LUCA: Her Ruthless Don

The guy locked up in our basement is bad. He has to be.

The only men who end up in our basement are the bad ones. That’s what my father tells me.

I only didn’t believe him once—after one of his half-deads begged me to help him while I was delivering his daily meal.

I’d burst into the living room where Daddy and Mama were snuggled up on the couch, drinking whiskey and guffawing over an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, and I’d actually dared to challenge him. Because the half-dead had a family. Teenage daughters and a wife and a mother with cancer, who all depended on him.

“C’mere, Bel,” Daddy had said, turning off the TV and patting the seat beside him on the couch. Then he’d told Mama to bring him his laptop.

“Danny, that’s too much. She’s too young to be looking at all that,” Mama kept saying as he showed me pictures and news stories about what the man had done to other people. But Mama never told him not to do it. That wasn’t how their relationship worked.

So, I got shown while snuggled up under my father’s arm: pictures of dead men lying in pools of their own blood, little old ladies who’d had their life savings swindled, and girls even younger than his daughters forced into prostitution—all to line the pockets of the guy in our basement. All of this was explained to me by Daddy who smelled like Lava soap and Acqua Di Parma, while the man downstairs smelled like blood and misery. And I stopped believing the prisoners didn’t deserve everything my father did to them after that.

Until now.

I grab my light winter coat, shrug it on, and open the door to descend into our freezing unfinished basement. No matter how high Mama and I turn up the heat, we can’t ever get it warm in the basement. Even in the dead of summer. And it’s only the beginning of spring now. It’s been raining since early this morning, and Mama fretted about driving in it, before sending me downstairs to take the prisoner’s meal order.

The guy Daddy’s been keeping downstairs doesn’t look like a man. I thought that back when Daddy dragged him through our house, unconscious. And I think it now as I walk down the stairs into the strong metallic smell of stale blood and the even grosser stench of other bodily fluids.

I come to a stop outside the cell Daddy installed. Steel bars hang from the ceiling with a small gap left beneath. Just high enough to pass a plate under without me needing to open the door, but not high enough for the men to have any hope of escaping.

He’s going to die today. Or as Daddy calls it, “take a walk in the woods.”

I know because Daddy left the house with a shovel earlier this afternoon, grumbling about having to “do this shit in the rain.” And Mama told me to take the man’s order. She only makes special meals for the men Daddy puts in this cage when it’s going to be their last.

But the thing is, the guy inside the cage looks like a boy—a teenager. Maybe even the same age as me. Whip thin under all the blood from the cuts. And though his face is a mangled mess, I remember thinking the first day I came down to give him food that he was way too young to be here.

Also, way too pretty. That was the other thing I thought on that first day when I slipped the one meal a day Daddy allows under the bars—that he was one of those boys. Pretty like you see on TV, even as he accepted the hot plate of food with chattering teeth.

He took the food, but he didn’t say anything else. Didn’t try to bribe me or bargain with me like some of the other guys had after their first beatings. Maybe that’s why I lingered outside the cage a little longer than I should have. Daddy hadn’t touched the new guy’s face, I noticed. Yet… I pre-mourned the end of his perfect looks as I watched the play of shadow over his high cheekbones and strong jaw and marveled at how sharply his crystal blue eyes contrasted with his dark wavy hair.

I guess looks are something we have in common. Mama’s always saying I’m pretty like the girls on TV. Daddy says that’s why he told her to name me Bella, because I was the cutest baby he’d ever seen, even more beautiful than his real kids when they came out—and not just because I’m a girl and they’re boys.

But today, while I stand outside the cage, still pretty and upright, the boy just lies on the concrete floor, a pile of blood covered bones. Teeth no longer chattering, even though the basement remains the same bitter cold. Face no longer like the boys on TV.

“What do you want to eat for today’s meal. I’m here to take your order,” I tell him.

He doesn’t answer. But I know he’s awake, because the one bright blue eye that isn’t swollen shut stares back at me, angry and electric. Still fighting, even after his body’s given out.

I have to get him out of here. The words materialize in my head—not as a thought, but as a decision already made. My breath catches, as a previously unseen line between right and wrong appears in the sand of my soul, and I take my first step out of the shady grey area where I’d lived my entire life.

Up until now.

Because I know what I have to do. I have to get him out of here, away from Daddy’s grave. Even though, unlike a lot of the full-grown men I’ve brought food to down here, the boy hadn’t begged me to help him escape. Not even once.

Maybe that’s why I feel so compelled to get him out of Daddy’s cage.

