Page 2 of Mafia Scars

My father was…

He was beside himself when he first found out about my mother. That was natural and normal. I was beside myself too, and still hadn’t stopped crying.

But him. God. I’d seen a side of him that I didn’t know existed and that opened my eyes to the truth about my family.

I thought we’d gained our riches simply from developing and selling real estate. However, something more sinister was at work.

I saw it happen in movies, heard stories on the news about crime families. The mafia. Mafia families like inTheGodfatherandGoodfellas.

What I didn’t know was that I was a part of one.

I was seventeen years old. I’d lived for seventeen years on this earth and never knew that. Never had an ounce of a clue that something didn’t feel right or seem right. Everything had seemed normal to me until that night when we found out about Mom.

That same night, men who I’d never seen before, came to the house after the police left. Men who you could tell straightaway were bad news.

Dad tried to get me to stay in my room, but I needed him. I went to my room, but came back downstairs to hear raised voices.

Dad was saying that he was going to kill someone, and the men had been reeling off names.

I heard one of them sayagent.

I didn’t think they meant to actually kill anyone, but something told me that I was wrong.

I hid in the closet in the room next to my father’s office until they left and I was sure he’d gone up to bed. After that, I took the chance to sneak into his office that was always,alwaysoff limits.

I’d thought it was because he was particular, but it wasn’t.

I snooped around, getting sucked in by the pull of curiosity. I snooped until I found a secret button under the rim of his mahogany desk and watched in complete shock as his bookcase opened up, revealing rows of guns, grenades, and other weapons I couldn’t describe.

The shock made me careless because the drumming of my heart deafened me, so I didn’t hear him come up behind me, catching me in the act of snooping.

We had such a big argument. Such a terrible argument. However, it was more him freaked out that I’d found out about his secret and yelling at me, telling me that I shouldn’t have invaded his privacy and that I needed to keep quiet about it. All the while I kept asking him why he had the guns and what it all meant.

The night had ended with me going to my room in tears, in pain.

Things weren’t the same after.

And they still weren’t.

I was in my room now, waiting. Waiting for I didn’t know what. We’d come back from the cemetery four hours ago, and night had fallen.

My door opened, and Millicent came inside. She’d been my nanny and our head housekeeper since I was born. I was too old for a nanny now, but she still took care of me like always. Truthfully, she was the one thing that kept me going in this whole nightmare.

She carried a tray with milk and cookies like she used to when I was little. She’d always end her shift with the notion, and often the cookies were ones she’d made.

I forced a smile I really didn’t feel.

“Amelia, please eat these,” she pleaded.

I was already so thin, and I hadn’t eaten properly since Mom’s death. A nibble here and there of bread maybe. Other than that, I didn’t have an appetite for anything.

My eyes fell to the softness of the plush cream carpet that surrounded my feet. I was sitting by the window with my knees hugged to my chest, just watching nothing outside.

I couldn’t eat the cookies, as great as they smelled.

Millicent came up to me with them and set the tray down on the nightstand next to me.

“I’m not hungry,” I told her.