by Bethany-Kris
“Not really.”
“Sure,” she teased.
Calisto had never been a fan of pain, but he found it provided a certain relief.
It was a high that couldn’t compete with anything else he experienced. That was why he fought bare-knuckled, why he drove fast, despite knowing he might crash, and why he still enjoyed looking at Emma Donati—no matter her current status.
Pain felt good.
He might have been a fool for doing so, but as long as he got what he wanted from it, he didn’t really care.
When he fought, he was given release. When he drove, he was given freedom. When he looked at Emma, he was given memories.
All of them brought a certain level of pain. All three might kill him someday.
Calisto glanced at Emma, taking her in again when she didn’t know he was looking.
He realized then that only one might actually be worth dying for.
Craziness, he told himself. You’re being crazy again.
Calisto wished it was as easy as simply putting Emma out of his mind, but he quickly learned that it wasn’t the case. She was always there in one way or another. His guilt over delivering her to his uncle for marriage still ate him alive. Calisto still worried that she wasn’t happy, or that she wasn’t being treated in the way she deserved.
That she wasn’t being cared for, attended to …
That she wasn’t loved.
“Ah, Mrs. Donati,” came a voice from the doorway.
Calisto found an older doctor he recognized immediately. The man was on Affonso’s payroll for certain things. Curtis Lea was a good man, if not a little crooked. He didn’t mind taking cash to stitch someone up, dig out a bullet, or write a few prescriptions and turn his cheek at the same time.
“And Calisto,” Dr. Curtis said, smiling. “I haven’t seen you in … a couple of years. How are you?”
“Tired,” Calisto said honestly.
The doctor chuckled. “Life makes us that way. What brings you here?”
“Carter had other things to do. Calisto is driving me around,” Emma explained.
“I see,” the doctor said. “You can wait outside, Calisto. There’s no need for you to be in here.”
Calisto didn’t need to be told a second time. He took the reprieve the doctor offered, and practically bolted out of the room.
He needed space.
Time, maybe.
If his wayward inner thoughts were any indication, Calisto was still walking a thin line between stupid and insane where Emma was concerned. He should be disgusted with himself. The woman was pregnant, married, and entirely unavailable.
Yet, he still wanted her.
A little.
God, he was a fool.
“How is the doctor appointment going?” Affonso asked.
Calisto balanced the phone between his ear and shoulder as he punched in the code for the soda he wanted to get out of the machine. “Fine, as far as I know. The doctor made me leave.”
Affonso chuckled. “Yes, Curtis is particular like that. He doesn’t like others in the room when he’s got a patient in there. Thankfully, he handles all of Emma’s medical needs. I prefer it that way.”
Who cared about Affonso’s need to control every little detail of the lives of the people around him? Calisto didn’t.
“What did you think about the mess this morning?” he asked, wanting to get his uncle on a different topic.
Affonso hummed under his breath. “I went down and looked at the body. The police hadn’t found it by then. Good thing.”
Calisto had been woken up at six in the morning by a phone call from one of the Donati Capos. Apparently, one of his soldiers hadn’t made it to the warehouse by five. He was supposed to, in order to do a job later that morning. The Capo, knowing where his man was supposed to be working the night before, went looking for the seventeen-year-old street kid. The Capo found him in an alley behind a pizzeria that he owned.
A bullet had been put between the kid’s eyes.
A shamrock had been drawn on his cheek with blood.
It was a very clear message from the O’Neil family. They were still trying to work their way into Donati territory, and anyone who got in their way would earn themselves a bullet to the head and nothing more.
Calisto knew his uncle was going to have to sit down with the boss of the O’Neil family and work something out so that the warring families could work together. That, or Affonso was going to have to take out the man altogether.
Something.
Anything other than doing nothing.
Doing nothing would only let the O’Neil family believe that the Donati Cosa Nostra was weak in protecting their territory. It wouldn’t lead to anything good.
“You’re going to have to handle that,” Calisto said.
“I’m aware,” Affonso replied dryly. “For now, I will send out my own message. If they don’t get the point, then I will handle it in a different way. It’s just a solider, Cal. One boy, nothing more. I can overlook one dead man that wasn’t even made.”
Calisto’s jaw clenched. “He meant something to someone, zio. His mother, or father. Maybe he had siblings. I know the Capo he worked under cared for him a great deal because he was one of his best men. And for that matter, by default, that makes him one of your men.”
“Perhaps, but I won’t start a street war with the Irish simply because one solider met his maker. That seems extreme.”
Calisto didn’t see it the same way, but he wasn’t the boss.
He didn’t get a say.
“Whatever you want, zio,” Calisto settled on saying.
“You know what I want, Cal. For you to drop the zio nonsense.”
Calisto could hear the smile in his uncle’s tone. It made him sick and furious at the same time. “Are we going to do this again?”
Affonso grumbled. “Not with that attitude.”
“Good.”
He hung up the call without saying goodbye.
A week later, Calisto found a spot in a familiar pew and let the comforting space of his church surround him. There was nothing like the house of God to settle his mind, and let him think properly.