“You can have anything you want,” I tell the boy, loud enough for Mama to hear up in the kitchen beyond the open basement door. “Anything. Mama’s going to the store special for you, and she’s a really good cook.”

It’s been a week. And a week is usually enough time for the men to become desperate for my father’s beatings to end with a meal made especially for them. But the boy only stares at me through the one eye. Like he’s imagining busting out of the cage and wrapping his long fingers around my neck.

“Please say something,” I whisper. “We need her to leave the house if I’m going to help you escape.”

The one eye wavers, confusion taking over his formerly unblinking stare.

“You don’t have his order yet?”

I look up. Mama’s at the top of the stairs. Just far enough down that I can see her heeled black boots and some dark brown leg beneath her wool midi skirt. But not far enough that she can see into the cell.

She always gets dressed up to go out—even if she’s only going to the grocery store. But she never comes down here when there’s someone in the cage. Daddy says she’s not as strong as me.

I agree, which is why I don’t say what I’m really thinking. That this boy is too young to be taken for a walk in the woods. That we should let him go before Daddy gets home from digging the boy’s muddy grave.

But of course, if Mama were capable of going against Daddy on anything, we wouldn’t be living in the woods a good fifty miles away from any major town or city in Massachusetts.

So instead, I say, “Spaghetti and meatballs. That’s what he wants.”

“For real?” Mama asks, still just a third of a body at the top of the stairs. “That’s all?”

“That’s all,” I confirm. Hoping she believes me.

Eventually, her boots turn, and I let out a held breath as she picks her way back up the steps. Part of me thinks about waiting until I hear the front door close. But I don’t have much time. Daddy could be back any minute.

As soon as she clears the basement door I ask the boy, “Can you walk? I can drive you to a hospital in Daddy’s car. But I can’t get you up those stairs by myself.”

Moments tick by, and I begin to fear he’s too broken to get up.

But then with what looks like considerable effort, he raises himself to his forearms. And a few moments later, he’s on his feet. Swaying, but standing.

I let out a small breath of relief and run to the wall to retrieve the extra set of cell keys. They’ve been there for as long as I’ve been bringing food down to the bad men. But this is the first time in those ten years that I’ve ever touched them.

Trying not to think too hard about what I’m about to do, I grab the keys off the hook and return to the cage. “We have to wait until Mama leaves the house,” I say as I push the key into the lock. “But then we can go—”

A loud bang halts me, followed by the stomping of shoes—a lot of them. And then someone’s talking in the kitchen. The voice isn’t high-pitched and breathy, like my mother’s, but deep and clipped. And menacing.

“What are you doing here?” My mother’s voice is loud but trembling.

The menacing guy’s voice doesn’t carry as far as hers. I can only hear bits and pieces of what he says. “Where…that fuck…tell me…bitch!”

But those words are more than enough. My father would never call my mother a bitch, much less allow other men to do it. Nor had he ever brought other men here—not even ones from his own crew. Mama and me are what he hides from his real family and his crime family.

But we’re not hidden anymore.

I stand, frozen, trying to figure out what to do. Run up the stairs to help Mama or go to Daddy’s gun cabinet?

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Mama answers, her voice shrill with panic.

And then there are no more decisions to make. The sound of a gunshot punches the air so loud, I suddenly have a clear understanding of why Daddy walks the guys so far from the house after their last meals.

Mama…

Grief erupts inside me, threatening to overwhelm my mind and empty my stomach—only to cut off abruptly when I hear footsteps at the top of the stairs. “Going to check the basement,” a nasal voice calls out.

There’s no more time to think about my beautiful mother bleeding out on the kitchen floor. I look around. There are two cabinets. One where Daddy keeps his guns, and one where he keeps his weights. A place to fight and a place to hide.

Hide, my gut tells me.

I jump over the weight bench and scramble toward the cabinet. Daddy isn’t like most fathers. He works out every single day—often in front of the caged men. So, his weight cabinet is mostly empty save for a few scattered ten-pound iron plates resting on the metal floor. I crawl inside it and close myself in with those cold weighted plates, just as the man who decided to investigate clears the last step.

I watch a scrawny guy in a tracksuit yell, “He’s down here!” through the cabinet’s narrow crack.

The steps don’t creak but groan under the weight of the next guy who comes down, and my eyes widen when he appears in my slice of viewpoint.

My dad is the biggest person I’ve ever met in real life. But this guy is even bigger. A behemoth in a pea coat. My breath catches at the thought of the hurt he could inflict on somebody.

“Luca. Fuck, Luca…What did that greasy fuck do to you? Motherfucker!”

