Maximo: A Second Chance Mafia Romance (Mob Daddies Book 3)

by Alexa Hart

  He paused for a second and looked at me directly, and I knew he was cracking. He’d smiled and joked and laughed through Pop’s entire sickness. He’d kept the mood up when everyone was dark. He’d changed the topic when no one could handle the truth. He was like our own, personal, human band-aid – and it had worn on him more than I realized. I felt a sudden rush of guilt.

  “Dario. It’s okay to let go now. You can let go. Your father just died. Let it out,” I said this quietly, thinking of my mother’s words.

  Grief must be shared. It must breathe.

  She had been right on all levels.

  Dario was still nodding – still smiling – as though I had just said something pleasant about the weather that he thought quite accurate. And then he broke.

  His cigarette dropped and he lunged forward, throwing his arms around me, heaving with instant, racking sobs. I hugged him – helpless and crying now myself.

  Brother. He’s my brother as much as any blood could ever be. Even if Natalia never speaks to me again. This is my brother.

  I wasn’t sure how long we stood there. My face and hands had grown numb from the cold, but Dario didn’t seem to take any notice of the frigid air. I had only ever seen him cry once when we were kids, and his snow-sled had taken an unplanned detour into a very thick tree trunk. He broke his arm that day.

  Today it was his heart.

  He seemed to calm eventually, enough to pull back and say through ragged breathing, “She won’t see you today, Max. She won’t. You gotta give her time. She’s not herself.”

  I nodded, knowing he was right, and aching inside with a growing sense of doom that was crawling across my mind like a thundercloud.

  I could still lose her.

  Pop had left no particular burial requests. In the end, Dario and Natalia had decided to forego the wake, opting for a short, closed casket funeral.

  “He doesn’t look like Pop. He wouldn’t want people to remember him like that... like that skeleton of what was left of him,” Dario had said blankly over the phone. After his complete breakdown, he actually had asked everyone to leave, and as he told it, “pulled a Nat” by truly locking himself in his room to grieve.

  At some point they must have obviously made their way to each other and forgone their hideaways. There were things to do, and no one else to do them. At some point the mind stilled itself and practical matters were handled as necessary. I knew from experience that the emotional stillness was only temporary. The screaming grief would be back, and it would be fierce. But the human psyche did what it had to do to make it through such things.

  Natalia would not speak to me. It was obvious now, two full days later, that she did not want to – or was not able to. I had tried to call her one last time the previous evening, and then decided to let the situation alone. I could only be there for her now if she wanted me to be. I refused to force myself into their home, into her life, or into her sadness without her approval.

  If this was the grief, and was temporary, it would be okay – I held nothing against her. If she had changed her mind and heart completely about me – well that had never been something I’d been able to control, had it? We had spent nearly twenty-four hours making love – reconnecting in every way possible. She knew what we had, what we were. She knew it as straight as I did. She would do with it what Natalia Angelone decided to do with it.

  And I would be waiting for her, as always. I would wait forever, if necessary. I had no more illusions of getting past her enough to love someone else. It wasn’t going to happen. I had Nic, and that was enough for the rest of my life – if it had to be.

  I arrived at the cemetery with my mother in the cold, January wind. Snow was coming down in what would have been a very pretty scene, were we not surrounded by graves. We both turned our heads slightly as we walked to the burial, seeing my father’s grave – snow covered and desolate – in its eternally appointed place. Ma leaned into me then, and I was glad that Nic was with his mother. He just didn’t need to see this.

  Let him stay innocent a little longer...

  Dario greeted us somberly, but Natalia never so much as stood from her chair. She wasn’t interacting with anyone at all, and past the fact that I wanted her so badly, I was worried about her. Being a psychologist didn’t mean that she was immune to being overwhelmed to a point where she just wasn‘t going to be okay.

  Nat didn’t look even close to okay – not at all. She sat, striking in all black, and nothing covering her head or face – just letting the snowflakes settle on her dark hair. It looked like a very grim scene from a dark, macabre version of Snow White. She wasn’t crying either. She was still – completely still.

  The priest spoke, my mother cried, and others sniffled along. Natalia stared at Pop‘s coffin the entire time. Not once did I see her break that stare.

  And poor Dario. He sat, then stood, beside her, having handled all of the well wishes, the condolences, and the small talk completely alone. At some point during the internment, tears started flowing out of his eyes and he didn’t try to stop them. He just cried quietly next to the statue that was Natalia, not seeming to hear the words being said, and probably no longer caring to.

  I had shoved my own grief deep down inside, wanting to be strong for my mother, for Nat, for Dario – at least temporarily. But the lump in my throat choked me, and tears burned in the corners of my eyes regardless. I remembered being thirteen, on a fine summer day, standing in this graveyard beside my mother as I did now - desperately wanting to be strong for her, but falling apart as any thirteen-year-old boy would do at his own father’s funeral. I felt I had failed everyone that day. I knew I was to inherit the business when I grew older, and I didn’t want my soft side to show – even then.

