Note: Alright Readers, I believe you are enjoying your read so far. So, I am dropping another interesting book under this stand alone mafia collection.
Have fun.
Tittle: The Mafia Leader’s baby
Anna
One shift down, three to go before I’m gone for good.
Closing the bar takes longer than usual tonight, especially after Fiona left early to take care of her sick kid. It’s all me: washing the dishes, restocking, cashing out, and cleaning up the atrocious mess left by our unruly customers.
After our home football team lost the game, our lovely drunken patrons were particularly belligerent, driving up my stress levels like a broken thermometer as they tossed food and drinks around like rice at a wedding.
Football games are great for my boss because, no matter what, people will either have a reason to celebrate or drink their sorrows away. Of course, he has a great time counting his money in the back office while the rest of us are practically fighting for our lives against bleary-eyed men with entitlement issues and a deep dissatisfaction toward their homelives.
Thank god it’s all over, at least for tonight.
It’s snowing pretty heavily when I walk out the door, and as much as I dread driving home in it, I can’t help but take in the delicate silence as it closes in around me. Usually, the city is still howling with partygoers at this hour, so the contrast tonight is pristine.
When it snows like this, it’s easy to feel like the last person on earth, and that’s oddly comforting to me. Being alone means that I don’t have obligations, and for once, I wish I could be free of those pesky little things. Being an adult never really treated me as well as I imagined it would in my angsty youth. Freedom comes with a hefty price tag.
But tonight, the price has been paid, and I can enjoy my drive home without anyone else on the snowswept road. During the daytime, the Seattle streets are overrun with impatient assholes who all believe that their daily tasks are the single most important thing on planet earth. I appreciate that I work late because I’m never stuck in traffic, but that’s just about the only perk.
I climb into my beat-up 1996 Chevy Impala, tossing my apron into the passenger seat amongst a graveyard of water bottles, coffee cups, and hospital discharge paperwork from last week when I cut my finger while slicing limes.
It sounds like a small thing, but it wasn’t. I nearly sliced through the bone, and my boss was pissed as all hell that I had to leave work to avoid losing it. He wanted me to put a glove over it and keep going.
No thanks, asshole. I’d like to keep my digits.
I shake my head at the memory, pushing the cold car key into the ignition and turning it. At first, the car sputters and shakes a bit but doesn’t start.
“Not today, baby. Just a few more trips. I promise,” I whisper, holding back the anxious anger that’s building in my stomach. I wait a few moments to give it some time, as though it can hear my promises and is actively considering them.
When I turn the key again, the sputter quickly erupts into a roar in the still night air, and the ball of anxiety heating up in my belly dissipates for perhaps another hour before something else brings it to life again.
There’s always something.
Living paycheck to paycheck gives every day the potential to completely destabilize my life, and I’ve had more than my share of earth-moving life circumstances in my twenty-three years. Growing up in a foster home with drug addicts as parents will do that to you, but somehow I’ve never developed the ability to anticipate disasters before they strike.
It’s like being in a constant state of surprise at the worst possible things, but I figure it’s better than being perpetually anxious about them before they’ve even happened. I find moments of peace through the struggle, like my drive home.
This particular drive is unremarkable, save for a house fire that I pass. Bright orange light spills across the icy road like lava, and I’m momentarily thankful that I don’t own my house. I just rent it.
Of course, renting also has its cons. The landlord increased our rent this year after a yogurt shop opened on the corner. I think he figures that the property values are going up, but my sister Rachel bets the shop will be closed by the end of the year. She claims that yogurt isn’t really in vogue anymore, and since she’s younger than me and savvier to those trends, I tend to believe her.
I share the house with her, so even if the rent doesn’t go down again, we can afford it. She’s only eighteen, and she’s everything that you could imagine a teenager with abandonment issues would be like, but she knows how to work. You have to when you’re a paycheck away from starving.
Sticking together was the best choice we ever made, but it wasn’t always easy to pull off. We grew up being bounced from one foster home to the next, always given the same dose of sunny optimism by social workers but never truly taken care of the way we should’ve been.
Our parents spent all of their time and money doing or selling drugs, and we were taken from our home for the first time when I was eleven and Rachel was six. We weren’t placed together, and it caused a lot of attachment issues for Rachel as she got older.
The next time we were removed from our separate homes, I begged and pleaded for us to be placed together. By some miracle, we were able to be placed in the same homes until I turned eighteen, landed a minimum wage job, and pulled us both out of that mess.
Even so, I’ve always been worried about Rachel. Though we experienced the same issues growing up, she’s always been more sensitive and never had the chance to develop the proper coping skills. It makes me so angry to think about the kind of person she could have grown up to be if she’d been given the proper support. She’s artistic, funny, and street-smart, but she’s always struggled with her temper and shuts down when faced with an issue she’s unfamiliar with.
Despite all of that, she’s the best roommate and confidante I’ve ever had. Even though we don’t have parents anymore, I never feel lonely or unloved at all. She’s made the world an easier place to live in, and she’s too young
to fully realize how important that is. Even the drive back home is better knowing that I’m coming home to her.
