Livia
The car speeds through the city at what feels like the speed of light, surging through traffic lights. All the while, Mom screams at the top of her voice: “Fretta! Fretta! Fretta!” We sit in the back and she grips my hands, squeezing them so hard I feel the blood circulation cutting off. Mom, usually a glamorous and marble-like woman, rarely revealing her true emotions unless they’re disdain or disappointment or the constant desire for me to find a husband, is now unhinged and desperate. She looks at me with red eyes, panting.
All around us, the Italian mob are crammed into the large four-by-four, the smell of whisky and cigarette smoke from the bar thick in the air. Mom digs her fingernails into my hands and I try and dislodge them, but she just keeps squeezing.
“It was that Irishman,” Mom breathes. “It was. I know it was. Oh, God, that Irishman!”
“I don’t think—”
Mom barrels over me, ignoring my words. “It was that Irishman!”
Finally, we arrive at the alleyway behind the country club. Mom kicks the door open with her expensive stiletto and runs out into the street, for once not thinking about how she must look to everybody around her. She spins in a circle, searching the dumpsters, the trash-covered concrete. Finally, her gaze comes to rest on a dumpster a few feet away. I follow her, look down. Aedan puts his arm around Dad and helps him to his feet. Dad’s eyes are opening and closing and his chest rises and falls shallowly, as though he can’t get enough air in. Aedan holds Dad up, much as he held me up that night, the last time we saw each other, and carries him toward the car. Mom rushes forward. I follow, and together we help Aedan bring Dad to the car.
“Was it this brute, my love?” Mom demands, holding Dad’s head in her hands. “Was it this brute?”
“It was the Mexicans, ma’am—”
“Don’t you dare talk to me, you animal!” Mom roars, and I wince; she sounds exactly how I did a couple of weeks ago.
We carry Dad to the car, limp in our arms, and lay him in the backseat. Mom climbs in after, and before anyone can do anything, I follow a sudden impulse and slam the door. The driver, taking this as a sign that they’re ready to get the don to a doctor, screeches out of the alleyway, leaving me, Aedan, and five Italians. Tony, Sebastian, Michael, Steve, and Joseph, all of them with slicked-back hair, all of them with murder in their eyes.
Aedan backs against the wall, leaning down, hands on his knees.
“You got our boss shot,” Tony says, a wide-bellied man with three gold chains drooping on his hairy, exposed chest, his shirt buttons all the way down to his midriff. “You got our boss shot, man. Do you think we can let that slide?”
“It was the Mexicans,” Aedan says. He waves a hand in the direction the golf course. “Go and check. I got three of ’em…the trees, the little wooded area over that way.”
Tony turns to Sebastian, a skinny runt with a tribal tattoo crawling up his neck, and Joseph, an old man with slit eyes and a nose which has been broken dozens of times, all squashed and mangled. “Go and check, we need to see if Peter Pan here is telling the truth.”
I stand off to one side, watching. I don’t think Aedan would’ve shot Dad, but I have to remind myself that I don’t know him, not really. I met him once and we went on a date and I got too drunk—that’s all. As far as actually knowing the man goes, as far as having any small insight into who he really is, I’m ignorant. He’s just a man, just a man I almost had sex with, nothing more, nothing less.
He looks up through the Italians’ shoulders and meets my gaze. I look away. His dark eyes are too alluring, too vulnerable-yet-strong; a strong protective urge rises in me when he looks at me like that. You’re a Russo, I remind myself, and Bruno Russo just got shot, and this man might have something to do with it. Don’t forget that, never forget that.
“What do you say, Peter Pan?” Tony says, standing over Aedan. “Why don’t you admit to it now? Save us all some fucking time.”
“Have you heard of me, man?” Aedan says. “’Cause if you have, you’d know I wouldn’t be so goddamn sloppy that I’d shoot a man in the leg and then let him call for help. Goddamn.”
“Maybe it’s a ploy,” Tony says, and the Italians around him nod in agreement. “Maybe it’s some clever trick, thought up by that prick Patty. We’ve all heard about Patty and his clever ways. Everyone knows he’s working with the Mexicans.”
“That’s not true,” Aedan says simply.
Michael, the kindest of the five, a rake-thin, kind-faced man with a bowl cut, approaches me and says quietly, “You might want to take a walk, Livia, Ms. Russo, at least to the end of the alleyway. This might get ugly.”
I look at him with steel in my eyes. “I’m staying,” I say, and he backs away from me.
It’s like there’s a battle being fought within my chest. One side wants nothing more than to leap into the fray and throw my arms around Aedan, but another side knows that this would be a foolish, absurd thing to do, considering that Aedan is Irish and I’ve only ever met him once before. But that meeting was sweeter and more fun and hotter than a hundred with other men, wasn’t it? And if you’ve met him once before, you’ve thought of him thousands of times since. He’s made a bed in your mind and every time you close your eyes you see him, naked, ready to pounce on you, ready to take you.
