His Mafia Rose

17 years ago…

Daisy

As we were about to step out into the garden behind the west wing, for an instant the hush of the moment rested heavy, stifling, as if the air from the room had been pulled out. I hardly had a second to sense the crawling feeling of terror that had crawled up my spine before a crowd surged in.

They arrived with the accuracy of men that had been trained for this very task. A blur of motion passed by me; a fist, unyielding and cruel, crashed into Kia's ribcage. She was driven back, her breath puffed from her lips in a gasping hold. Fire blazed up her side, white and hot and searing, but no time to recall it, no space for anything but the next blow.

A Fist in a glove tore through my hair, fingers clamping like a vice in the strands and letting me fall. My knees crashed onto the marble with a crack that doubled me up and scorched pains up both legs. Agony in my scalp came afterward, after raw savagery of it, pitiless grip of hanging and jerking and hashing without mercy.

I struggled with the arms that pinned me against the floor, scratching through the fabric, through muscle. There had been a scream of pain from some other direction. I'd found something, but it would not be enough. I was outmanned. Outnumbered. And as Kia flailed in the grip of her assailant, I knew my fight would be pointless.

A kick in the spine. It had landed on my stomach, a hard merciless kick that had knocked the air from me. The ground whirled as I staggered over it, slippery with ice. Marble rolled across my skin, damp now with blood-warmth of it, with sweat, I suppose. My eyes protested and would not open for an instant of horribleness, only darkness, moving things, formless creatures, and the dull glint of metal.

Blood on my lips, thick, cold. I coughed, blood dropped down my chin, warm, but I couldn't stop to wipe it away. My body was already pushed toward defeat. Ropes around my wrists, tight and cruel, cutting into my skin with terrors. I squirmed, but the ropes cut more deeply, burning into my skin like fire. The harder I squirmed, the more pitiful I was. As if they wanted me to squirm, struggle, and watch how helpless I was.

I retreated in the safety of hurt as Kia fell, her body folding in on itself under the impact of another solid punch. There was a fist on the jaw and her head had spun around. There was a gagging crack in the air, and then she fell to the floor.

I wished to scream, to shout her name, but my voice was stolen. My throat seared, strangulated by blood, gasped in horror. My chest heaved up and down with each small breath as the men labored rapidly, effectively, so there could be no concealment.

Kia had stopped talking. Stopped breathing, almost. Her chest rising in slow, rigid breaths, her head dipping to rest against her chest as if the air was being drained from her. I saw it kill something within the core of my heart. This was real. This was not something that I would wake up to, something which would pass and leave me shaken but unbroken. This was real. And it wasn't real for just us.

…

Holland

Gunshots echoed in the distance, a crash smash that coursed through my body with another round of fear with each report. Screams echoed down the halls. Glass exploded. A scream tore the ballroom, a shriek-high and piercing yell, followed by the horrific crunch of something gigantic crashing onto the floor.

A shriek-screaming-high and piercing, slicing through the air like a serrated knife.

In the large parlor, where the betrothal had just been toasted, shots rang out. One, and another.

I looked out the window and saw my son and his fiancée-to-be make a dash for the woods before the noise of gunfire was heard.

The laughter stopped. Glasses were toasted from trembling hands and hit the floor with cold, clashing music. The beautiful song that had been found its throat and died. A guard stumbled through parlor doors, his shirt smeared in a splat of blood. His mouth began, but no sound was made. He jerked a grotesque marionette with cut strings, then fell face-first onto marble. His arms jerked once and remained still.

Wails erupted. Women clutched at their skirts, faces smeared in horrified fear. Men sprinted for weapons, upending chairs and tables in their demented scramble for metal. Gunpowder hung in the air like its acrid smell, a foul odor that signaled the beginning of some awful thing.

Richard and I were swept up in the struggle, wildly scanning around us, our hands instinctively reaching towards the guns we had instinctively shoved under our jackets. But before we could act, shots had already been fired.

The bullets found their target. We both collapsed, our legs giving way under us. My cane clattered to the floor, abandoned as I hugged my injured thigh, my face contorted in a scowl of anger and pain. Richard gasped in a similar manner as he staggered through the hysterical crowd, his hand covering the wound in his leg, the crimson blood flowing through his fingers.

….

Dominic

The air was thick and still, and full of rust and rot. It stuck to walls, to the hard damp concrete beneath them, to metal chairs that bit into their scarred flesh. The solitary, dimly lit burning bulb suspended overhead cast long, skeletal shadows across the walls of the cellar, deforming the two women bound beneath it. Kia and Daisy were bound, wrists chafed raw by the straps that bound them. Their own breaths were shallow, measured, but not with fear-no, what they felt was fury, burning and hot.

Carried as corpses from the great halls where they had marched in pride, they were thrown indiscriminately into this pit, their bodies bruised reminders of their torture and the cruel blows of their enemies-fists bursting in angry colors into their flesh, lips rent, and bones trembling with shock at each blow that had fallen upon them. But they did not beg. They did not cower. Their dignity had been forged over years of being able to know precisely what they were, and it remained unbroken even as blood pooled around them.

