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I finally get to meet Serena, Gio’s sister. She’s beautiful and so sweet. Her smile is genuine and friendly. She hugs me like we’ve been best friends forever. I feel like we are going to be close friends. She’s so easy to talk to.
Gio’s mom cried and wrapped me up in her arms while his dad hugged me and gave me a sweet kiss on the cheek. It was such a good feeling to know that they accepted me and had my back. I’ve never had that before. They were all worried about me, and I feel guilty for leaving the house and causing distress.
Marcello comes over to the table and sets a beautifully wrapped gift box in front of me. It is black with a metallic finish with a perfectly applied bow around it.
“This is your welcome to the family/wedding gift, little sis.” He smirks in a mischievous way that scares me a bit. Not because I think he will hurt me because I know Gio would never allow that. His expression tells me there is something in this box that he thinks is funny. With Marcello’s weird sense of humor, that is scary.
Everyone sits around the breakfast table and watches with bated breath as I carefully unwrap the box. It’s almost too pretty to unwrap.
Once I remove the bow, I carefully start removing the paper. I pull the lid off of the box, and inside is a jar. It’s just the average mason jar you would have in your kitchen. My head tilts to the side in curiosity because I don’t know what I’m looking at. I reach in and pick up the jar. Once I realize what I’m holding in my hand, my heart stops beating. Before I can make sense of what’s happening, I hear Gio scream.
“What the ever-loving fuck, Marcello!”
Marcello answers, giggling, “It’s Daryl’s tongue and eyes.”
Valerie adds in her stern, motherly, reprimanding voice, “Marcello, what have I told you about body parts at the kitchen table?”
Aldo just adds a bored roll of his eyes. “Listen to your mother, boys.”
Serena sounds thoroughly pissed but not shocked that there is a jar of body parts sitting on the kitchen table. “Marcello, what the fuck is wrong with you, dumbass? You are freaking her out.”
Looking around the table and watching the chaos go on, I feel like I’m outside looking in. This looks like your average family meal with joking brothers, reprimanding parents, and an exasperated sister, and it’s everything I’ve always dreamed of.
Well, besides the tongue and the fucking eyeballs sitting in front of me in a fucking mason jar. I haven’t made a sound, and everyone is now staring at me, waiting for me to scream and make a run for it. That would be the normal reaction to a situation like this. It even surprisesmewhen I don’t. This might be an unconventional family, but it’s a family. A loving family that has come together to comfort me and protect me.
With those thoughts, I decide to embrace it. “Thank you, Marcello. That’s such a thoughtful gift, but who the hell is Daryl?’
Gio comes up behind my jar, leaning over and removing the jar from in front of me. He tells me who Daryl is, and I’m shocked.
“Angel, he was the clerk at the gas station where you used their bathroom to get ready in the mornings.”
“What happened to him?” I feel so strange. You would think I would be screaming in terror, but I feel like I’m outside of my body watching this happen to someone else.
Gio wraps an arm around my back and explains. “He was looking at my wife’s ass and said things about you I didn’t like.”
“Gio, you can’t just go around killing people because they look at me in a way that you don’t like, and I wasn’t your wife then.”
“Yes, I can, and I knew from the moment that I saw you the first time that you were mine,” he shrugs.
“No, you can’t,” I argue back.
Marcello chooses this second to snort and add his two cents. “Of course, he can. If the guy looked at my woman’s ass and basically called her a whore, I would have done worse.”
“He called me a whore?” I knew the guy looked at me like I was street scum, but it hurts to hear it verified.
“Marcello, you are the one who killed him, jackass,” adds Gio.
“You ordered me too, Boss. Do I need to remind you that you said you wanted his eyeballs and tongue? I only did what I was ordered to do.” Marcello just grins in his psychopathic serial killer way. It’s actually kind of cute.
What the fuck is wrong with me? The fact that I think this is adorable says more about me than it does about them. It occurs to me I wasn’t Gio’s woman when he ordered Daryl’s death. It’s a strange thought that someone was so obsessed with me. He was following me around and ordering people’s lives to end for looking at me wrong. I’m just a plain Jane, and there is nothing special about me. The fact that this gorgeous man seems to think I am more than that feels good, even if it is under crazy circumstances.
Once Gio takes the mason jar away from the table, his family continues eating breakfast like this was just a normal day in the life of a mafia family. I guess it is. The men sit at one end and talk business while Serena and Valerie look up wedding decor on their phones. I guess I’m getting married, and this time, I will be a willing participant.
Gio
Marcello just had to put a guy’s fucking body parts in a mason jar and gifted them to my wife at the fucking breakfast table. I roll my eyes. I expect her to scream and run away from us in horror, but she just sits there staring like she’s stunned. Honestly, her not running shows that Everly was made for this life and that she’s made for me. This isn’t the first time we’ve had body parts at the kitchen table, and it won’t be the last with Marcello around. My mom and sister are so used to his antics that it doesn’t phase them.
After the chaos and excitement of Marcello’s gift, we finish breakfast and leave the girls to wedding planning while we head to my office.