My body is a traitor. Even now, lust grips me, even when Dad’s been shot, even when all I should be thinking about is whether or not he’s going to be okay. What’s the matter with me? I wonder, as I find myself tracing Aedan’s arms.
Sebastian and Joseph jog back into the alleyway. Aedan stands up to his full height, dusting his hands off on his jeans, as though this is a settled matter now that they’re back.
“There were no bodies,” Sebastian said.
“What the fuck?” Aedan says. “That’s not possible.”
“You Peter Pan motherfucker!” Tony roars, pulling out his gun. He takes a step back, aiming it, and then gestures with the barrel. “Boys, show this Peter Pan motherfucker what happens to men who hurt our don.”
“Ask Bruno,” Aedan says, his voice calm, as though there’s not a gun pointed at his head. “Call up Bruno and ask him. It was only a flesh wound. He’ll be able to tell you the truth. Or, better still, go find the security.” He tilts his head as sirens fill the air. “Or wait for the police to come and arrest me, and then wait for them to let me go when it’s proven I only killed three men in self-defense.”
“Talk pretty fancy for an Irish Peter Pan fuck, don’t you?”
All of them lay into Aedan, Tony leading the attack by battering Aedan with the hilt of his gun. The only person who doesn’t get involved is Michael, who stands off to one side, looking uncertainly at the mess of blood and tangled limbs. I flinch, jump back, and watch in horror as Aedan is battered here and there, his eyebrow splitting, his cheek bruising, blood pouring tear-like down his cheeks. I gasp and scream and yelp as Aedan is thrown all around the alleyway. Finally, he collapses, and they start kicking him, over and over, the sound so sickening I feel bile rise in my throat.
He shot Dad, I think. He must have. But then…oh, look at them! He’s not even fighting back and look at them!
I try and fight the urge, try and tell myself that he’s just a man I don’t know and I owe him nothing, try and tell myself I don’t give a damn about him, not one single damn, but the sound of his grunts, quiet and reserved, are too much to handle.
Clenching my fists and wondering at myself, I take a step forward. “Stop!” My voice cuts through the air.
At once, the men stop, taking a collective step back, Tony chuckling meanly from deep in his throat. Aedan presses his fist against the concrete and pushes himself to his feet, bleeding from a dozen cuts. He stands up straight, squinting at the men, body thrumming with rage. He could take them, I think, as he watches them with his dark eyes. If he wanted to, he could take them. Looking at him, you can’t doubt it. He looks like a lion staring down a group of cubs.
“This man shot your father,” Tony sneers. I’ve always hated Tony. What kind of asshole wears three gold chains? “Why the hell would we stop?”
“The sirens, for one thing,” I say. “And…” Inspirations strikes me. “Michael.”
The kind-faced man nods.
“Go and check the forest. Be quick.”
“There’s no need for that—” The panic in Joseph’s voice only serves to make me more confident.
Michael runs away, and for two or three minutes, the scene is frozen, Aedan lifting the fabric of his t-shirt and wiping down his face, the sirens getting louder in the air. Then, Michael returns. He glances at Joseph, shaking his head. “There’re dead men in the forest,” he says quietly.
I march up to Tony, hands shaking, and stare him straight in the eyes. “You’re a fucking animal,” I spit. “Get the hell out of here. Or stay, and let the police take you. But I’m taking Aedan home.”
“He’s an Irish—”
“Say one more word,” I tell him, lips trembling. I let them beat him. I just stood there and let it happen. I just stood by and watched like it was no big deal as the man who saved my father’s life was beat within an inch of his. “Please, Tony, say one more word.”
“Come on, man,” Joseph mutters, grabbing at Tony’s arm. “You don’t wanna fight with Ms. Russo. Don’t be an idiot.”
Tony holds my gaze and for a moment, I think he’s going to do something stupid, but then he stuffs his gun into his waistband and nods.
“Let’s go, fellas. Do you need a ride?”
“Um…” Good point, I think.
“I’ll get us a car,” Aedan says, and then spits a blob of blood onto the floor.
“That works,” I say.
Tony shakes his head, and then the men leave the alleyway.
I go to Aedan. Without giving any thought to what I’m going—to the ramifications of standing up for an Irishman in front of a group of Italians—I put my arm around him and help him out of the alleyway.
As he limps, he takes his cell from his pocket and holds it to his ear, sorting the car for us.
When he’s done, he mutters: “It’s good to see you, Livia.”
I swallow. You, too, I think but don’t say.