Going Once, Taken Twice: A Dark Romance

by Claire St. Rose

  The first trimester was over and that was generally the danger zone. We had made it through unscathed, and the pregnancy seemed to be progressing as planned. I had started showing as well, which was sort of exciting. There was nothing there one minute, and it was suddenly there when I had woken up the next day, physical proof that the little life inside of me hadn’t been poisoned by my grief and that—even though my father was dead—there was something, someone, who I needed to keep my chin up for. I was just thirteen or fourteen weeks along, but my lower abdomen curved gently outwards whereas my stomach previously had been flat.

  The change was fairly new, so it wasn’t one of the factors that got in the way of dressing for my dad’s funeral. My mother and I were expected to stand together as family, but I wouldn’t do it without Lorenzo there with me, too. He was my rock. If he wasn’t there, they would have had to take me away on a gurney because I would not have been able to hold myself up.

  One good thing about being pregnant was that nobody made you stand up when you were tired. I held Lorenzo’s hand in both of mine, definitely hard enough to hurt him, but he didn’t complain. Not once.

  How could one of the brightest, happiest points of my life be followed by this?

  Thoughts about what this would change plagued me and made me feel even worse about the whole situation than I already did. Our initial marriage hadn’t been our own, but we had established our own partnership, and we were in love. I prayed that that was what Lorenzo felt as well. I didn’t want us to break up, especially not then. I wanted him to continue being my husband, and I wanted to believe that the intense and beautiful happiness that I had felt, however fleeting, was real, and that it was possible that we could find it again.

  Time was supposed to heal all wounds, and I was counting on that adage proving true now more than ever. If that was the case, then that meant the pain was going to subside and that I was going to start to feel like a whole person again at some point.

  ***

  It was a Sunday.

  The only reason I remember it was a Sunday was because Carlotta wasn’t home and I had to crawl out of bed and come down the stairs to answer the door when someone rang the bell. It was not Lorenzo because it was his house, he had a key. If he had forgotten it or something, he would have rang me on the phone to tell me that he had done that. This was someone else. Whoever it was, I hoped they liked my no-makeup face because that was what they were getting.

  I unlocked the door and opened it, squinting at the outdoor light that streamed through the door. Whoever it was pushed past me into the house before I saw who they were. Her high-heeled shoes clicked on the floor, and she looked flawless and polished in a short dress; her hair was perfectly styled like she was going out; and her makeup looked like it had been professionally applied. I was—on the other hand—in a tank top and a pair of comfortable shorts.

  Elissa Lazzerini.

  Not even my general state of reduced arousal was enough to kill the resentment and hatred I felt for her when she looked at me like I was wasting her time.

  “Elissa? Are you lost?” I asked.

  She scowled at me.

  “Why did you take so long to open the door?” she snapped. “Where is Lorenzo?”

  I wanted to scream at her, or at least call her every kind of bitch that I thought she was, but strangely, I felt a calm come over me that stopped me in my tracks. This was the woman, the pathetic, desperate woman who tried to break my marriage up by sending me three or four-year-old nudes of herself and Lorenzo. This was the woman who had been throwing herself at my husband, long before he became my husband and still was now that we were together. This was the woman who had stormed into my home on a Sunday afternoon like she really had some business here. Elissa Lazzerini had nothing on me. She was nothing to Lorenzo, and she was upset about it. She was behaving like a toddler who had had her favorite toy taken from her, and she was having a tantrum.

  “He’s not in. You couldn’t call him?”

  The frown on her face told me that she had tried calling him, but he had just ignored her, forcing her to take more drastic measures.

  “I know he’s here, why is he avoiding me?” she demanded. She walked towards the stairs and started calling for him like the house was burning down. I pressed a few fingers softly to my temples. She was shrieking.

  “Elissa, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this is a private property, and if you refuse to remove yourself from the premises, I am going to get the NYPD to remove you for me,” I said. She swung around and looked at me with pure venom. She was vexed, and I wasn’t going to lie. I sort of liked it. She smiled sardonically.

  “Oh, little Isa. I’m surprised that you’re still here. Really, a lot of us thought Lorenzo would have gotten rid of you by now and started competing in his own weight class,” she said. She made a show of looking me up and down, but her face dropped when she got about halfway. I looked down and saw what she did. My stomach. She blanched, and I realized she didn’t know that we were expecting. Her eyes slowly traveled back up to mine.

  “My, my Isa. Letting yourself go in your married bliss?” she chirped. I smiled and placed a hand on my stomach.

  “No, Elissa, this is called fourteen weeks of pregnancy. You’ve never had this happen to you, have you? You usually have them terminated before six weeks? Am I right?”

  She was speechless. How fucked up was it that I derived so much pleasure goading her.

  “No… no. You aren’t pregnant. It can't be.”

