Lorenzo

I had gone to college. That meant I had options.

A lot of things had changed since I had gotten married, and I was prepared to have to make changes, but if I was honest, I didn’t think I’d be debating a career change. Up to this point, I thought I had done pretty well with all the changes that had come my way. There might have been some growing pains in the beginning, but I was getting married. It wasn’t supposed to be easy and smooth. Though admittedly, a little effort for me could have made the transition for Isa, for both of us, really, much easier and smoother.

I had been a dick. A capital asshole. And Isa, the poor girl, hadn’t deserved a minute of it. I had made her quit her job and work around the house. I was rude and bossy. No wonder she never wanted to have sex. I was unbearable. It didn’t matter though because that was all in the past now. I was upset about the sudden change and still sore about my father using me as a pawn in his little fight with Alfonso D’Agostino.

I was reformed. There was no more space for that because I had to concentrate on being the sort of man that Isa wanted and deserved. Our parents and tradition and whatever the hell else aside, I was in service to her now. I was her husband, and that meant that she was my number one priority.

If it was a competition, she trumped everything, including the business my family and I had been in forever. The first time the thought came to me, it shook me a little because it was so foreign. The more I thought about it, however, the more attractive it started to sound to me. So what if ‘Montorini’ was an infamous New York mafia crime family name. I was a man of many talents and abilities. If I had to, I could get into something else. Nothing that was specialized like law or medicine, but something else, on the straight and narrow.

I was generally employable and could work a nine to five if I really had to to put food on that table. Like I said, I had been to college. Even if I hadn’t gone, we had enough money to support us for years and years to come in the event that anything was to happen.

Because let's face it, anything could happen.

That was the life that I had always lived—and that was the way that Isa had been forced to live since she had met me. However, just because it was the only way I knew, didn’t mean it was the only way there was or the best way there was.

It definitely wasn’t the best way there was, that went without saying. Just because our families had lived this way for generations didn’t mean we had to, too. That wasn’t a good enough reason, not when there was a chance that I could lose my wife or our baby because the people around us were reckless with their bullets and didn’t care about who was killed as long as it made the right people mad.

I didn’t have to do it, and the fact was that nobody could make me do it. I didn’t even really want to do it all that much. Besides, the fact that I had grown up with underground organized crime as the center of my life didn’t mean that it had to remain a part of my life. Technically, I hadn’t chosen it for myself, my parents had. It was just something that was decided for me when I was born, like the fact that I was going to be raised Catholic. It wasn’t something that I had chosen, but it was something I had been expected to maintain and accept because it had been a part of my life for my whole life. I hadn’t been to Mass in years, and I didn’t have to be part of the mob. There were other ways to live, just because I hadn’t experienced them didn’t mean they were necessarily any worse than the way I was now.

We were generations deep in the shit. I was in it. My father was in it. His dad, my grandfather was and his father before him, too. If my father was to believed, our family’s involvement started with the mob’s genesis, back in the 1800s. Maybe he was full of shit, but in case he wasn’t, it was important to think about what I was potentially giving up. Years, decades... over a hundred years of just the dirtiest money you could imagine. That was what had made us.

It was more than just the career of choice that all the Montorini men before me had taken on. It was a legacy. It was a family history, and there was a lot of pride and identity connected to it. Was I ready to give it all up?

The short answer was yes. Fuck yes, I was.

What could possibly be worse than living with the constant threat that something or someone was coming after the person you loved. The only way this could possibly be worse was if we lived in the middle of a war zone.

How the hell had my father done it? Did he have to go through all this when he was marrying my mother and I was born? How did any of them do it? Was there never anyone before me who had gone through this same contemplation? Was there not a single one of my descendants who had just said enough was enough and tapped out of the whole shit?

This was unbearable. I had never worried about something, about another person so much. What about when the baby came? Would we have to sit the kid down one day and explain to them why they have to lie about what their daddy does for a living to their little school friends? Would we raise them the way that Isa had grown up? Oblivious until the day they are forced to get married to someone they don’t even know for the sake of a feud that they had nothing to do with?

