I swirl the scotch around at the bottom of my glass, watching the amber whirlpool form among the carefully crafted diamonds of crystal. I can feel Emil staring at me, waiting for me to give him some kind of explanation as to why I am acting like this, why I have called him up here to speak after we’ve been doing our best to keep our distance. He shifts his weight from foot to foot in the door to my study, and then lets out a grunt of irritation.
“What’s going on, Luca?” he demands, and I look up at him, jerking my head to indicate that he should come in. He paces through the door, and I can tell from the look on his face that he’s concerned.
I can’t blame him. Given what has been going on with our family business the last few months, he’s got every reason to be worried about what I’m about to lay out to him.
“Is this to do with Dad?” he asks bluntly as he sinks down into the seat opposite me. Though I’ve only been here a few months, this study is probably the place in my new apartment that I’ve most turned into a home, with a drinks’ cart, a desk, and scatterings of paper and notes about my patients among those covering what’s going on back home.
I shake my head quickly. “No, nothing to do with Dad,” I reply. “Have you heard from him? You know what’s going on back home…?”
He returns my headshake.
“Nothing,” he mutters, reaching to pour himself a strong vodka and taking a long sip. “He’s only contacting us through direct messages. No calls, no emails. He doesn’t want us to be tracked here.”
“Yeah, of course,” I agree, though I feel a dig in my chest at the thought. I’m still making sense of being so far from everything that I’ve known for the last few years—sure, I might have studied in this city, but now I’m a grown-ass man, and I don’t want to be reliving my student days.
No, I want to be out there taking care of business. Bringing down those bastard Magliones who have been causing so much trouble for us. They’re the reason my brother and I have been sent here in the first place, because we know that we can’t let them kidnap one of us to use as leverage over our father. Not very many people would dare do something so fucking stupid, but these guys clearly don’t have a damn idea what’s good for them.
“And no news is good news,” he reminds me. “At least when it comes to Dad. We’ll hear about it if something goes wrong. In the meantime…” He trails off. He doesn’t need to finish the rest of that sentence.
In the meantime, all we can do is sit and wait, no matter how much of a pain in the ass it is, no matter how much I fucking hate being taken from my family, my legacy, my business. But, when Dad brought us together a few months ago, he left no room for argument as to how we were going to handle this.
“You’re really just going to let him win like that?” Emil had growled when our father told us what the plan was.
Dad pushed his hand through his dark brown hair, glancing between the two of us.
“Not win,” he snapped back. “They’ll win if they manage to get their hands on either of you. And that’s what I’m trying to avoid. A few months in another city, and this will all be over.”
“But you need us here to—”
“I can handle myself,” Dad replied, cutting me off before I could go any further. His eyes were sharp, leaving no room for argument—and for a moment, I saw a flash of the man who commanded so much respect in this city. Or at least, the man who had, up until the Magliones started to edge their way into our territory.
My father, Marco Mariana, has a name that would send a shiver down the spine of nearly anyone who hears it—at least, if they’re smart enough to understand his power. He stepped up to take over the Mariana Mafia from his own father a few decades ago, and since then he has expanded our territory out from the southside river that we owned for a long time, to the boundaries of the city. In that time, he’s made an effort to clean things up—clamp down on gang infighting, bring together people who had been clashing, and find a way to make this place run as smoothly as possible. For a while there, nothing and nobody went in or out of the city without him hearing about it, and I know that’s the way he liked it.
And shit, that was the way I liked it too. I had trained as a doctor, but I never had any intention of actually working in a hospital—I planned to serve as the primary medical team for our mafia, to make sure none of our men ended up with injuries more severe than they could manage. I’ve seen too many men die for stupid reasons, because they were too scared about getting caught to go to the hospital and get the help they needed, and I knew that the only way to change that was to provide the same service in a way they couldn’t turn their back on.
I was just getting started when the Magliones started causing problems. At first, we thought it was little more than the usual gang bullshit, people trying to stir up trouble for the sake of looking tough. But as time went on, it became obvious that these fuckers weren’t going away—and that we’d need more than we currently had to make them pay for what they had done.