It’s the same voice that spoke to my mother. The huge guy has an Italian accent. Not Boston Italian like Daddy, but like those ones you hear on TV. The kind that makes me think about horse heads, Emmy-winning HBO shows, and guys named Tony.

Big Italian Tony disappears from my vertically-sliced point of view and then reappears with the boy who used to be TV pretty. Tony isn’t carrying the boy, but he might as well be, he’s bent down so far under his arm to prop him up.

“We got the moolie mistress. Anybody else?”

“Daughter…” the boy croaks.

Fear ices my heart, and my hand quietly finds a weighted plate. When they open the door, I’ll throw the weight as hard as I can…

“But she’s gone,” The boy says hoarsely.

Big Italian Tony looks around, scanning the basement.

Later, when I go over these moments again and again in my nightmares, I’ll conclude that Big Italian Tony had to be wondering who put the key in the lock.

But right then all I can do is silently pray he believes the boy. Believes I’m no longer in the house.

My prayer is answered.

“Alright,” the guy says. “Let’s get you up to the car.”

I linger in the weight cabinet as long as I can stand it after they leave. I try to play it safe. Try to be cool. Two, maybe three minutes. But sooner than would be recommended by the National Council of Black People with Good Sense, I burst from my hiding place.

The image of my mother wounded on the kitchen floor is all I can think about as I run toward the stairs. Because there was only one gunshot. Maybe if I call an ambulance, she can be sav—

The explosion throws me off my feet. I fly through the air and land ugly, the back of my head hitting the concrete floor so hard a painful ringing immediately erupts between my ears.

Weird, I think now, and, in the years to come. Weird that the ringing was the thing I minded most in those painful moments before I passed out. Later, I’ll wonder why I wasn’t bothered that the world had gone completely dark…even though it was still midday.

Luca:

Almost Ten Years Later…

Today’s the day.

“You sure about this, Luc?” my cousin Rock asks, twisting his big body to look at me over the front passenger seat as his identical twin, Stone, pulls the Cadillac to a stop on the left side of Columbia Law School’s iconic, Jerome Greene Hall.

I don’t answer. Mostly because I don’t want to, but also because I’m busy looking out my street side window. Waiting for her to appear as a live recording of “New York, New York” starts up on the Frank Sinatra Sirius XM station, Rock knows to always put on when I’m in the car.

“Luc? Luc?” Rock asks, apparently, not taking my silence as an answer.

Stone knuckle punches the radio’s power button, cutting off Frank just as he starts spreading the news. “If he wasn’t sure, he wouldn’t have transferred outta Princeton, and we wouldn’t be living in New York now,” he tells his brother.

Technically they look exactly alike. Same ape build, same black t-shirt-jeans-leather jacket combo, same completely shaved heads—that son of bitch early male pattern baldness curse got handed down to the both of them from their ma’s side of the family. But other than looking completely identical, my two closest cousins ain’t nothing alike.

Rock’s been talking non-stop since he and Stone picked me up at my Upper East Side condo, but far as I know, these are the first words Stone’s said today. Stone doesn’t talk much, and when he does, his voice is the kind of flat that comes with racking up a dozen plus body count before the age of thirty. But unlike his twin, he’s always got my back, no questions asked. Which was another reason I chose the bruiser my Uncle Tonio left behind to be my personal guard over the son of Dad’s underboss, Greggi Deltano, when I decided to make the move to New York.

Unfortunately, Stone’s a package deal. And Rock must have skipped over the “Keep Your Fuckin’ Mouth Shut,” chapter of the bodyguard text because he’s still trying to get some back and forth going on this plan of mine. “I’m just saying, this is a lot of work to put into getting to one girl—wait there she is!”

Rock doesn’t have to tell me that. I’ve already spotted her. She’s about a decade older, but even prettier than I remember. No longer a girl, but a woman with glowing hazel skin and a face like God pushed the Exquisite button before delivering her to earth. She wore her hair in a ponytail like a prison waitress back when I was in her father’s cage, but now it hangs all the way to her waist. So long and shiny brown that lyric about girls’ hair coming undone when Frank was twenty-one springs to mind.

I’m twenty-seven now, and I started smashing long before my legal drinking years, but still… I swell inside my pants just looking at her. Like a boy. Like the kid I used to be before her father beat out the part of me that could still manage teenage crushes.

And maybe Rock’s saying something else, but all my awareness stays centered on her as she walks past our car. I openly stare, since she doesn’t see me or anything else as she efficiently taps a black and pink mobility stick back and forth, making her way down 116th St.

