by Leah Wilde
“That’s dumb,” he said bluntly.
I ogled at him. Did he really just say that? “What do you want?” I asked him defiantly.
“I wanna know why you’re crying.” His head was still cocked to the side as he looked at me.
I considered him for a moment and decided to tell him the truth. “My daddy hit me,” I said.
The boy’s blue eyes flashed for a moment with an emotion I couldn’t quite read. “He shouldn’t do that.”
I shrugged. “He’s my daddy. He can do whatever he wants.”
“No,” the boy said as he shook his head, “he shouldn’t do that to you.”
“Why not?”
“Nobody should hit a woman.”
I saw his fists curling. Part of me wanted to laugh. It was a ridiculous scene, after all. What was this teenage boy going to do to my grown man of a father? But another part of me saw how serious he was. “It’s not like I can do anything about it,” I said.
“You should stand up for yourself.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just find a way. You can always stand up for yourself.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. To be honest, the thought had never occurred to me before. This was just how my life was destined to go. An angry dad, a failing restaurant, and chores that never ended. That’s what was in store for me. The idea of pushing back against those things was alien, too unheard of for me to even process.
I asked, “Do you fight back against your daddy?”
The boy’s fists relaxed. “I don’t have a dad.”
My jaw dropped. “What do you do, then? How do you get food and stuff?”
“I steal cars and sell them,” he boasted. “I can do whatever I want.”
If it was anyone else, I wouldn’t have believed them. Plenty of street kids lied about being bigger and badder than they were. It wasn’t the first time I’d talked to one of them while I was out back. But usually I could tell right away that they were phony. With this one, something was different. I believed him without questioning it.
“What’s your name?” the boy asked.
“I’m Isabel.”
“Nice to meet you, Isabel. I’m Dominic.” He crossed the distance between us and stuck out a hand. I looked at it curiously. “Shake my hand,” he demanded.
I reached out and placed my palm against his. His grasp was firm but gentle. I liked the warmth of his skin. He looked straight at me as he squeezed softly. His eyes were bright in the darkness.
Just then, my father’s voice interrupted. “What the hell do you think you’re doing out here, Isabel? And who the fuck is this?”
I dropped Dominic’s hand immediately. “It’s, um, just someone who, uh…”
Daddy’s eyes narrowed. His gaze darted from me to Dominic and back again, dark and accusing. “You street rat, get the hell away from my daughter,” he spluttered. Saliva flew from his lips. “And get the hell away from my restaurant! Go on, get!”
Dominic backed up slowly, his eyes never leaving mine. He didn’t say a word, but I knew what he’s thinking. Stand up for yourself. He turned and walked away. I lost sight of him when he turned the corner at the end of the alleyway.
Daddy gripped my arm and yanked me to my feet. “You think you can sit around and cry out here? Get the hell back in there and clean up the mess you made!” He hurled me in through the door he held open. My shoulders drooped as I walked back towards the disaster of a dining room.
For a moment, when Dominic touched my hand, his words made sense. Standing up for myself seemed feasible. But now, on the other side of the door, I surveyed the wreckage, and it felt impossible again. Wood splinters everywhere. The ruined tables crumbled chaotically around the room. This would take hours to clean. I’d be up all night trying to piece everything back together.
Dominic was wrong. There was no escaping this life of mine.
Chapter 5
Dominic
I continued home. I could still feel the ghost of Isabel’s fingers on my own, a faint tingling where she’d touched me. The contact had a weird electric tint to it, almost like static electricity. Maybe I was just imagining things, but it really felt like there was something still there, like her fingertips had left a mark. I studied my hand under the glare of a streetlight overhead, but I couldn’t see anything.
I shook my head and let thoughts of her drift away for the time being. Jogging through a small break in traffic, I crossed the street and made my way down the alley to the foot of a fire escape. I jumped up to tug down the ladder. It descended with a metallic shriek, then I clambered up and took the stairs two at a time on my way to the top floor of the building.
Reaching the open window on the top level, I slipped inside. I landed with quiet feet on the tile floor of the bathroom of the empty apartment that Slim and I had been squatting in for the last couple months. The electricity didn’t work, so we had candles scattered throughout the place, but by some miracle the water still ran, so it was as good a place as we could afford for the moment.
I reached to pull open the door and let Slim know I was home, but just before my fingertips settled on the doorknob, I heard voices. I frowned. I didn’t recognize them. Sucking in a breath, I leaned my ear to the crack in the door and listened in.
“Slim, you rat-faced piece of shit, you shoulda known better,” said one of the unfamiliar voices. It was a man’s voice, deep, like it belonged to someone big. There was a faint Italian accent on the edges.
“You made the wrong choice, my friend,” said another softly.
My heart was pounding in my chest. I didn’t like the menace on the edge of these men’s words. I needed to get a closer look.