Because it wasn’t just the usual shit that people tried to pile into this world. No—they weren’t bringing in bricks of weed or coke, or even trying to move guns through the streets. They were selling people. Women, to be specific. Walling them up in these twisted little buildings and then charging a cover fee before they allowed just about anyone to walk in there and do what they wanted.
We raided one, but it only pissed them off—we managed to get a few girls out of there, but there were dozens more captured all over the city, and I had no doubt that they were doing everything in their power to make sure they brought in more. I hated the thought of it, all these women being dragged into something they didn’t understand—perhaps promised some work, something stable, only to find themselves servicing the kind of pigs who liked nothing more than to abuse women who had no choice but to take it.
And the raid sparked an attack on us. Not one of our warehouses or gangs, but my father’s home. They fire-bombed it, but thank God, my father managed to get out before he was burned alive in the fury of the fire. But from that moment out, he realized that he couldn’t keep his sons around any longer—he needed us gone so he could focus on taking them down, once and for all.
Emil and I dug in our heels, of course, but it didn’t do shit. If we were stubborn, we had learned it from him, and he knew that nothing good would come of keeping us there.
“You need to get out,” he told us, his voice firm. “You need to get out of the city for a few months till all of this dies down. I can’t risk them targeting you. And I can’t risk being distracted by the worry that they will.”
“Dad, we can’t just—” Emil started, but Dad whipped his hand up, silencing his youngest son.
“You heard me,” he replied sharply. “You need to go. I have apartments set up for you in Pensacola, and that’s where you’re going to spend the next few months. Just try not to get in any trouble while you’re out there, okay?”
I nodded—and I meant it, even though I knew my brother would not agree with me. I intended to come here and to let sleeping dogs lie, to keep my head down and focus on work at the hospital. I applied for a job here, and I was pretty sure that my father’s name had gone some way to making sure that I landed it—either way, I was glad for the distraction. I had a six-month stint currently planned, and while I don’t know what’s going to happen when I come out the other side, at least I have something to keep me busy while I’m living here.
But trouble? Yeah, I might just have walked into more trouble than I know what to do with. And I don’t have a single clue of how I’m going to work through it.
“What happened, then?” Emil demands, his eyes narrowing as he locks them onto me. Emil looks more like our late mother than I do—her brown eyes, her light brown hair, her tone of voice. I know he wouldn’t like the comparison, given that he wants to be seen as the toughest motherfucker on the block, but he knows as well as I do that it’s true.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. No easy way to break this. I just have to rip the Band-Aid off and tell him the truth.
“I have a daughter.”
He lets out a short bark of laughter—like he assumes I have to be joking. But as he stares back at me and waits for me to confess that it’s all a joke, I just stay silent.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he growls, leaning forward, his voice dropping in panic. “What do you mean, you have a daughter? You got someone pregnant? We’ve only been here a few months—”
“It was a while ago,” I reply. “You remember when I came back here at the start of the year, before all the shit back home kicked off? I hooked up with a girl at this—at this party…”
“You never mentioned that to me,” he fires back.
I shrug. “Not like I’m going to tell you about every girl I sleep with.” The flicker of a smile crosses my face. “We’d be here all day, wouldn’t we?”
He smirks slightly. He knows as well as I do the reputation I have with women, and he’s not going to go pressing for more right now—not when there are bigger things for us to concern ourselves with.
“So you slept with this girl, got her pregnant,” he continues. “How did you find out? Didn’t know you were keeping in touch with these women…”
“I’m not,” I reply. “I…I delivered the baby.”
He falls silent once more, his eyebrows nearly vanishing into his hairline as he downs the rest of the vodka. Once he has poured himself another glass, he turns his attention back to me.
“You delivered the baby.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re sure it’s yours?”
“I asked her,” I reply. “She tried to deny it at first, but she eventually came clean.”