Walking as quickly as all these other NYC assholes, I think. But I gotta admit, I’m a little impressed by her total lack of hesitation as she heads towards the entrance portico of the law school’s main building. And the sound doesn’t come back on inside my head until she disappears around the corner.

“Yeah, I know what he’s got planned, but she’s blind,” Rock’s saying to Stone. “Doesn’t that feel messed up—”

“Her pop’s on Luc’s list,” Stone answers, shooting his brother a grave look.

“Yeah, but—”

I get out of the car, cutting off whatever oversensitive bullshit Rock’s about to say. Stone’s right. Fuck sympathy. Her dad’s still out there taunting me in both my sleeping and my waking dreams. This chick could be Helen Keller in a wheelchair with brain cancer on top, and I’d still come after her. As long as that fucking father of hers is living, I’m not going to rest. Not until I push a hundy down his throat, duct tape his mouth closed, and thank him for ten years of trauma with a bullet between the eyes.

Plus, it’s taken me a fuck ton of time just to get to this point. Dad ordered me to let the shit with Romano and his crew go after the retaliatory round of slaughters. Said I lost a week, but the Romanos lost a whole regime in the battles that followed, Peretti’s capo and six of his fellow soldiers. He called me at boarding school to tell me it was over, even if that main Peretti fuck still hadn’t been found.

But like hell it’s over. Dad doesn’t know about the daughter or my obsession with her. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t have a business degree like the one I’m getting, but fuck if that bottom line shit doesn’t come naturally to him. Far as he’s concerned, the embarrassment of his son getting kidnapped was a sunk cost. And he isn’t going to throw good money after bad, trying to hunt down the motherfucker who did it.

But here’s what happens if I close my eyes for more than four to five hours… if I allow my mind to stop grinding for more than five minutes. I return right back to that basement, hanging by my wrists over a tarp as Peretti uses me as his punching bag. He knew exactly where to hit, so that I bled and broke, but not so bad that I wouldn’t survive to see the next day’s beating.

I soon found out the tarp wasn’t there to keep the basement’s concrete floor free of my blood. It was there for my piss and my shit and my vomit—all the stuff that came out of me when he hit me just right. And he didn’t untie me until I’d done at least one. So that it felt like some kind of fucked up “Good boy” when he hosed me off, unchained me, then carried me over his shoulder back to my cell where I got to wait, helpless and broken until his radiant-as-the-fucking-sun daughter appeared with a plastic fork and a plate of pasta that would’ve made my nonna jump off the George Washington Bridge it tasted so good.

Filling my eyes and my stomach with beauty until the next day when he came downstairs, did a full two-hour workout, ate breakfast with his daughter, then dragged me out of the cage to do it all again.

No… my pop doesn’t get it. And he never will.

But I couldn’t let it go, even after WITSEC disappeared Bella Peretti better than the average key witness. I purposefully built clout with payoffs to certain Feds. Made contacts of my own, who wouldn’t rat me out to Dad. That took most of the ten years between now and the week still ass-fucking my subconscious.

But I did it. I found Danny’s hot-as-hell daughter, Bella, living out her anonymous life as a blind law student in New York. Now I just had to figure out how to get close to her. Because it ain’t enough just to use her to find her father. I want to beat Peretti the way he did me. When I put a bullet in his head, I want him to know I fucked his daughter. And as for his two sons, Danny Jr. and Nolan—they’re still alive, but just long enough for them to have kids of their own. Then I’ll coldly do the same thing to them that I did to their dad.

Why? Because I’m old school Ferraro through and through. And maybe my dad decided to abandon our brutal family reputation after his father and brother caught life sentences for their bloody hands, but I haven’t. I don’t forget, and I don’t forgive. Ever. And that will eventually make me the most ruthless don the Ferraro family has ever had. Someone even the most savage enforcer wouldn’t dare to cross.

So yeah, sorry, Rock, this girl ain’t getting a pass, I decide as I pull open the door to Greene Hall. My cousin thinks her do-gooder blind girl status makes her exempt from my revenge. It doesn’t. Today’s the day. After a few weeks of watching her from afar, it’s time to make my move.

When I stroll into the Public Health Law seminar, just about all the girls and gays eye shift into ogle mode. A few of them try to pretend they’re not looking, keeping their faces turned toward their laptops and textbooks, even as their eyes follow me across the front of the auditorium-style lecture hall. But most of the girls watch my every step, faces open, hoping to catch my eye as I make my way up the carpeted steps.

I’m used to it. It’s the same thing that always happens when I enter any space with people in it. Good hair and as Uncle Tonio used to say, “Face like one ’nuv them Renaissance fuckers painted it.” I’ve been getting stared at and flirted with since before my babymakers dropped. And usually, I use the attention to my advantage. True story—I ain’t touched a piece of homework since the 90’s.