  “Yes, Elissa. It can be and it is. That’s what happens when two people are married; they usually have kids after.”

  “Lorenzo didn’t tell me!” she yelled.

  “That’s because it was none of your business, Elissa. You aren’t the pregnant one, I am.”

  She suddenly charged for the door and left, without another word.

  Crazy bitch.

  I closed the door, locking it before I made my way back upstairs. Was that all she had come here to do? Yell at me? No. She was looking for Lorenzo and had yelled at me because she had been unable to find him. They weren’t still in contact. I knew this because she had had to make the trip here in order to try and see him. The question was then, what did she have to say to him that was so important she had to come here?

  From her track record, it was probably nothing. She probably just wanted to show up and be hysterical for the hell of being hysterical. She was no longer the girl that Lorenzo needed to suck his dick, and she was having a hard time accepting that.

  Still, if she was here trying to cause trouble, then I wanted to warn Lorenzo. I sat on the bed and called him. He picked up quickly.

  “Babe?” he sounded surprised to get a call from me.

  “Lorenzo?”

  “How are you, Isa. Is everything okay?”

  “You won’t guess who just came to visit.”

  “I’m not going to like the answer am I?”

  “It was Bachelorette number one, Elissa.”

  “Don’t call her that. What did she want?”

  “She was asking for you, screaming that you weren’t getting back to her and she was mad about it. But then she saw my stomach, and she suddenly ran away. She didn’t know?”

  “Nope. Why would she? She isn’t a friend or family,” he said. I smiled.

  “Could you come back home?” I asked.

  “Are you scared?”

  Was I scared? Elissa was intimidating, but that was mostly because of the way that she looked and dressed. There was the little thing that she was a little crazy, but so were all women when you pushed us too much. I wasn’t threatened by her… well, maybe I was a little threatened by her. She wasn’t a nice woman, and she had shown that she was willing and capable of playing dirty to try and get Lorenzo’s attention with the pictures that she had sent me.

  I didn’t trust her. I had no real reason to trust her. She was out of control. She had stormed into my house asking for my husband. She hadn’t even mentio
ned the pictures when she had come inside. It wasn’t so much that I wanted or expected an apology from her, but that brazen disrespect was just shocking. It was disgusting, and she was disgusting. If she had done that, what else could she or would she do?

  Where was she going anyway? Would she just go back to her house and be mad about it, or was she going to find Lorenzo where he was and harass him? I wasn’t worried about what would happen if she did, but who knew with the woman honestly. She was a loose cannon, and she had proven that she would do something crazy if it made me want to leave Lorenzo. Something about it all was making my scalp itch. I wasn’t so much scared; I was cautious. What if she did come back? It wasn’t just me I had to worry about, it was the baby, too.

  “I don’t know… not really. I just don’t want to be alone right now.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said to me before he hung up.

  “Hurry home,” I said down the dead line.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Lorenzo

  I had gone to college. That meant I had options.

  A lot of things had changed since I had gotten married, and I was prepared to have to make changes, but if I was honest, I didn’t think I’d be debating a career change. Up to this point, I thought I had done pretty well with all the changes that had come my way. There might have been some growing pains in the beginning, but I was getting married. It wasn’t supposed to be easy and smooth. Though admittedly, a little effort for me could have made the transition for Isa, for both of us, really, much easier and smoother.

  I had been a dick. A capital asshole. And Isa, the poor girl, hadn’t deserved a minute of it. I had made her quit her job and work around the house. I was rude and bossy. No wonder she never wanted to have sex. I was unbearable. It didn’t matter though because that was all in the past now. I was upset about the sudden change and still sore about my father using me as a pawn in his little fight with Alfonso D’Agostino.

  I was reformed. There was no more space for that because I had to concentrate on being the sort of man that Isa wanted and deserved. Our parents and tradition and whatever the hell else aside, I was in service to her now. I was her husband, and that meant that she was my number one priority.

  If it was a competition, she trumped everything, including the business my family and I had been in forever. The first time the thought came to me, it shook me a little because it was so foreign. The more I thought about it, however, the more attractive it started to sound to me. So what if ‘Montorini’ was an infamous New York mafia crime family name. I was a man of many talents and abilities. If I had to, I could get into something else. Nothing that was specialized like law or medicine, but something else, on the straight and narrow.

  I was generally employable and could work a nine to five if I really had to to put food on that table. Like I said, I had been to college. Even if I hadn’t gone, we had enough money to support us for years and years to come in the event that anything was to happen.

  Because let's face it, anything could happen.

  That was the life that I had always lived—and that was the way that Isa had been forced to live since she had met me. However, just because it was the only way I knew, didn’t mean it was the only way there was or the best way there was.

