His Mafia Rose

Genesis

The funeral arrived days later.

My father's palace, where invincible power and feral splendor had enjoyed uncontested dominance, was now a sorrowful altar. There fell upon the palace a foul pall of silence, pierced only by the lamentable susurration of the wind through cypress trees. The stormy heavens above cast a sepulchral pall on the countenances of mourners, lined with sorrow, indignation, and something darker-a mortal vow of vengeance.

Caspian and I sat there, our small bodies reeling under the enormity of what we'd witnessed, what we'd lost. We did not wriggle. We did not look away. We did not talk. There was nothing to be said.

The world had pushed us too far, had stolen from us the treasures of ignorance, of innocence. We had been catapulted into a world where to damage was not choice but fact, where blood was not shame but autograph on the scroll of fate. And we survived. Invincible. Bound up in fear, in sorrow, in an irreparable understanding of each other that others could not have.

The coffins, filled with the weighty dead mass, were pushed into the smoldering earth. The earth and wood crash against stone tore the air. The mourners lowered their heads, their incantations breaking over trembling lips, but Caspian and I didn't break.

I stood up and took his hand, my trembling fingers wrapping around him. Wordless, helpless act of resistance against the nothing-eating loneliness that hung over us like a ghost. Caspian's fingers wrapped around mine, fingers closing over locked, immovable. He did not let go.

We no longer weep. Sorrow had worn its path into our very bones, but tears would not change that it was over. Our pain was now different, something edged. It burned in our chests, not as frailty-but as determination.

This was only the beginning.

…

Caspian

I was numb, my fists clenched at my sides my nails cutting deep into the palms of my hands, stings creeping under my skin. But I welcomed it. I needed it. It was something to feel, something tangible in this wide vacant hollow within me. The cold stung my flesh, creeping up under my clothing like skeletal fingers, but I stirred not. I winced not.

My mother was dead.

The woman who had kept me gently under cover of the quietness of night time, who had breathed hope into the folds of my ear, who had caused me to imagine that there might be something more in the world than blood and war. She had tried to save me; well 'steal me' according to my father.

She had failed.

So had Genesis' mom.

To my left was Genesis, a damp forgotten doll, the bitter green of her eyes faded to something hollow, something unread. She had not moved since coffins had fallen, since earth covered them up completely. It was like she was silenced there, gagged under the weight of everything that she would never speak.

There was quiet, heavy and unbroken. The wind howled again, and no echo of conversation. Moretti men and Graves' men who had arrived to take the empire men, men who fought and perish for their names, stood before them with dropped heads, joined hands before them.

Then, finally, Richard Moretti's voice shattered the quiet, sharp and unyielding as a blade drawn across stone.

"We leave no room for weakness."

His dark eyes swept over the assembled men-his soldiers, his empire-weighing them, demanding from them the same resolve that burned inside him. His jaw was tight, his shoulders squared, but there was no grief in his expression. No mourning. Only a cold, simmering fury.

"We recover and protect ourselves."

His words were adamant.

"The empire has to be defended." His voice was commanding. "Our children must be defended."

But even as he spoke, even as he denounced at revenge with the rhythm of his commanding voice, Genesis stood beside her father and refused to look at him. For she already knew.

She was not to be defended.

She was to be exploited.

At his side stood my father, too, a pillar of unstated strength. Holland Graves never had to roar to be followed. He didn't. His position was enough. His eyes were impossible to read, a cold face sculpted out of years of hard decisions and fighting fought in the shadows. Too much spilled blood he'd seen, too many dead men buried, and now here he stood before me, and he'd do what had to be done one final time.

The wind shrieked through the graveyard, hammering my black hair, burning my skin with icy fingers. I did not look away. I did not flinch. Not when my father towered over me, not when his great, calloused hand struck against my shoulder.

"You're going, son," he growled in a low, unshakable voice, a sentence given with no expectation of appeal. "You'll be safe in London."

The words had slammed into my side.

I retracted my head, gasped, muscles tensed.

"No."

The word tumbled out on a whisper, trembling, shattering. And then, when shock set in, when hurt of rejection and loss gnawed inside me, my sorrow twisted itself into another shape-another shape that was ancient, feral. My heart pounded inside my ears, off-beat.

"No" I snarled, tearing myself loose from his grasp, my wiry body trembling with the violence of my rage. "I won't go! I need to stay! Mother said I had to take care of Genesis!"

I spat the words in splintered syllables at the last, my voice strained with despair.

Holland's countenance did not change, his voice unchanging. His fingers closed about my shoulder once more, but tighter this time, a bands of steel that would not yield.

"You will be given the opportunity to do that when you're grown," he said, his tone final. "Not now."

I struggled, every fiber of my being screaming against the command. My world was already crumbling-my mother was dead, my father was sending me away, and now-

I turned sharply, my frantic gaze landing on her.

Genesis stood there, watching.

Her blazing, green eyes were attracted to the unimaginable. Her expression was a mask, but the fists that she had bunched at her hips betrayed her. She hadn't screamed. She hadn't cried. But I saw it-the internal battle, the silence conflict between heartbreak and outrage.

"You're leaving?" she asked softly, pretending that she was calm.

My chest constricted, a dull escape of pain creeping over me. My mother's words were ringing in my head, a death whisper-she's yours now.

I swallowed hard around the lump rising up into my throat, my trembling hands at my sides.

"I'll be back," I snarled, my voice low. A promise. A vow.

Genesis did not utter a single word. She simply glared at me, her eyes fixed on mine, already committing my face to memory, already bracing herself against the possibility that she'd never lay eyes on me again.

I took another step closer, praying-hopeless-she'd wake up from this trance, tell me it was all some kind of dream.

But she didn't.

She did not sob.

My father's wounded men, dragging me back, pushing me away before I could fight, before I could stay.

"No! Let me go! Let me go!"

My words were carried off by wind, by fate's unrelenting procession.

Genesis stood still, unbroken, observing.

She would not look away until I was out of sight.

…

Genesis

I turned, regarding my father.

"And what of myself?" I asked.

Richard Moretti did not wince nor flinch. His black eyes regarded me, unseeing eyes but immovable, as if he had already committed himself to the task before him. No softness in his features, no regret, no grief. Only computation. Only weight of empire and responsibility.

"You'll stay at a convent," he spat harshly, as if what he'd just uttered wasn't still biting deep inside me. "Until you're called upon."

There. My fate.

I did not beg.

I just gazed at him, my breaths even, and my shoulders squared, my fists bunched up at my sides. If ever I'd ever been a child, I was one no more.

The wind howled in the graveyard, lashing at the hem of my jacket, nipping at the vulnerability of flesh beneath. All this heaviness pummeling over me like rocks-my mother's death, Caspian's departure-my father's harsh insistence;

but I would not break.