  “It’s okay to cry,” Nat had said, a wise soul at all of thirteen years of age, sitting quietly beside me in the grass. We had parted from the crowd just enough to be alone. She knew I didn’t want to talk, and she knew I was horribly embarrassed that I had cried, even if it was my father’s funeral. So we just sat in the sun, me picking mindlessly at the grass, and Natalia compassionately doing nothing at all.

  “I’m supposed to be tough now,” I had blurted out, surprising both of us.

  Natalia had grabbed my hand in her tiny one and squeezed it. I had looked at her then, feeling moved by those sapphire gems of hers in a new and very exciting way; and she had said simply – but firmly, “You can be whatever you want to be.”

  Now she was standing over the grave, looking at the partially lowered box that contained her father, whom she had loved beyond all measure. She held a red rose in one hand, waiting to drop it on all of the others. Dario had bent and placed his own carefully just moments before – still crying – and then walked off alone into the graveyard.

  Natalia had been standing there so long that I wasn’t sure she would drop hers at all. But then she held it up to her lips, kissed the petals slowly, and held her arm straight out over the grave, the rose dangling. She closed her eyes and whispered something, then simply let the flower fall.

  As she walked away, alone and silent, I couldn’t help thinking that she was perhaps today – in her raw grief – the most complete picture of exquisite perfection that could ever exist in this world.

  And suddenly, I needed to find Dario.

  I knew the life that I wanted, and I wasn’t going to let it go – not again.

  Chapter 13

  Natalia

  I wasn’t entirely sure who was going to remove the hospital bed from the house, but I had an obsessive urge to set it on fire. Pop had been dead for three days. We had put him in the actual ground yesterday. What the fuck did we need this bed for now? It was mocking us. It was sitting there grinning and reminding us that it had spent more time with our father in his last year than we possibly could have in his whole life.

  I’m going to burn that fucking bed.

  “Nat?” Dario’s voice broke through my burgeoning madness.

  “Yeah,” I
returned, not taking my eyes off of that goddamn piece of shit deathtrap.

  “You need to stay out of Pop’s room. It wasn’t his real room anyway – you know that. And you’re getting weird. Really weird. I’m having a moving service come tomorrow to take away the furniture that we don’t need, and then a cleaning service is going to basically sterilize the whole thing.” He put his hand on my shoulder now, standing calmly behind me. “I’ll have painters come if you want. We can turn it into something – anything else. Anything you want. Or we can board it up and never use it again. But you need to stay out of it for now, okay?”

  Movers are just going to come and cart that thing off free and clear? No fire? No punishment for what it took from us?

  “I’m leaving tomorrow night,” I replied evenly, not moving from the doorway to Pop’s sick room.

  I heard Dario suck his breath in quickly – he hadn’t known that was coming – and although I felt horrible leaving him here alone so quickly after the funeral, I felt I might actually lose my mind if I stayed any longer.

  This wasn’t just a neighborhood. It was an insane place where you loved people you couldn’t ever possibly, safely be with. It was a prison where you were born into expectations that crippled you from birth. These streets stole lives – through violence, occasionally; but mostly much more torturously slow, through misery and strain. It took young, promising, extraordinary people who could go anywhere – do anything – be anything – and told them exactly who they were by shoving them into a pressure cooker and turning up the heat until their dreams were forced to burn out.

  My mother’s aneurysm, my father’s excessive drinking and smoking, Max’s father’s triple round of heart attacks – even Lucy’s fucking coked-out abusive mother – that was the future awaiting all of us if we stayed here. It was like a seal of impending ruination was stamped on every house on every block.

  I fucking loved Maximo. I loved him more than anything or anyone, and I wanted him so badly that it made me feel sick. I had never more clearly known that I wanted to be with him forever than now. I wanted to marry him. I wanted to carry his babies. I wanted a fucking big dog that wasn’t a poodle and protected our kids. I wanted a faded rowhouse where you could almost hear your neighbors having sex and most definitely hear them arguing. I wanted a fucking full life with Maximo Fanucci. I wanted it all.

  And then one day, after I had that – after I had everything I could ever want, he was going to drop dead from the stress of the business, his heart unable to keep up with his life; or someone would shoot him over a deal gone wrong, and maybe then come for myself and our kids. Perhaps he’d take up drinking, and turn into an abusive monster – or cigars, and smoke his lungs into black tar pits like my father – whatever it took to deal with the tension.

  But I would lose him. The business took people from you. It always had and it always would. I had left Max all those years ago because I knew he would leave me when I least expected it – not of his own free will – but he would leave, somehow, in some way, all the same.

  I was going to be tossing a red rose on top of Maximo’s grave – be it in the sunshine or the snow – at some point if I stayed here. It would happen.

  I had to leave.

  Packing my suitcases was different this time. I found myself looking around my bedroom, searching for things that I wanted to take with me, because I planned to never return to this place again.

  Never.

  I moved slowly from one little trinket to the next – tiny surprises my father had bought for me, some jewelry my mother had given me when I was just a little girl, some dried flowers from one of my first dates with Max... What did I take? What did I leave?

  What would be more painful to have with me than to leave behind forever?