It was enough. My limit had been reached; here it was. I could just dismiss it all as regular business until the point that the lives of my wife and my kid were endangered. I couldn’t even think about Isa and the baby in danger without feeling sick to my stomach. If I lost one, I would lose the other. The baby wasn’t born yet and couldn’t survive outside of Isa’s body.

What the fuck was I supposed to do if I lost her?

There would be nothing. Nothing.

I had never had anything in my life that I wanted to protect so much. Everything was expendable because I would give everything up in order to keep Isa and the baby safe and close to me. I thought about my father briefly and what he would think when I told him what I wanted to do. He had forced me into a marriage that I hadn’t wanted, so it was safe to say that he still had a pretty strong impact on my life and actions, but this was going to be one of those non-negotiables. I wanted out. I wanted whatever was safest—and as far as I could tell and see, that was leaving.

Leaving, really leaving, was what I wanted to do.

Somewhere far. Italy, France, somewhere we had to cross an ocean to get to. Somewhere where people had to cross an ocean to get to us. Would Isa go for it? She had lived abroad before, but would she want to again, and with me?

Once I was out, I wanted to be out. We would be able to start again, for real, without our parents and the mob and her family and my family and everything else that stood in our way. We could be a normal married couple, raising our child and living our lives together. The thought was intoxicating. I had never lived any other way than this, but the thought of waking up every day and never having to wonder whether I was going to die that day, or my wife, or my child... it was freeing. I wanted it. The mob could suck my dick. I had bigger things to worry about.

Getting married the way we had... I had hated it in the beginning. I thought it was an insult. I hated that my father respected me that little. I hated being that week underneath him. What the hell gave him the right to make that kind of decision for me? It drove me crazy. It also didn’t help that Isa likely felt the same way. She used to look at me like I was the last person on the earth that she wanted to be around. When we talked, it was like two people trying to make a long elevator ride a little less awkward. I was mad and she was mad.

Now, I couldn’t imagine being married to anyone else. She was my world. My vows to her that we had exchanged at the wedding had ended up being the truest things I had ever uttered. I was ready to leave the only life I had ever known for her. I was ready to make myself into a passable excuse for a husband and father for her. She was my now; she was my future; and she was the best thing I could have asked for. Whatever she wanted and needed was what I was ready to provide, whatever it was. She had not asked me to leave the mob, but I hoped slightly that that would be one of her requests. I could probably count on her to ask me to leave. She liked the shit even less than I did. She hadn’t even known that she and her people were major players until a few months ago. With any luck she would ask me to step down, and we could just tell the life and this city a nice big fuck you and get out of here.

Isa... God, I loved her.

Maybe my father hadn’t foreseen us actually falling in love, but that was what the fuck had happened. We had fallen in love and now the way we lived was about to jeopardize the happiness that we hadn’t even gotten to experience yet. There was no way I was losing her. Things were just turning around, and then this shit had had to happen.

What was keeping me with her now?

If her father was gone, did that mean the deal he and my dad had struck when the two of us married was officially null and void? Did that invalidate our whole marriage if one of them was no longer in the picture? Did they expect us to do something? Split up, or anything like that? Because it wasn’t happening.

She had all the reasons in the world to leave—and she hadn’t. I wanted to give her reasons to stay because I didn’t want to be without her, not since I had experienced what being with her was like.

She had told me that she loved me, but if the only thing that was really keeping her at my side was the agreement that our fathers had made, she had reason to leave now. The news had nearly knocked her dead, and there was no telling what was going on with her day by day. I hoped I was doing the right thing. I wanted to be there for her and support her, but I wasn’t sure I knew how. I had never wanted or needed or loved a woman like I did Isa.

Who was I kidding, she had all the reason in the world to leave. She was completely heartbroken—and it was my fault. Maybe she would just leave to spare herself the trauma that was surely in store if she stayed with me. I had no idea what I was doing, or if it would matter at the end of the day. I couldn’t read her, and she could hardly give me anything back. I was desperate. I was willing to give up many things, but not her.