But today I’m only interested in one girl.

“Hey, Amber, right?” I say, slipping into the empty seat beside her. This is the closest I’ve ever been to her, and my heart beats just as wild as it did the first time I saw her, even though she’s only a cog in my overarching revenge plan now. Somehow, I manage to keep my voice easy-breezy as I say, “Jake. Nice to meet you.”

“That seat’s reserved,” she answers. And she doesn’t even turn her head in my direction like I’ve seen her deliberately do when she talks to the other students in the class.

My brain trips, because I’ve been pretending to listen to the professor drone on while watching her for weeks now. And not once has anyone ever sat in the seat to the right of her.

“You expecting somebody?” I ask.

“It has to stay empty,” she answers, her gaze still pinned straight ahead. “Just in case I need assistance.”

“Have you ever needed assistance?” Seeing the way she strode down 116th, I doubt that’s the case.

“Doesn’t matter,” she answers, her voice cold as a New Jersey winter. “The chair’s supposed to stay empty.”

“Okay,” I say, deciding not to argue with her. “I’ll move. But can I take you to lunch after class? I was thinking of trying to get an internship with the Legal Aid Society, and I heard you’ve got an in over at the Manhattan branch—”

“Yeah, email me, and I’ll send you the info.” Her voice remains clipped and flat, and she reaches for her backpack, like she’s already done with this conversation.

“I was hoping to talk to you about the experience—”

“You can put any questions you have in the email,” she says as she pulls out a laptop and a much smaller rectangular device with braille keys on top.

“Did I say something wrong?” I ask. “Because I’m feeling some kind of hostility coming off of you.”

“Look, Jake,” she says in the same tone she would have used if I’d introduced myself as AssDouche. “I have to do twice as much work as you do to take this class, along with four others. That means I don’t have time to deal with come-ons poorly disguised as an interest in doing anything for the Legal Aid Society—who deserves better than getting used as a pick-up line, by the way. So if you could remove yourself from the reserved seat...”

“Okay, I get it,” I say, staying right where I am. “You don’t appreciate the subtle approach. Got ya, here’s me being more direct: I want to get to know you better, Reynolds, so I’m asking you out on a date—”

“No. Now, get out of the seat, please.”

I never in my life heard a please sound less like a request. And the couple of beats I take to decide my next move in an unexpectedly complicated introduction must be a couple too many. Because she suddenly taps her cane on the floor and says, “Professor Cluce, could you tell Jake to remove himself from this seat and that it’s basically like deciding to park in a handicapped spot just because no one else is using it?”

Shit. If I were capable of being embarrassed after what happened to me in that basement, that would have done it.

The whole class turns to stare at me now, and not because I’m so good looking.

Professor Cluce looks flustered at the front of the class. “Ah… Jake, if you wouldn’t mind moving,” he says.

I do mind, but I get up without another word because apparently, I calculated this chick all wrong. I thought “Amber Reynolds” would be a blind version of the girl I met in that hell basement. The one who passed food underneath the bars of my cage and watched me eat with a sympathetic look on her angelic face.

But, obviously, she’s not that angel anymore… or the open-hearted do-gooder she painted herself as on her Legal Aid Society application.

She’s harder. Pricklier. No BS. I can’t even call what she has going on around her heart a wall. More like a reinforced concrete barricade with a trench of hot tar in front and barb wire running across the top just in case I do manage to climb up it. And apparently, she doesn’t give one fuck that I can be pretty damn charming when chicks give me half a chance—which they almost always do.

So I decide to retreat and regroup. But before I do, I bend down to let her know, “This ain’t over, beautiful. I’m going to get that date.”

“Contrary to what you might have heard, there’s nothing sexy about a guy who won’t take no for an answer,” she replies coldly, already tapping on the rectangular braille device.

“Think I can change your mind about that.”

“But the thing is you won’t,” she answers, breezily, as if her not being into me was a thing written by the hand of God in the Bible.

I regard her a few hot seconds, not caring how it looks to the professor and the rest of the class. She doesn’t know it yet, but she handled “Jake Ferra” the exact wrong way. I was only planning to use her before. But now she’s challenged me, which means I’ll have to conquer her… Body, mind, and soul.

With that thought, I walk away and spend the rest of class staring at the back of her head. Because now I’m not just plotting how to use her, to teach her missing father a lesson, I’m imagining her underneath me, taking my dick and begging me for more… and how good it’s going to feel when she drops the hard-ass act and gives me exactly what I want.