But her only flaw was that she trusted too easily.
I was twenty at the time and thought it could never happen to me or someone I cared about.
But one night it happened, and I wasn’t there.
I was working a part-time construction job while in school. I wanted my mom to not have to be concerned with what food options I had and if I needed anything extra while going to class.
When my phone rang, I expected to answer and for her to complain that I didn’t make it back in time for our late night pizza run and our second time of re-watching The Vampire Diaries. Instead, I had an officer on the other end of the line asking me if I was her next of kin.
That is the specific detail my brain replayed on a continuous punishment loop. It was her I expected to answer the phone.
Not the police who asked me to come to the scene.
Her body was found by a room-mate she shared the dorm with.
The officer who spoke to me kept using small words to explain the entire situation to me as if I were a child and knew nothing of the dangers in the world.
He spoke gently and carefully, like it would soften what had happened. I remember staring at hismouth, watching syllables move while my brain refused to translate them into anything real.
Blunt force trauma. Sexual assault. Time of death.
I never asked for anymore details. My imagination was already too willing.
They let me see her once before the funeral and I wish they hadn’t.
I wanted to remember her as the person who snorted through laughter. The one whose cheeks blushed when she caught me staring at her in class. The one I saw my entire life with.
After the service, the world expected me to move on. My mother cried quietly and tried not to look at me like I was something fragile she might break by accident.
But grief didn’t make me reckless. It made me methodical. Angry in a way that required structure. I started asking questions no one wanted to answer. Names. Faces. Patterns. Who drank where. Who bragged about what.
That was how I fell into the rabbit hole of the Italian Mafia.
Through obsession. Through her.
I didn’t join because I wanted some type of power. I only joined because they knew things. Because information traveled faster in those type of circles than it ever did through police files. I told myself I’d get what I needed and leave and that would change everything for me. I was only there to find the man who had ruined herlife and mine.
I found him, eventually, but it didn’t satisfy me like I thought it would. Instead, the anger grew inside my own head. It raged because I had no one else to blame. The problem was gone, I took care of it.
At least, I thought I had.
But I was still here, and I still felt everything like it was yesterday.
It didn’t bring her back to me. It didn’t silence the wrath in my head. It didn’t make the nights easier without her. I kept expecting something like closure to drop from the sky and knock my ass out.
Nothing ever did.
So I stayed with the bad guys.
Fury is easier to live with when you give it somewhere to acclimate. The mob gave mine direction. I learned how to channel my rage into precision.
And the money definitely helped. Or it was a decent enough distraction.
But women were different. They always had been after her.
Well, women, children and anyone smart enough to convince me that they were innocent.
I couldn’t put my hands on them without memories flashing in uninvited.