Tugging open the door as slowly as I could to avoid the squeak of the hinges, I slipped through and crouched low to the floor. The bathroom opened onto a short hallway. The corner of the wall jutted out into the living room. I moved towards it and peeked my head around just far enough to get a line of sight into the living room.
Slim was seated facing in my direction on the one rickety chair we owned. His hands were bound behind him. Standing with their backs to me were the two men I’d heard. One was grossly fat, his belly hanging heavy over the edge of his pants. The other was taller, skinnier, and he was holding a gun in one gloved hand. The fat man was gripping a length of iron pipe.
Slim looked badly roughed up. I saw a cracked tooth tangling by a thread from his mouth. The front of his shirt was slicked with blood, and his head hung forward, too exhausted to hold it up straight. “Please…” he muttered through lips fat and busted.
“Why didn’t you just think, Slim?” the skinny man said mournfully. “We knew you were working with the Broken Bones. You could’ve stopped, and all this mess would’ve been avoided.” The fat man shook his head in disgust.
“I didn’t…” Slim was two words into his thought before the fat man swung the pipe viciously into the side of Slim’s head. The crunch was sickening. I felt the blood rush from my face.
“Don’t tell us what you did and didn’t do,” the fat man barked. “We tell you what you did. And right now, my partner is telling you that you fucked up, capisce?”
Slim nodded, unable to speak further.
“This is what happens when you try to hurt the Capparelli family,” the man said. He leaned over, put two fingers under Slim’s chin, and lifted it up to look straight in his face. “If you hurt the Capparellis, you get hurt.”
The air reeked of blood and sweat. The skinny man let go of Slim’s chin, which dropped back to his chest, and straightened up. “Now, we are here to make sure that you don’t cooperate with the Bones anymore. No more cars for them, you understand?”
Slim nodded again.
“Do you swear you won’t help them again?”
Slim nodded as frantically as he was able. A low moan trickled through his bloodied mouth.
I could almost hear the sickly smile on the skinny man’s face as he shook his head. “I wish we could believe y
ou, Slim. If only that were enough.”
Long pause.
He gestured to the fat man. “Do him.”
The fat man raised his pipe high above his head. The skinny man holstered his gun and started to tug his gloves off, turning around as he did so. I scrambled back behind the wall to avoid being seen just as I heard the crack of metal on Slim’s skull.
More moaning echoed out as the crack sounded five more times, each crunch as wet and throbbing as the last. Then the sound of footsteps walking towards the front door. It creaked open, then clicked shut as the men left.
The second they were gone, I sprinted out towards Slim. They’d cut his bonds loose, so he was slumped forward in the chair, hands by his sides. Blood dripped down his face, neck, and chest from the devastation in his head. His eyes were fluttering, half-lidded. I tried to tug him upright, but I lost my footing in the puddle of blood surrounding the chair and slip. He tipped sideways and fell to the ground on top of me.
I struggled upright. His head was in my lap. “Slim, Slim,” I said desperately. The candlelight flickering around us had never felt so ghastly, so wrong. “Wake up, Slim,” I begged. “Please wake up.”
The only sound he could make was a nauseating groan. He tried to work his jaw to form words, but the scrape of pulverized bone overpowered the attempt and he gave up. He was floating somewhere between states of consciousness, drowning in pain. His fingers were wavering on his lap.
“C’mon, shorty,” I pleaded, using his nickname for me. “Don’t die. Please don’t die.” I felt the sting of tears in my eyes. This was the man who saved me. I had to save him. I had to. I owed him that much.
I pulled my shirt over my head and tried to soak up the blood. But there was too much. Slim kept groaning, a horrible, grating noise that set my teeth on edge, as I dabbed at his broken skull with the wadded fabric. I could see slivers of white bone sticking out around the ragged edge of the wound.
I didn’t have any concept of time as I sat there, trying to stem the bleeding. It could have been hours or days or weeks that I didn’t move, Slim’s head in my lap. It took me a long time to realize that the moaning had stopped, along with the rise and fall of Slim’s chest.
Numbness took over. I didn’t move, even as his body grew cold and still. I felt hollow.
Slim was dead.
Chapter 6
Isabel
I was still standing in the middle of the trashed dining room, lost in thought and unsure of where even to begin, when the door flew open and three men I’d never seen before poured inside.
I whipped my head around to ask who they were, but I didn’t even have a chance to get the words out of my mouth before one of them had picked me up by my arms and slammed me into the wall.
“Where’s your daddy?” he hissed. I hated the nasty smell of his breath and the unshaven hairs lingering around his mouth. His eyes were a dull brown, brimming with violence. Over his shoulder, I saw the other two men stepping over the broken tables and chairs on their way towards the office and kitchen.
“I-I don’t know,” I stuttered, too frightened to make sense.