Arriving home, I park on the street and turn the car off, anxious that the morning will bring the potential for a dead battery or some other devastatingly inconvenient interference. I only have a few shifts left at work, and I don’t want this car to fail on me before then.
The night air is still around me as the snow continues to fall, blanketing the church parking lot across the street with an unmarked landscape of white swirls and waves. The streetlights reflect softly off the iridescent surface, and I take a moment to really enjoy the natural beauty of it. In the morning, it’ll all be overturned, blackened, and shoved to the side of the road.
When my toes start to freeze in my poorly insulated boots, I head inside to greet my sister, who is more than likely still awake re-watching old seasons of American Dad and eating the last of our supply of barbeque chips.
I step through the front door to find that most of the lights are off except for the one above the stove. Rachel isn’t mindful enough to shut off the lights before she goes to sleep, so my guard is up immediately. Why is it so dark in here?
“Rachel?” I call out, feeling my apprehension growing as no response comes. I carefully work my way through the living room, looking for any sign that she was here recently.
You’re overthinking. She could just be asleep, I think to myself. “Rachel!”
My dread reaches a peak when I listen closer. No creaking floorboards, no music playing softly in the background.
Dead silence.
I run up the stairs, my heart pounding in my ears as my skin breaks out into a thin layer of sweat. The door flies open at the force of my shoulder, and it only takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the layout of the room to realize that it’s empty.
My stomach churns. Did someone comes here and take her? Did she run away?
Confusion, anger, and guilt bubble in my stomach as I try to come to grips with what’s going on. The only glimmer of hope that I have is knowing that she always brings her phone with her. She’s addicted to that thing like nothing else.
Unlike her, I’m not glued to my phone screen every waking second. I had it turned to airplane mode at work like I always do, and I haven’t turned it back since I clocked out.
Switching the connection back on, I wait in vain for a message for her, anything, no matter how silly it is. My stomach drops as a few seconds pass.
Rachel is gone, and she didn’t even text me to say why.
Then, as I lower my phone in defeat, the screen blows up with message after message from her.
“Come home now.” “ANNA, PLEASE!”
“I love you.”
My heart doubles in speed, and my stomach churns what little food I ate during my shift at work. I nearly vomit from panic, but I know running to the bathroom would be lost time. I swallow the bile building in my throat and try to think clearly.
There must be a way to find her.
Even in the fuzziness of panic, a sharp realization cuts through my mind, and I remember one of the safety features that I insisted on installing onto both our phones against Rachel’s wishes a mutual phone tracking app.
Of course, she hated the idea and gave me hell for it when I insisted, but this time, she might actually thank me.
With my hands shaking nearly uncontrollably, I find the app on my phone, typing her name into the search bar where it locates her position almost instantly.
A green dot appears on my screen, and I have to zoom way out to see it in relation to my own position. She’s all the way on the other side of town, but why?
Knowing her location does nothing to quell my anxiety. In fact, it makes it worse when I realize that not only is she on the other side of town, she’s in the area where the most gang violence has occurred in our city in the last three years.
If she’d had a sketchy boyfriend around the house, this would make more sense. But Rachel tends to keep to herself. She’s never been a partier or much of a social person at all. What could she want with a place like that?
I breathe in deep to keep from screaming. It’ll take me at least twenty-five minutes to get all the way over there. Do I call the cops instead?
No. The police have been historically unhelpful for Rachel and me, and at some points, have even accused us of the crime that we were reporting just because we were fosters. If Rachel has gotten into something dangerous or questionable, the cops could just lock her up instead of helping at all.
That means I’m on my own.
I run back out to my car, hoping to whoever can hear me that the damn thing starts and doesn’t die on me in my most dire hour of need.
I jump into the driver’s side and turn the key, and that familiar sputtering fills me with dread until the engine finally comes to life. I’m nowhere near out of the woods, but the rumble of pistons and a half a tank of gas put me more at ease. At least I can focus on one crisis at a time.
After pulling up the address on my phone again, I speed away, careful to watch for cops as I rampage through the streets as quickly as I can without being slowed down by a speeding ticket from a bored officer. Traffic lights blur as I race through them, and once or twice I run one that’s red because there’s nobody else on the road. The snow is my friend tonight.
But even with luck on my side, I can’t get my heart to stop racing, and it’s making me sick. The drive to the location is agonizing, and keeping an eye out for cops or even stray pedestrians idling across the road in lieu of traffic is exhausting.
What worries me the most about all this is that Rachel tells me everything, at least that’s what I believed with my whole heart before tonight. I was her age once too. I understand wanting to keep secrets from the adults in your life, but I’m her sister. She should trust me.
I curse under my breath, more at myself than at Rachel. I didn’t realize that a major component of my relationship with my sister has been out of alignment. If this isn’t a freak accident or kidnapping, then she’s been keeping something from me, and I have nobody to blame but myself.
I don’t even know what’s happened, but I feel like it’s my fault.