“Shit,” he mutters. “So she knows you’re the father. Does she know who you are? What you do?”
I shake my head. “No. As far as she’s concerned, I’m just a doctor,” I assure him. “No reason to think she would look into it any further than that. But…” I trail off.
I know Emil’s mind must be where mine is right now, because the two of us have been focused on keeping our heads down and our shit under control since we’ve been here. I can still hear my father’s voice ringing in my ears, telling me to stay out of trouble—I guess I have, insofar as I knocked this girl up before I even came back here to escape our enemies.
“What do you know about her?” he asks, leaning forward and furrowing his brow.
“Next to nothing,” I admit. “She didn’t seem to want to admit it to me, so I guess she wants to raise this kid alone. Doesn’t want me to have anything to do with it.”
“And you?” he presses. “You want anything to do with it?”
My mind flashes back to the child in her arms—the mess of dark hair, those striking eyes, the sweet, soft, milky scent of her. Even though I know it’s all kind of crazy, I shrug.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I mean, this is my fucking daughter we’re talking about. And I could have gone my whole life without knowing about her—”
“Hey, it can’t come as that much of a shock,” Emil jokes. “With how much pussy you go through, you’ve got to have a few children out there you don’t know about…”
“Oh, don’t even get me thinking about that,” I protest, raising a hand to silence him. “I’ve been going through all the girls I’ve been with since I found out about this shit, and I can’t help but wonder…”
I trail off, stopping myself before I can go any further. I know it doesn’t bear thinking about, that I’m better off keeping my head down and focusing on what I know has happened, not what I think might have.
“So what the fuck are you going to do about this?” Emil asks me.
“I have no idea,” I confess. “I mean, I don’t want to be some deadbeat dad who’s got nothing to do with his kid’s life, but at the same time…”
I leave the words hanging in the air. We both know what I’m getting at. After everything that has happened, there’s no way to ignore how fucking dangerous it would be for us to bring a child into all of this. These fuckers, the ones who have targeted our family, they will do anything in their power to bring us down, and that means exploiting any weak spot in the process. As much as I don’t see myself as weak, this child could be a way for them to force my hand—let alone her mother…
“No,” Emil says, shaking his head. “No, I have an idea of what you’re going to do. And that’s keep as far from this kid and her mother as you can, you hear me?”
I grimace. I know he’s right, of course, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear it from him right now.
“We’re living in the same city,” I remind him. “I don’t know if it’s going to be that easy…”
“I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy,” he replies. “I’m telling you that you need to think of the best option for everyone. You keep out of this, and you don’t have to burden yourself with a child—and you don’t put that kid or her mother in the middle of something they don’t know anything about.”
I nod slowly. I’m listening, I am, but it’s hard to force his words to go into my head right now, to really sink into my mind in a way that matters. I don’t want to just pretend like none of this happened. I can’t just…walk away from my daughter, can I?
Even thinking of myself as a father is the kind of shit that makes my head spin. I’ve never wanted to be a dad before—at least, not like this. Maybe I pictured settling down with some woman in the far-off distant future, building a family the same way my father did with my mother. But this—this is something far different. This is the kind of mess I can’t say that I ever intended to get myself caught up in, and now that I’m in the middle of it, I have no idea how the hell I’m meant to navigate it.
“Don’t bring anyone else into this, Luca,” Emil warns me, his voice low. “You know how tough things are right now. One wrong move, and they could pull this girl into this mess too…”
I nod. I know he’s right. And that statement alone is enough to get me rethinking things. Because the thought of that little girl getting dragged into our mess is enough to make me stop dead in my tracks. She’s a baby, a fucking infant; she’s barely even taken her first breath. And now she might be facing off against some of the most dangerous fuckers in the country.
I reach for the bottle and pour myself another generous helping of scotch. I’m going to need it if I’m going to keep my head—and if I’m going to make it through the next few months without seeking out my daughter again.
Even if all I want to do right now is hold her in my arms and stare down into those sweet gray eyes.