  A soft knocking at my door, and Dario entered. He had given me a little space after our conversation downstairs, but apparently, he had more to say.

  “Nat?” He spoke cautiously. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “You don’t have to ask me, Dar. Just talk,” I responded lightly, folding and re-folding sweaters before carefully placing them in my suitcase. I didn’t know what he had to say, but I was sure I knew the general goal.

  “Don’t leave yet, Natalia.”

  “I guess... I kinda thought... You and Max seemed to have...” Dario sputtered out half sentences, and I looked at him very directly.

  “I don’t want to talk about Max, Dar.”

  And I didn’t. My mind was made up. No more neighborhood – no more business – no more funerals – no more losing people.

  “Well, we’re going to anyway, Natalia,” was his firm and completely unexpected reply.

  My eyebrows shot up – I couldn’t stop the instant shock that took over my face. I wasn’t sure Dario had ever spoken to me like that in our entire lives. It had always been me – when we were younger – who generally kept him in line.

  I wanted to respond, but I wasn’t sure if I was mad or fascinated. It was a little of both, I thought, staring back at him and saying absolutely nothing.

  “Max talked to me after Pop’s funeral. He gave me full leadership of the business. Just like that. Completely handed over his position. He might run the store for a while until I can get some more help but, he doesn’t want to be in charge. He doesn’t want to go on runs. He’s essentially done. And honestly, he has enough cash at this point, if he invests it wisely, he could pretty comfortably retire altogether.”

  I had been stunned into silence. Max. Max quit the business.

  “I want it to be different now, Nat. The old guys – they're done. That era is over. It’s time to put some legitimate business into the business. Less of this thug shit. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a fucking old school gangster. Max was all of the muscle anyway,” he laughed now, pausing and focusing his gaze on me. “You haven’t said anything.”

  “I’m just – I'm just – I'm processing,” was my weak reply. It was true however. This new information was swirling around in my brain wildly – cracking all of the concrete blocks that formed the foundation of my life – the cornerstones on which I based all of my decisions.

  “Nat, he did it for you. You know that, right? You have to know that. As much as Max has always, always wanted to do justice to his father’s legacy... As much as I think he felt he had to... He wants you more. He loves you more. He’s quitting Rafaele’s business for you,” Dario was very serious, very adamant now. He walked across the room and put his hand on my shoulder once again, looking deeply into my eyes. “I know you love him, Nat. Pop knew it. Everybody knows it. You can’t just leave him again. I don’t think you even want to.”

  I was beginning to tear up, and I was so goddamn tired of crying. Dario hugged me tightly, and then left me to myself, instinctively knowing I needed to be alone now.

  I sat on my bed, beside my open and half-packed suitcase.

  Max quit the business.

  Dario had movers come later that same day. Apparently, I had genuinely freaked him out with my previous behavior. We sat side by side at the kitchen counter, each holding mugs of coffee, watching the movers go in and out, freeing the room of its last inhabitants.

  I watched with particular interest as the bed left.

  You’re running out of time to set it aflame, Nat.

  There was no way Dario could have known the absurd thought that shot through my mind, but he still eyed me uneasily, as if he worried that the sight of that thing was somehow capable of triggering a full break from reality inside of me. Given some more time alone with it, maybe he’d have been proven right.

  I felt fragile – on edge. It occurred to me repeatedly with a cruel stab to my heart that the only person I would really want to talk to about my dilemma right now was six feet under some freshly laid dirt in a fancy box, lifeless and gone forever.

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t confide in Dario – I knew I could and always had. But some deeply ingrained instinct had kicked in this last year that
made me want to shield him from anything that would make his life even harder, or sadder, or more complicated. My mental state was a “need-to-know" matter right now, and he didn’t need to know.

  And beside all of that, I already felt horrible enough for the way I had acted at the funeral. I hadn’t meant to completely shut down. It had just happened. Actually speaking to anyone when my father’s dead body was only a few feet away seemed impossible and ludicrous. Of course I wasn’t going to speak to any of those people. I didn’t owe them that. I didn’t owe them anything.

  But Dario hadn’t deserved to be left like that to handle the crowd. It had been a shit thing to do to him. And now I was leaving – quickly – and I knew that, in spite of the fact that this had always been the plan, it was also incredibly unfair to him.

  “You’re not really leaving tomorrow,” he said absently, refilling his coffee.

  “That’s the plan, Dar,” I replied calmly, still watching the coming and going of the moving men. They reminded me of the ant farm Dario had bought with his own money when we were kids. He loved that damn thing. He even tried to name every last one of the completely identical ants, insisting he knew one from the other.

  “So, change the plan, Nat.”

  Just change the plan.

  That night I tossed around endlessly in my bed. Max had not called – he hadn’t called since the night before the funeral, actually. I knew I had hurt him – again. It seemed to be my specialty in life to torture one Mr. Maximo Fanucci.

  I knew I could press a button and have him on the phone in seconds. I could make it all okay again. Several times I almost did... but always stopped myself. It didn’t occur to me until well into the early hours of the morning why I would not allow myself to make that call.