched as the sound of shattering glass and screaming neighbors reached my ears even through the roar of the rain as I made my way around the front of the house down to the private side entrance. My landlords were notorious drunks. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d tried to fall asleep to the screaming and slurring of Mr. and Mrs. Hanson through the paper-thin walls and doors that sectioned off my part of the house from theirs. From the sounds of it, I was looking at yet another sleepless night.
As soon as my foot hit the step that descended to the basement entrance, I felt it. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, goosebumps raising across my skin, neither having to do with the iciness of the rain. My heart started to pound, fight or flight urges warring in my mind but I couldn’t seem to make myself move. Not before I scanned the darkened street behind me. No odd vehicles, no lights on in many of the row houses.
There was nothing out of place, yet I couldn’t stop the sharp fear that built. It had been five years since I had been escorted out of that courtroom and up until the last week, I had been in the clear. The first two times I felt it, I brushed it off, thinking it had been a customer or someone at the store as I picked the last jar of spaghetti sauce off the shelf.
This though, I felt in the pit of my very soul. A shadow shifting further down the road caught my attention but disappeared before I could look that way. The eyes that watched me had to work for my father, there was no other explanation, and the thought of his ruthlessness made me shiver. No matter how far I’d gone, or how long I’d been ‘dead,’ he could find me. The horror my father was capable of, that I had witnessed firsthand, seemed as fresh as if it had just happened yesterday, but knowing he could get me was what terrified me the most.
My eyes burnedfrom holding back the urge to cry. Acid crept further up my throat as I stood next to the witness stand. Any second now, the wave of unshed tears would come cascading down my face—the evidence of my family’s cruelty. Guilt ate away at me; I was the daughter of a monster, but that didn’t mean that I was anything like my father. And that’s why I was here—to right my father’s wrongs. It was me who was about to, hopefully, put him away for life. All I would have to do was make it through the testimony.
Inhaling sharply, I forced the lump in my throat down, willing my face to remain impassive despite the eyes I felt burning into my back. The air of danger that lingered in the courtroom swirled around as the bailiff took residence in front of me. Who would win? The eighteen-year-old who had seen something she shouldn’t have … or the forty-something-year-old mobster. Another pang of fear threaded through me, the flashes of what I had seen racing to the front of my mind. I knew the odds weren’t in my favor, but I had to try. Even as I stood there with my feet cemented to the carpeted floor of the courtroom, nausea built when the bailiff raised his hand.
“America Perelli, please repeat after me.”
His voice was deep and commanding, the sound pulling me from my inner turmoil to focus on what was going on around me. Blinking, I nodded when he paused. When he was assured I was truly listening, he rattled off the oath.
“I do solemnly and sincerely and truly declare and affirm that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” I echoed, knowing there was no going back once I stepped onto that stand. When the officer moved, my vision tunneled. The distance was only a few feet to the chair but it stretched into miles before me.
“You can take the stand now, America,” the judge stated simply, her soft command to move still coming through clearly despite the turbulence fighting to steal every bit of resolve and focus that I’d hardly held onto. Taking a deep breath, I took the couple of steps and closed the distance between me and the simple office chair.
As soon as I sat, my eyes drifted to my father and his men. The former refused to look at me—as if I wasn’t even there. The lack of care in his posture wasn’t surprising, but I would have thought he’d be glaring me down knowing my testimony was the key piece to the entire case. Jason Perelli was a cruel man and always had been. Mean to me and my mother when she was alive but even worse after she’d passed.
Black eyes, the carefully placed bruising of a too-strong grip, forceful rebukes that started to trigger an intrinsic urge to shrink away from him, all signs that rang as a clear warning that my younger self hadn't been able to fully grasp. My father was dangerous. If only that lesson had truly hit home before I wound up here.
As the lawyer collected his notes to start the questioning, I wasn’t sure if I was more worried or relieved at my father’s dismissiveness. His lackeys, on the other hand, stared with cold, hard gazes, but it wasn’ttheireyes that I felt burning a hole through my chest.
My testimony should have been my focus, ensuring that my father would truly pay for what he had done, but I couldn’t stop my eyes from searching the crowd. When my gaze finally landed on them, I knew what the feeling was. That indescribable pull, an intimate yet inescapable tug that said, ‘you belong over here’ resonated throughout my entire being with no thought to ask permission and definitely no intention to beg forgiveness for its intrusion. But how had they found out? I had purposefully not told them. With the trial being kept on the down-low, the media left out of the loop, they shouldn’t have known.