Well, that and his priest.
Calisto didn’t pretend to be a good man, or even one with great morals, but he had his church and his priest. That was enough.
“Calisto, my son, what brings you through these doors on a beautiful Summer day in the middle of the week?”
The voice of Father Day relaxed Calisto in a way he couldn’t explain. The man had counseled Calisto from the time he was a young man, straight into his adult years. When a personal issue came up, his priest was the best person to talk to. Father Day didn’t judge.
“Stress,” Calisto murmured, watching the rays of sunlight dance in the stained glass windows. “What else?”
Father Day took a seat beside Calisto in the front pew. “It’s always about some kind of stress with you. I’ve been telling you for years to—”
“Let the little things go.”
“Precisely. It’s all the little things piling up on your shoulders that make one huge weight for you to carry around.”
Silently, the priest handed Calisto his favorite item. It was a rope of black rosary beads, attached to an ornately designed golden cross. When he was just a child and following his uncle around, Calisto had watched Affonso go to the church regularly to confess his sins. To keep him from becoming bored during the ordeal, Father Day would let Calisto play with his string of rosary beads as long as he promised to give them back and not break them.
Calisto never broke them. He always gave them back.
Now, as an adult, the string of beads sometimes helped to soothe his nerves when he talked. The little things his priest remembered never failed to amaze him.
“Tell me what’s bothering you,” the priest demanded. “Let me take the little things, Cal.”
“I learned something this week, and I didn’t react well to it. I acted horribly, actu
ally. My mother would be ashamed.”
“Shame is a heavy weight to carry.”
“It shocked me; that was all.”
The priest chuckled. “Are you excusing your behavior?”
“No,” Calisto said, frowning. “But I lost something, and it hit me like a ton of bricks.”
Father Day sat a little straighter in the pew. “What else?”
“Don’t you want to know what I lost, Father?”
“If you want to tell me.”
Calisto didn’t want to explain about the lost child, the one that never got the chance to see the world, to the man. It seemed unfair to burden the priest with that knowledge.
But the miscarriage had been plaguing Calisto for the last week. From the moment he learned it had happened, it had constantly poked at the back of his mind like a hot fire, charring his nerves at the already frayed ends.
It hurt him.
He felt like he was missing something.
The guilt quickly followed whenever he thought about it all. Calisto wasn’t sure he had any right at all to grieve for the miscarriage that he hadn’t even experienced. It wasn’t his body, it hadn’t been his blood spilling from his body.
It had been his baby.
He couldn’t let that go.
“I think it was the idea of something that I lost more than the reality of it,” Calisto muttered heavily. “I don’t know how to grieve for the idea of something when it never had the chance to actually be something. Am I making sense?”
“You always make sense, Calisto. Even in your ramblings.”
“People are supposed to learn from their mistakes.”
“They are,” the priest confirmed.
“So why haven’t I learned from mine?”
Father Day let out a quiet sigh. “Sometimes, there are men who need to walk the wrong road several times over before they find the small path that links them to a new one. The right one. As for this … grieving … you mentioned.”
“Hmm?” Calisto asked. “What about it?”
“No one but you gets to decide how you grieve for something, be it imaginary or real. If you feel like you lost something, then maybe you did. There’s nothing wrong with giving yourself the chance to heal and move on from that.”
“It wasn’t mine to have in the first place,” Calisto said.
Father Day’s smile evaporated. “You’re still allowed to grieve.”
“Am I?”
“Of course, my son.”
Father Day stood from the pew and patted a hand on Calisto’s knee as he straightened fully. Calisto was still rolling the rosary beads between his fingers, calmer than before and a little more settled in his mind.
“You can stay and be by yourself for as long as you need,” Father Day told him.
Calisto shrugged. “I’m good. I have business to do.”
After the incident last week with the Irish leaving one of Affonso’s Capo’s men dead in an alleyway, the streets were as tense as they had ever been. Calisto had some collecting to do, money-wise. He didn’t trust the Irish as far as he could throw them, but Affonso had assured his famiglia that the Jersey family had backed off a bit.
Enough for the streets to be safe.
Bullshit.
This life was never safe.
Calisto stared down at the small cross in his hand. The only safe place was right where he was sitting. He still had a job to do.
“Keep that for a while,” the priest said, bringing Calisto from his thoughts.
Calisto’s gaze snapped up. “The rosary?”
“Mmhmm. Keep it. It helps you.”
“It’s yours.”
“Consider it a loan.”
Calisto laughed darkly. “In my business, loans never end well.”
The priest smiled. “Good thing this is my business then, hmm?”
Who could argue with that?
Calisto
It seemed like in no time at all, June had jumped straight to July, and then July jumped into August without warning. By the time September rolled around, Calisto was sure he was just walking around in a bubble, unaware of the seasons changing around him.
Fall was Calisto’s favorite time of year. He enjoyed the colors of the leaves—burned, bright, or dulled—and he could spend hours watching them fall from the trees in the park on a windy day. Fall wasn’t too hot, and it wasn’t too cold.