I had grown up knowing this about my family my whole life, why was this making me so nervous? Not only was there the baby and Isa; there was Isa’s people, too. Her father was dead; her mom had become a widow. She had family in Jersey, who whether they were in the business or not, were targets now. If they could go for the head, Alfonso, what was stopping them from going for anyone lower on the totem pole?

There was still work to do, even if I wanted out, making a clean break was harder than it seemed. You couldn’t just leave. I thought about Isa’s mother. The last and maybe the only time we had talked was at the wedding. Maybe we had chatted a couple times before that. She wasn’t exactly as on board with the whole thing, but like Isa, it wasn’t like she had had much of a choice in the matter.

We had gotten closer during the last couple of months, out of necessity more than anything. I doubted her estimation of me had risen, but I was the person who was making sure her daughter was alright in all this, so it was a necessary evil. She didn’t talk to me like she hated me, but she didn’t really do it like we were friends either.

I couldn’t have just abandoned her. This was my fault. Someway, somehow I knew it was. It had to be. Shit like this didn’t just come from nowhere. Isa’s life had become significantly harder as soon as I had shown up in it, and I owed it to her and the people that it was affecting to at least act as if I gave a fuck.

Mrs. D’Agostino took a minute to answer the phone when I called her.

“Hello?” she said.

“Mrs. D’Agostino? How are you?” I asked her. She had never come to me making any pretense that she liked the idea of having a son-in-law. My mother had fallen in love with Isa, but Mrs. D’Agostino... let’s just say that she wasn’t encouraging me to call her “Mom.”

“Fine, how are you?” she said sedately. It was the voice of the weary widow, the one that she had had to use the whole two months, talking to people offering her condolences that she was sick of receiving.

“I’m okay. I wanted to know whether everything was fine. I’ve had a patrol around your house since Alfonso passed. You haven’t had any trouble, or noticed anything suspicious have you?”

She was silent for a beat.

“Oh, I thought you knew,” she said to me.

Knew? Knew what. That was never good. I didn’t like not knowing something that I was expected to know because that meant that someone was a step ahead of me—and that was always a bad thing.

“What’s been going on? Has something happened?”

“Well,” she sighed, “I didn’t think to tell you sooner because I thought it would blow over by itself before it got to be an actual problem.”

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck raise.

“What do you mean? Mrs. D’Agostino, are you in trouble?” I asked.

She made a sound that sounded like a yawn. She had completely tapped out. I didn’t think she had a single part of her that still cared what happened to her since her husband had died.

“I mean, I’ve been hearing things, Lorenzo. There was a man who came by the house offering his condolences. He said that Valentino needed to watch his back.”

Valentino was one of Isa’s uncles. I closed my eyes and rubbed them with my hands. God dammit.

“He’s been calling me. He says he’s gotten phone calls warning him that someone is after him. That his brother was first and that he will be next,” she said.

“Does he know who the phone calls are from?” I asked her.

“No. Whoever is contacting him never said.”

I wanted to tell her that I could do something about it. It was too late to try and tell her that I knew all this shit and I was already on it. I wasn’t. Someone had cut me off at the pass, and that person was trying to get my attention. That had to be it. I was at the center of all of this because what the hell else could be the answer? Isa was innocent. It was her involvement with me that caused her all this stress. I told her mother that I would look into it and immediately placed a call to Filippo.

How many people were going to have to die because Isa and I had gotten married? The number currently was one—and that was already too many. There wasn’t enough time to call a meeting, but I could talk to Filippo. I could have asked him to come to the house but Campania was closer.

He showed up about fifteen minutes after I had arrived.

“What can you tell me about Valentino D’Agostino?” I asked him, skipping the niceties completely.

“Mrs. D’Agostino’s been getting guys telling her that he’s next,” he said simply. I tried very hard not to let my outrage show on my face. In knew I was on my way out, but when did that mean they would completely leave me out of the loop?