  It definitely wasn’t the best way there was, that went without saying. Just because our families had lived this way for generations didn’t mean we had to, too. That wasn’t a good enough reason, not when there was a chance that I could lose my wife or our baby because the people around us were reckless with their bullets and didn’t care about who was killed as long as it made the right people mad.

  I didn’t have to do it, and the fact was that nobody could make me do it. I didn’t even really want to do it all that much. Besides, the fact that I had grown up with underground organized crime as the center of my life didn’t mean that it had to remain a part of my life. Technically, I hadn’t chosen it for myself, my parents had. It was just something that was decided for me when I was born, like the fact that I was going to be raised Catholic. It wasn’t something that I had chosen, but it was something I had been expected to maintain and accept because it had been a part of my life for my whole life. I hadn’t been to Mass in years, and I didn’t have to be part of the mob. There were other ways to live, just because I hadn’t experienced them didn’t mean they were necessarily any worse than the way I was now.

  We were generations deep in the shit. I was in it. My father was in it. His dad, my grandfather was and his father before him, too. If my father was to believed, our family’s involvement started with the mob’s genesis, back in the 1800s. Maybe he was full of shit, but in case he wasn’t, it was important to think about what I was potentially giving up. Years, decades… over a hundred years of just the dirtiest money you could imagine. That was what had made us.

  It was more than just the career of choice that all the Montorini men before me had taken on. It was a legacy. It was a family history, and there was a lot of pride and identity connected to it. Was I ready to give it all up?

  The short answer was yes. Fuck yes, I was.

  What could possibly be worse than living with the constant threat that something or someone was coming after the person you loved. The only way this could possibly be worse was if we lived in the middle of a war zone.

  How the hell had my father done it? Did he have to go through all this when he was marrying my mother and I was born? How did any of them do it? Was there never anyone before me who had gone through this same contemplation? Was there not a single one of my descendants who had just said enough was enough and tapped out of the whole shit?

  This was unbearable. I had never worried about something, about another person so much. What about when the baby came? Would we have to sit the kid down one day and explain to them why they have to lie about what their daddy does for a living to their little school friends? Would we raise them the way that Isa had grown up? Oblivious until the day they are forced to get married to someone they don’t even know for the sake of a feud that they had nothing to do with?

  It was enough. My limit had been reached; here it was. I could just dismiss it all as regular business until the point that the lives of my wife and my kid were endangered. I couldn’t even think about Isa and the baby in danger without feeling sick to my stomach. If I lost one, I would lose the other. The baby wasn’t born yet and couldn’t survive outside of Isa’s body.

  What the fuck was I supposed to do if I lost her?

  There would be nothing. Nothing.

  I had never had anything in my life that I wanted to protect so much. Everything was expendable because I would give everything up in order to keep Isa and the baby safe and close to me. I thought about my father briefly and what he would think when I told him what I wanted to do. He had forced me into a marriage that I hadn’t wanted, so it was safe to say that he still had a pretty strong impact on my life and actions, but this was going to be one of those non-negotiables. I wanted out. I wanted whatever was safest—and as far as I could tell and see, that was leaving.

  Leaving, really leaving, was what I wanted to do.

  Somewhere far. Italy, France, somewhere we had to cross an ocean to get to. Somewhere where people had to cross an ocean to get to us. Would Isa go for it? She had lived abroad before, but would she want to again, and with me?

  Once I was out, I wanted to be out. We would be able to start again, for real, without our parents and the mob and her family and my family and everything else that stood in our way. We could be a normal married couple, raising our child and living our lives together. The thought was intoxicating. I had never lived any other way than this, but the thought of waking up every day and never having to wonder whether I was going to die that day, or my wife, or my child… it was freeing. I wanted it. The mob could suck my dick. I had bigger things to worry about.

  Getting married the way we had… I had hated it in the beginning. I thought it was an insult. I hated that my father r
espected me that little. I hated being that week underneath him. What the hell gave him the right to make that kind of decision for me? It drove me crazy. It also didn’t help that Isa likely felt the same way. She used to look at me like I was the last person on the earth that she wanted to be around. When we talked, it was like two people trying to make a long elevator ride a little less awkward. I was mad and she was mad.

  Now, I couldn’t imagine being married to anyone else. She was my world. My vows to her that we had exchanged at the wedding had ended up being the truest things I had ever uttered. I was ready to leave the only life I had ever known for her. I was ready to make myself into a passable excuse for a husband and father for her. She was my now; she was my future; and she was the best thing I could have asked for. Whatever she wanted and needed was what I was ready to provide, whatever it was. She had not asked me to leave the mob, but I hoped slightly that that would be one of her requests. I could probably count on her to ask me to leave. She liked the shit even less than I did. She hadn’t even known that she and her people were major players until a few months ago. With any luck she would ask me to step down, and we could just tell the life and this city a nice big fuck you and get out of here.