But he hadn’t even realized it was Fall until he took a stroll through the back property of his uncle’s home with his oldest cousin. Reds, yellows, dulled greens, and oranges littered the ground. The fallen leaves crunched under his shoes.
Calisto finally woke up from the several months’ long daze he’d been in.
“What’s up with you?” Cynthia asked.
“Nothing,” Calisto replied, offering her a smooth smile.
His cousin didn’t fall for it.
“Really? Because you’re looking at the leaves like you’ve never seen them before.”
“They’re bright this year.”
“Mmhmm,” Cynthia muttered. “You missed my whole Summer, Cal.”
Calisto frowned, knowing that was partly true. “We went on that trip to Niagara Falls.”
“It’s in the same state.”
“Still a trip, Cynthia.”
Cynthia crossed her arms, but kept walking beside Calisto. He could practically feel the girl’s irritation wafting from her. He’d promised both his cousins that he’d make an effort to take them away for a couple of weeks over the Summer.
Instead, he’d been too busy avoiding Affonso when he could, and staying the hell away from his uncle’s wife. Calisto didn’t need the temptation of Emma at his fingertips, demanding his attention. More often than not, he found himself worried about the woman, and before he knew what he was doing, Calisto would be asking his uncle how things were going with the pregnancy, just to have some sense of relief.
It was fucking stupid.
Entirely selfish.
Punishing.
To make matters worse, Affonso would answer Calisto’s seemingly normal questions with as much vagueness as he could. Sometimes, it felt like his uncle was baiting him, like Affonso wanted Calisto to ask more, or maybe even come around and check for himself. Affonso had even tried, more than once, to get Calisto involved in things. Driving Emma to more appointments, dropping things off at the house, or whatever else Affonso could dream up.
Calisto wouldn’t do it. Affonso posed the offers innocently enough, but Calisto still wondered if there was more to it. He didn’t trust his uncle, he didn’t want to be too close to Emma, and he certainly didn’t want to find himself inserted into Affonso’s day to day life more than he already was. Calisto would never be friends with his uncle—he couldn’t.
Somehow, Calisto managed to avoid Affonso’s demands by putting others in his place. An enforcer could take Emma to her appointment when her own guard was busy. One of the family soldiers, someone Calisto knew his uncle trusted, could drop things off at the house.
It didn’t have to be him.
Calisto wasn’t going to do what he’d once done again.
No way.
Beside him, Cynthia was still walking with her arms crossed, sporting an unhappy scowl, and staying quieter than normal. Calisto let his cousin have her anger. She was warranted it, after all. He had left her and Michelle to hang out to dry over the Summer in his attempts to stay away from Affonso and Emma.
“I came today,” Calisto said, knowing it was a weak statement.
One day was nothing.
“And I fly back to boarding school tomorrow,” Cynthia replied shortly.
“I’m sorry.”
Cynthia’s straight back softened. “I know.”
“Doesn’t help much, huh?”
“Everyone is always sorry, Cal. Daddy can’t come out to see us dance, he’s sorry. We can’t take the trip with our classmates out of the country, he’s sorry. You spend the Summer avoiding him, and we don’t get to se
e you, either, you’re sorry.”
“Hey, I wasn’t avoiding—”
Cynthia shot him a burning glare. “Yes, you were. You don’t like Daddy, Cal. I’m not fucking blind.”
“Your mouth has gotten worse, I see.”
Calisto wondered who his cousin had been spending time with for her mouth to be so damn dirty. He figured that was another thing he had to own. He had no one to blame but himself for not knowing what was going on in Cynthia’s and Michelle’s personal lives.
“Saying you’re sorry is just another excuse,” Cynthia told him.
Calisto sighed. “You’re right.”
“And do you want to know what’s worse?”
“What?”
Cynthia stopped walking, and let her arms fall to her sides. Calisto stopped beside her, letting the teenager work through whatever it was she had going on in her head. At least if she took it out on him, she was unlikely to go at her father with it. Affonso wouldn’t stand for that, and while he never laid a hand on his daughters, he wasn’t above making their lives miserable to punish them.
Wasn’t being sent away from home for the majority of the year miserable enough?
“What’s worse,” Cynthia said quietly, “is that you can’t even make this up to me like you used to do.”
Calisto shoved his hands in his pockets. “Sure I can.”
“No. I’m graduating at the end of this year. Then, I’m off to college. But if I get my way, it won’t be a college in this state. Daddy will be so busy with the new baby that he won’t give a single fuck about me or Michelle, especially if he finally gets the son he’s always wanted. He’ll probably be happy to let me choose whatever college I want, no matter where it is.”
Cynthia’s tone was sharp enough to cut steel.
It damn well cut through Calisto.
“So, yeah,” she said with a flick of her wrist at Calisto. “You can’t make this up to me. I won’t be around for you to do it.”
She was right.
Calisto’s guilt climbed higher, shaking his foundation. He’d always made a conscious effort to spend time with his cousins, and to be there for them in case they needed him. It wasn’t like they had that in their father.
Jesus.