Page 1 of Mafia Scars

Chapter 1

Amelia

* * *

10 years and 9 months ago…

I buried my mother today.

I couldn’t believe it. It actually happened. One of my biggest fears in life. Losing her and going through the living nightmare of burying her. Putting her into the ground and watching everything that I’d ever cherished fade away.

She was my everything.

Things weren’t supposed to be like this.

It was all wrong.

All of it, every last piece of my life.

Last year this time, I was so happy. So very happy. I thought I must have been experiencing the epitome of my life.

Epitome.It was a word Madame Bouglaise used when she told our class how she felt when she first got accepted to the Bolshoi Ballet.

She’d been prima ballerina for years but told our little group that while that was amazing, what had been best and the highlight of her life, was getting the chance and the opportunity when she was first accepted.

It was that classic phrase,I know I can do it if I just get a chance.

That was how I felt as I’d entered the grand halls of Julliard last year at the Lincoln Centre.

I’d just been told I’d been accepted to start my training there for this coming September. My parents and I had been invited to a ‘Come and See day.’ It was an event Julliard did so the following year’s intake of students could get a taster of what life would be like within its talented walls. I’d loved it. I’d absolutely loved it.

I knew I could be prima ballerina. I could be the best dancer, the star of any show, but what I relished was the chance.

The opportunity.

It was so much the better to have my mother there. I’d never seen her look so proud. She was beaming. Face radiant with happiness and love. Excitement for me.

Excitement for what I would become.

I remembered the day so well, but that was all it would ever be. A memory. A memory of what could have been.

September was only two months away. I looked around my beautiful bedroom, fit for a princess, and tears welled up within me.

I wasn’t going to Julliard. I couldn’t, not after everything. I thought it would have made a great eighteenth birthday present, since I was going to be eighteen the same week I started. Seemed so trivial to think of things like birthdays now.

My world had changed and shifted into darkness the day my mother died. Exactly two weeks ago today. I still couldn’t believe it.

Two weeks ago, I’d come home after hanging out with my friends to see a police car pulled up on the drive. I hadn’t even parked my own car properly. Knowing and feeling something was terribly wrong, I parked next to the police and sprinted inside the house, where I got the news.

There’d been a shootout at the docks, and my mother had gotten caught in the crossfire.

I was still having trouble processing the explanation.

A myriad of questions had raced through my mind when I first heard. Questions that still hadn’t been answered. What was my mother doing at the docks? She had no reason to be there. I couldn’t have begun to conjure up why, and not knowing was killing me.

But the void of knowledge was the least of my worries. Bigger things had come my way.

I’d lost one parent, and it seemed that I was on the way to losing another.