The man snarled, unsatisfied with my answer, and casually tossed me into the leather seat of the booth next to us. He raised his arm to point at me with the hammer he held clutched in his hand. “Stay there,” he ordered. “Don’t fucking move.”
I nodded. Fear had taken me over. I was nothing more than a pile of reactions. It was beyond my control to find words or form thoughts. All I could do was obey.
The man turned and followed his partners towards the back. I heard the sounds of struggling and their voices raised as they kicked open the door of Daddy’s office. He tried to yell, but the quick smack of a fist silenced him immediately.
Their suits and grease-slicked hair identified the men immediately as Capparellis, though they weren’t the same ones as the two men who usually came to collect money from us. One voice I recognized with a sudden lurch. It was the one who’d been talking to my father late at night on the same day I found the body in the dumpster. His words were short and clipped as he said coldly, “What’d you do, Sergio?”
“What are you talking about?” Daddy began. “I didn’t do any—”
“Hit him,” the man interrupted. One of the others must have followed orders, because I heard Daddy utter a pained grunt as a meaty slap resounded down the hallway.
I didn’t dare move. I was too frozen by fear and the animal instinct to do what I was told.
The first man continued, “You’ve been helping the Broken Bones for a long time. Did you think we wouldn’t find out?”
“I swear, you’re wrong.” I’d never heard Daddy sound so pitiful.
“Hit him again,” the man ordered. More thumps and moans broke out. The hallway amplified everything tenfold, making the grotesque sounds of the beating echo towards me that much louder and more vilely.
“Frank Capparelli has been getting very sick of your shit. You never pay on time, you never pay enough, and now we find out you’ve been helping our enemies? That was a very bad idea, I’m afraid.” The man’s voice was icy.
“Please, God,” my father begged. “I can make it up to you, I promise.”
The man answered doubtfully, “I don’t think you can, Sergio. Look at this piece of shit restaurant you run. You don’t make any fucking money. How are you going to pay up?”
“I…I’ll find a way, I will, I swear. We’ll, um, we’ll extend our hours, or, or…” He trailed off, unable to come up with anything convincing.
The man tutted. “I don’t think so. If you could make money, you’d have done it a long time ago. There’s not enough cash in this whole damn business for you to buy your life back.”
“There must be something,” he moaned. “Please, just tell me how.”
“I don’t know, Sergio. I just don’t know.”
Another of the men spoke up. “Antonio, what about the girl?”
My heart plummeted. They were talking about me.
“Hmm,” said the first men. That must be Antonio. “That’s a good idea, Stefano. That’s a very good idea. Go get her.”
I heard the thumping footsteps as one of the men came back from the hallway. He was headed for me. Fight or flight reactions took over, finally breaking through my immobility. I leaped up and started to sprint for the doorway. I almost made it out before a hand snaked around my waist and snagged me off the ground.
“Now, now, princess, can’t be running away. That’s not nice,” the man murmured in my ear. He smelled disgusting. I kicked and writhed in his arms, but despite being short and wiry, he was surprisingly strong. I couldn’t get away.
He carried me back down the hallway and dropped me to my feet in front of him, keeping his hands pinned on my shoulders and pressing me into the ground.
Daddy was slumped against the wall, seated on the ground. The man with the hammer stood over him, keeping the tool resting gently on top of my father’s head. Leaning against the wall on the other side was the man who had been doing all the talking. Antonio, they’d called him.
He was of average height and build. His skin was perfectly unblemished, hair slicked straight back and glistening with grease. He studied me carefully with his pale eyes. They weren’t intelligent as much as they were cunning. Ruthless, even. Hungry, although for what, I couldn’t be sure.
I could feel Stefano shifting around behind me. His nauseating smell still rolled around the confined space we were standing in. I wrinkled my nose, but I couldn’t peel my eyes away from Antonio.
He squatted in front of me, looking at me at eye level. “What’s your name, little girl?” he asked me softly.
“Isabel,” I told him. My voice was coming out shaky and timid.
“Antonio, please don’t touch her,” my father gasped. Antonio didn’t blink or look away even for a moment. He flicked a finger towards Daddy. The man standing over him reached down, picked up his hand, and pinned it against the wall, fingers splayed along th
e plaster. Two quick strikes of the hammer left my father gibbering in pain, his hand clutched against his chest. I flinched at the sound of the weapon landing on fragile bone.
“Isabel. What a pretty name,” Antonio murmured. His words were nice but beneath them there was something I hated. He was slimy, conniving, a snake in a human’s body. “How old are you, Isabel?”
“I’m thirteen,” I answered.
He hummed and nodded. “Almost a woman, then.”
I didn’t answer.
“Tell me, Isabel,” he continued, “do you know what it means to be a traitor?” I despised the way he said my name. When it came from his lips, it was almost like an insult. I couldn’t help but think of the way Dominic had said it that day in the alley. That was the polar opposite. Out of Dominic’s mouth, it was almost like a blessing.