“Why is this the first that I’ve heard about this?” I asked him.

“We couldn’t come to you before we had a name or at least an idea of who it was,” he said. He had a point. Regardless, I was mad.

“Well, what's taking you so long?” I snapped. I had no right to ride his ass about this, but this was serious. “That’s my wife’s uncle. When were you planning on finding out who it is? Hm? After he was dead? After her mother was dead? After she was dead?” I asked.

“We’re doing the best we can, boss. Whoever it is, it’s not someone we’ve dealt with before.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it isn’t one of the likely suspects. The guys you can bank on to be up to something just ain’t involved. It’s someone new. Someone different.”

I sat back in my seat and swore.

“Whoever it is, I expect you to tell me soon. You can't act like this isn’t urgent. I need answers.”

I let Filippo go and made my way back to my car. This was going to be a lot harder than I originally thought. My phone rang suddenly. I picked the phone up and saw it was Isa. I was surprised, pleasantly surprised. The last two months had been hellish for her; it was good that she wanted to talk to me. I wanted to talk to her. The slight feeling that something was wrong ran through me as I picked the call up.

“Babe?”

“Lorenzo?” It was good to hear her voice. It was hard to feel like she was still there a lot of the time because she was so depressed. I hated seeing her like that, and to be honest, it was hard. She wasn’t there, and I didn’t want to use that as an excuse to try and get what I needed from another person, but it was still difficult. She was doing what she could, and I couldn’t imagine what she was going through. I hadn’t lost my father, she had. She was also coming off the drama with the pictures and Elissa. She didn’t deserve all of this. If anything, I was going to find the guy who had done this to her so that I could break his neck personally.

“How are you, Isa. Is everything okay?” I asked.

“You won’t guess who just came to visit.” She was right, I couldn’t. Had she had someone over? Was it Marina? She sounded different than she had been sounding lately, a little more alive if you know what I mean. All the same, the way she said it made my guard rise; something made me feel that I wouldn’t like what she was about to tell me.

“It was Bachelorette number one, Elissa.”

I rolled my eyes. Something really had to be said for Elissa’s determination. Now I was less inclined to call it determination and more inclined to call it obsession. Obsession with me and Isa and the life that she thought she was going to get as my wife. She was really a piece of work. After the pictures? After sending pictures of her and I having sex with the intention of breaking up my marriage, she still felt she had any right to walk her ass into our home for any reason?

After clearing up the picture situation with Isa, I had talked to her—on the phone because I didn’t want to see her again. One more thing. One more act of harassment towards my wife or to me and the police were getting involved. It didn’t even matter what. Whatever we had to do to get her legally obligated to leave us the fuck alone, that was what it was going to be. She was more than a pest. She was endangering my marriage and she was stressing Isa out. If anything happened to Isa and the baby because of her, I wouldn’t know what to do. She had begun calling me again, and I had blocked her number because it was no longer a number I needed for any reason.

She might have been able to be my friend at one point, but she had shown that she was definitely not. Isa didn’t care for her, and it wasn’t like she’d be the person either one of us would think to call if we ever needed a babysitter in the future, or wanted a friend to housesit for us in case we traveled. No. She was most likely fucking around again, trying to start trouble—and I couldn’t have it.

“She was asking for you, screaming that you weren’t getting back to her, and she was mad about it. But then she saw my stomach and she suddenly ran away. She didn’t know?”

“Nope,” I said. “Why would she. She isn’t a friend or family.” In reality, very few people knew. I had ended up telling my father when I saw him, but otherwise, just our mothers knew. It wasn’t something that needed to be broadcasted, not that I wasn’t proud and happy about it. I was. Other people, however, might not be—and that wasn’t a risk that I was about to take with Isa or with the baby.

“Could you come back home?” she asked. If Isa had wanted me to come to her and she was half way around the world—right then—I would have done it. This was what it was about. She was my family now. She was my world and whatever she needed, I was going to do it.

“I’ll be right there.”