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When I managed to get away from here, I would always be looking over my shoulder, waiting for these men to show up and try to kill my child and me. I was never going to be able to relax and be at peace. I would have to always be prepared to leave in a single moment and live a life where I would go by a false name and never be able to have a real relationship at the risk of putting him in danger. It wasn’t a life that either myself or my child deserved, but it was better than the alternative that awaited us if we stayed.
The second Dominic left, I didn’t even wait for Armando to notice me. I had to know what happened. I had to know why he went to the level that he did, and I had to make sure he knew exactly what I thought of him.
“You tortured my father?” I had wanted to say the words with strength but couldn’t keep the pain from escaping.
Shock and hurt flashed through his eyes. He hadn’t been expecting me to be behind him, hearing some of what he had been talking about. He had told me to stay in my room, like a good girl, but he should have known better by now that I don’t do as I am told. I had to admit that I was surprised by the hurt in his eyes. Why would it hurt him if I knew the truth?
“Natalie,” he started but paused and seemed at a loss for words.
“I guess there isn’t anything you could really say to that. No way to justify what you did,” I said, disgusted at just the sight of him.
“Justified? I don’t have to justify anything to you. Your piece of shit father served you up to Dom on a silver platter. That baby you are carrying, its father is one of the guys that work for Dom; he sent him to prey on you to get you knocked up. Your father knew all of that, and he allowed it to happen instead of paying his debt. He deserved everything done to him. I am sorry you had to find out, but I am not sorry I did it.”
Gone was the hurt and uncertainty from his voice. The man who stood before me was equally dangerous as the man he answered to. It would have been smarter for me to go upstairs and keep a distance between us, but I have never been the type of woman to back down or wield to a man. And I sure as shit was not about to start now.
“You act like you are any better than Dominic, but you are just like him. You can lie to yourself all you want, but you can’t lie to me. You are a monster, just like he is,” I seethed.
I couldn’t believe I had allowed myself to have sex with him. It was bad enough that he had killed my father, but he had tortured him to death and I had slept with him. My skin was crawling, and now I was going to need a new plan for an escape because there was no way I was ever going to be able to stomach being touched by him now.
“You don’t know anything about me. Do you think you have me all figured out because you know about Alexis? You have no idea why I am here, what I am fighting for. You don’t get to judge me. You don’t get to compare me to that piece of shit,” he snapped, moving closer.
I pushed off from the stairs and met him head on. I was not going to back down to let him try and justify anything to me. He might have been through some terrible shit in his life, but he also chose to stay within this life. He could have left plenty of times, but he chose to stay.
“You made a choice to stay here and work for Dominic. You have no one to blame but yourself. And don’t try and make it seem like you’re sacrificing by being here. You aren’t fighting for anything.” He wasn’t some white knight in hiding. He made his choice, and now he wanted to try and justify his actions. Too fucking bad, it wasn’t going to happen, not with me.
“I hate working for that piece of shit. I’m only here to kill him for what he did to Alexis,” he snapped and I could see the shock filtering through his eyes. He hadn’t been planning on telling me this.
“What did he do to Alexis?” I couldn’t help but ask. I didn’t expect any of this to come out of his mouth. If he wanted to kill Dominic, why was he doing all this when he could shoot him in the head? He could have already done that in the living room. Why go through working for him?
I could see the conflict in his eyes as he turned away from me. He was clearly debating if he should tell me or not. We were already through the looking glass, though, and I wasn’t about to let him walk this back. My life was on the line. The life of my unborn baby was on the line, and I was not going to let him withhold information from me.
He lost that power the second we had sex. I reached out and grabbed a hold of his forearm as he turned to go into the living room. He shot me a look out of the corner of his eye and I couldn’t tell if he was angry at me for the contact or not.
“This is my life on the line. I am sorry for what happened to Alexis and your unborn child. But they are dead and me and my baby are alive. I don’t care what the other women before me did. I am not them. I will not lie down and let myself be killed and my baby be ripped from my arms. I don’t have to tell you for you to know that. You want Dominic dead for some reason, but I can help.”
Did I want to help kill someone? No, but maybe there was something I could do so that Armando could finally kill him. I didn’t care as long as we got out of here alive. That was the only goal that mattered.
“You can’t help. It’s not safe for you to,” he said gentler as he moved towards the living room. I let him go, but I followed after him.
“Why do you want to kill him? What did he do to Alexis?” I pressed. I needed to know the truth. I needed to know if there were some redeeming qualities to him. Something that would show me he was more than some killer.
He let out a deep sigh that was dripping with pain and exhaustion as he dropped onto the couch. He was quiet for a moment. I wasn’t too sure if he was actually going to tell me or not. I went and sat down on the coffee table in front of him as he began to speak.
“I was born into this world but wasn’t born here. I was born in New York City. I run the mafia there. A year roughly before Alexis and I began dating, I found her out this way when I was on a trip. Dom picked her up when she was only a young teenager. She lived on and off the street because of her abusive parents. He saw a beautiful young girl without anyone to protect her and he kidnapped her. Tossed her into his human trafficking ring, got her addicted to heroin and that was her life for roughly six years before I found her. I don’t know what it was, but there was something different about her when I first saw her at a party.”
“You came down to see Dom?” I asked, just trying to process everything he had said so far. He was a Don in New York City. He wasn’t some muscleman; he was the man that was in charge of his own Mafia.
“No, I didn’t know him then. There’s a good number of factions within the States spread out. Some are Italian and others are Russian. We do our best to avoid the Russians and I make a habit of not interacting with other Italian Dons.”
“Why not? I would have assumed it would be like one huge family. You all have to be related to each other, right?”
I wasn’t too sure how it all worked. Did Italians just pop up one day and decide they will form a mafia? Or were they all connected to a head family in Italy?
“Not quite. At one point in the beginning everyone within your mafia was related to the Don in some capacity. Sometimes it was a close relationship; others it was one of the guy’s third cousin’s kids. Each could be connected back to one of the Head families in Italy. Over the generations though things have changed. The old timers died, some of the head families all died off or the ones that were left were either females or the next in line had no interest in keeping it going.
“Over time, the mafias started to recruit Italians from any family. Now it is all a muddled mix of families and no two mafia factions get along. There is a level of respect, but if you were bleeding out in the street in front of them, they would step right over you and go about their day,” he said with a small shrug.
“I can’t believe I am going to say this, but the mafia got worse since the older generation died off?”
