Your Call

Chapter Eleven

A cold pain stated mind. Everyone owned one of those, something that you couldn't even dream of. Everyone had the potential to lose themselves. Locked away in a tower or castle of their own imagination or the terrors within them. A scared little girl cowering on her way home. A silent ride, and an even longer one.

The car felt like it had driven for hours before it stopped the big villa greeting us. The beach waves crashed, and the rain begun to pour. I wanted to be back home in New York. I was escorted into this smaller room, nothing too scary of the sort. An older bed, some dusty books and an old lamp. Marco throws me in there, he follows closing the door behind me. "Then let's really sit down and talk. What do you have to say now, hm?" He questions beginning to use a scare tactic using his body against mine.

    "If you are asking me to lay my guard down I won't". I continue to up a facade that I don't know how much longer I could keep it up. "I couldn't care less on what you could or couldn't do." He grabs my hand flipping the palm and examining a scar I had lining it. "So, you are a traitor".

He claims flipping my hand back over. "An initiation made over ten years ago doesn't mean anything." I spoke his eyes trying to find something out to pick. "Who did you belong to?" He asks I look up confidently, "to every better man in this world. I worked with over hundreds of men, but I've only had twenty-six that have kept me. I can't remember who gave this to me or I'd say it". I knew exactly who it was, my father cutting my palm open as I screamed and cried, pouring my blood down on a piece of paper when I turned eight.

The haunting night flashed through my mind and some part of me wanted nothing more than to run back into my room and hide under my covers. Valentina my mother stares at her husband trying to make sense of why he would even do this. Over a fire my palm is slowly being roasted and burned just by staying there for too long.

A switch blade held in his hand ready to pierce skin. His lowered closer towards my palm, "Alonzo she's too young for this". Valentina speaks up staring at him. My father looks right back up at his wife almost glaring through her. She was his object, a giver to this world. With one purpose to serve him. He married her young and continued to make her into the mold she is today. Rarely did she ever talk back to my father.

Her long curly hair tied back her brown eyes trying to plead a case. Almost puppy dog like, "My Love, please she's only a baby". Her thick Cuban accent rolling off the tongue, his eyes never faltered to demean her being. "You don't get a say in what happens I run this fucking house". He grits his teeth she looks at him and sighs. "She's our daughter Turo please have some mercy on her". She talks back, my father lets the knife fall back into his pocket.

He takes strides towards his wife before backhanding her, she turns wincing, her entire cheek glowing a bright red. He hadn't held back when it even came to the one, he loved. "Now let me fucking continue" he walks back over to me assuming the position he had before. My father lowers the knife until it just barely touches my palm.

"I, Mariana Russo, swear to the oath of the Russo Familia, to promise and protect. The loyalty lying with the highest elders, a broken oath or a newfound one will result in death". Through choked sobs I managed to stutter out. His knife piercing the skin just as I finished, a blood curdling scream billows out. My brother shoving a cloth into my mouth to muffle myself. the blood begins pooling in my hand falling into the fire.

My father grabs a piece of paper, one with over a thousand words on it that I couldn't understand or comprehend. He forces my palm to close I start wincing and screaming into the cloth. Everyone watches me cry and shake, I was only a little girl swearing into something I hadn't asked to be brought into.

    Marco snaps me back to reality his hand tracing over the scarred line. "Someone was dumb enough to leave a mark that they knew only they could trace". He explains his intense glare goes right through me. "Why would anyone want to trace it? I would've been claimed like baggage years ago if so." I explain his green eyes followed the line.