She moved, the bite of the restraints on her wrists stinging. Her lip ached, ripped open by the impact of a backhand, but she hardly noticed. Instead, she turned her head, gathering enough blood and spit in her mouth before she spat onto the cold floor. Her voice, raw from fatigue and bruising, was lethal.

"Do you know who the fuck we are?" she growled, her eyes blazing with something bestial. I emerged from the shadows, moving slowly, quietly-as a killer savors the instant before he kills. The faint cracking of the leather gloves folding over my knuckles broke the stillness, accompanied by the slow, deliberate revolving of the knife off the ghostly light. Dominic Fernandez. A title they'd all relegated to the years that did not matter, one of the Spanish mafia exiles, a man whose power had been stripped from him and left to perish in exile. And there I was, smiling, my attitude conveying the confidence of a man who'd already charted their destinies.

"Yes," I panted, my voice full of awe. "That's why you're here." I said looking straight at the Moretti Queen.

Kia's fingers curled into fists, her nails biting into her palms as she straightened in her seat, her jaw set so tightly it felt like her teeth would shatter. Her gaze was fire and ice, cutting through the dimness with pure, undiluted hatred. "You're a dead man walking," she spat, her voice devoid of fear, layered instead with a certainty that made the air feel electric.

I grinned, a slow, half-hearted one that seemed to echo off the basement like the beginning of something irresponsible. "Perhaps," I thought, turning my wrist, the knife slipping in my palm. "But you wouldn't kill me first." I turned towards Daisy and gripped her arm in my hand.

I cut slowly-deliberately in the first cut. My knife sank into Daisy's arm, cutting through skin and muscle with a precision that testified to sharpened cruelty. Blood welled up at once, thick and hot, running down her forearm in slow, shining rivulets. She breathed through her nose quickly, her teeth sunk into her jaw to stop screaming. She would not give me that. She would not give me the pleasure.

Kia tugged at the ropes, hands and wrists searing where the ropes bit into her, but she wasn't about to quit. She didn't mind. Her breathing was harsh and coarse, her head a maelstrom of possibilities, with figures, with something that would extricate them from this. But possibilities were never their method. Not anymore.

Daisy's breathing was uneven, but she raised her chin, her eyes struggling despite the fact that blood leaked out of the cut. She inhaled deeply, deliberately, before she could muster a smirk of her own. "You cut like a coward," she croaked out, her voice raw but laced with contempt.

My expression didn't shift, but the second slash wasn't as precise. It was deeper, more ferocious, cutting into the muscle with sadistic abandon. Daisy's body convulsed against the restraints, her fingers clenching in shock at the hurt, but she didn't break. Kia jerked back her head, gasping for breath at the sight of the deep, raw slash running the length of Daisy's arm in scarlet. Her anger intensified.

They would not beg. They would not plead. They were mafia queens, and they had long understood that this was something on the table. Death had loomed over their lives since they could remember.

I backed up a step, admiring my work like an artist would admire a painting. And then, sighing, I crept in closer.

Kia wrestled with the restrictive cuffs on her wrists on cold metal of the chair, the coarse fabric biting into flesh, searing the skin with heat, pounding channels brimful of yielding red. She bled from her hands down her arms through torn fabric of her sleeves. She did not yield. The agony did not count. The idiocy of trying to fight at all did not count. She was bred for war, conditioned for this sort of thing. Nothing-discipline, iron resolve-could have prepared her for this, though.

I watched Daisy reflect her disdain, her own grip no less unbreakable. Her lip was drawn taut, purple from earlier strikes, and fresh blood started down the side of her jaw, but black eyes still flamed with intransigent fury. She spat onto the barren gray concrete floor, the crimson blood and spit on the bleak color a contrast. "Do you think this scares us? You'll scream yourself to death first before we will."

I erupted into a tightly wound laugh, releasing my fingers from their hold on the knife still clutched in my hand. I edged in closer, the muffled scrape of metal on cloth as I fidgeting with the blade between gloved palms. "A shame," I whispered, edging into position in front of Kia. "I did not think it would have gone this far my love. You should have stayed on schedule."

Kia's glare was white-hot, searing even as the blade tip touched the underside of her jaw, cold metal pressed into the sensitive skin there. "Fuck off," she spat, unbreakable even to the sharp bite of the blade. My own lips curled into something less than a sneer or a smirk-something more like thinking. And then, with a motion so silky it hardly was one of elegance, the knife followed the line of her throat.

After their corpses had been covered in individual bags, nothing remained of the savage women once who ruled with merciless will but a drop of blood on the ground and the otherworldly aroma of their revolt. I shrugged and sheathed my sword, moving back to look upon the destruction. They were admired. They were feared. They were both admired and feared. Now they were only the remnants of something now already forgotten to oblivion.

The creaking door to the basement, cold night winds rushing in. The bags were dragged, pulled out with ease. And in the silence that remained, the blood kept seeping, the walls kept whispering, and the shadows kept talking of tomorrow.