Page 6 of The Kingpin’s Bride

Then he turned away and spoke to his men in a low voice. They pulled my brothers out of their chairs. Mama tried to stand, but the man behind her held her down. I heard my brothers’ muffled voices for a few seconds in another room. Then those voices stopped too.

They never brought my brothers back.

When the tall man returned, his white gloves were no longer clean. He looked at Mama one last time.

“Remember,” he said. “Only mercy.”

Then he and his men left us there, in the quiet restaurant with the tipped-over wineglass and the dark stain on the floor where Papa had been. Mama didn’t move for a long time. She just held my hand under the ruined tablecloth and stared at the place where Papa had died. When she finally stood, her legs shook so badly she had to lean on the table.

She didn’t speak as she led me out the back door into the cold night air. She didn’t speak on the long walk home either. The only sound was the soft click of her heels and the distant noise of the city that had no idea what had just happened inside that restaurant. I kept seeing the tall man’s face every time I closed my eyes.

And I understood, even at ten years old, that the mercy he had given us was not kindness. It was a different kind of sentence.

Four years after the restaurant, the apartment smelled like cheap perfume, old smoke, and the sweet chemical stink of whatever Mama was using that week.

I sat at the small kitchen table with my homework spread out in neat piles. Calculus. History notes. An essay on the fall of the Roman Republic that was three days ahead of schedule. School was the only place that made sense. Numbers didn’t lie. Deadlines didn’t change their minds. If I stayed quiet and scored high enough, the teachers left me alone. That was all I wanted.

Mama was on the couch with that man again.

His name was Dario. I never called him that out loud, I preferred to avoid him. He was one of the men who paid Mama. Taller than Papa had been, thicker through the shoulders, with a gold chain that sat in the dark hair on his chest. He laughed too loudly and left bruises shaped like fingerprints on Mama’s arms. Sometimes on her throat. She always wore long dark sleeves the next day and told me she was fine.

Tonight he had a small plastic baggie in one hand and a glass pipe in the other. Mama’s eyes were glassy. She leaned into him the man she was cold and he was the only source of heat left in the world.

I kept my pen moving across the page so I wouldn’t have to watch the exact moment the flame touched the pipe. Dario noticed me anyway.

“Your girl’s quiet,” he said, voice rough from smoke. “Pretty, though. Looks like you must’ve looked before life got to you.”

Mama gave a soft, empty laugh and didn’t answer. She hadn’t really answered anything in months. Most days she looked straight through me, like I was part of the furniture she kept meaning to throw away. I finished the last calculus problem and closed the textbook with a quiet snap. My grades were perfect. The guidance counselor kept talking about scholarships and colleges out of state. I nodded at the right times and never told her I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. Girls like me didn’t get to leave. We just learned how to survive the backrooms we were trapped in.

Dario stood up after a while and stretched. The movement made the gun at the small of his back press against his shirt. He never bothered hiding it around us anymore.

“Got something to say to both of you,” he announced. Mama blinked slowly, halfway somewhere else. I stayed in my chair. Dario reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold band. It looked cheap under the yellow kitchen light. He held it out to Mama like he was offering her a cigarette.

“Marry me,” he said. “I’ll take care of you. Roof. Food. Product when you need it. You won’t have to work the street any more.”

For a second Mama just stared at the ring. Then her face crumpled. Tears spilled over and she made a sound that might have been a sob or a laugh. She nodded fast, too fast, and let him push the ring onto her finger.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Okay. Yes.”

She was smiling when she looked at me, but the smile didn’t reach anywhere near her eyes. It was the same expression she used to wear when Papa’s associates came over and she had to pour drinks and pretend everything was fine. Resignation dressed up as gratitude.

Dario turned his head and looked straight at me. He walked over to the table slowly, like he had all the time in the world. I forced myself not to lean back. He stopped right beside my chair and reached out. His knuckles were scabbed. He brushed one thick finger down my cheek, light as a spider. My skin crawled so hard I felt sick.

“You’re the real prize in this arrangement, sweetheart,” he said, voice low enough that Mama probably couldn’t hear it over her own shaky breathing. “Pretty little thing. Smart. Quiet. I’ve got big plans for you once the paperwork’s done.”

He smiled then. It didn’t look friendly.

I didn’t answer. I just sat there with his touch burning on my face and the future rearranging itself into something even worse than the present. And Mama was staring at the cheap ring on her finger like it might disappear if she blinked.

My little sister Camilla was born on a Thursday in the middle of a heatwave, when I was fourteen. Dario wasn’t there. He was “handling business.” Mama labored for seven hours in the same apartment where the air always smelled like smoke and stale perfume. I held her hand the whole time because the midwife Dario paid for looked more interested in the cash than in either of us.

When they finally placed the baby on Mama’s chest, something in me locked into place so hard it hurt. Baby Camilla was tiny. Red-faced. Perfect. A soft tuft of dark hair and fists that opened and closed like she was trying to hold on to something. Mama looked at her for maybe ten seconds before her eyes glazed over again. The craving was louder than the child in her arms.

I took Camilla before Mama could drop her. She was mine to keep alive from then on.

Mama’s use got worse after the birth. The money Dario gave her for “the baby” mostly went into her veins or up her nose. Some nights she didn’t come home at all. Other nights she came home with new bruises and glassy eyes and forgot Camilla existed until the crying got too loud.

I learned how to mix formula at three in the morning. How to rock a colicky baby girl while finishing calculus homework with one hand. How to hide the worst of the apartment when the social worker came by after a neighbor complained about the noise. Camilla’s first smile was directed at me. Her first word was a soft, slurred “Rena.” I cried in the bathroom afterward so she wouldn’t see.