Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jorge
As I sit with my arm around Liesel on the swing in Noor and Hisham’s backyard, I can finally breathe for a few minutes.
I’m relaxed knowing we’re headed home soon.
Even though we haven’t resolved anything, at least I have an explanation and targets for my anger once we’re home.
It took everything in me to only issue Bastian threats when I wanted to tear him apart.
If Liesel hadn’t been there, I might have.
I truly don’t know that I would’ve had the restraint to do nothing if it were just my brother and cousin with me.
I can channel my waves of rage toward the responsible parties rather than feeling flustered and frustrated like I have this entire time.
I push off with my feet every few swings, and I wonder if one day Liesel and I might sit like this when we’re old and gray, watching our grandchildren play in our yard.
That makes me consider where we might live.
There’re two neighborhoods adjacent to one another. They’ve become syndicate Switzerland. Couples from all Four Families live there. It’s practically become an underworld compound. It’s where most of us grew up. We moved into that neighborhood when Mamá brought my brothers and me to the U.S.
The Kutsenkos and their Andreyev cousins didn’t move into the neighborhood until the oldest, Maksim, married and had twins.
Then his brothers and cousins followed him—of course, because they’re an eight-tentacle octopus.
Where you get one, you get all the others with only one brain amongst them.
Their mother moved into a home once the brothers were out of the house and could afford to buy her the property there.
Before that, they’d grown up near Brighton Beach, a Russian enclave.
Pablo, his parents, and his brother lived in New Jersey. But he and Florencia recently purchased a home in that neighborhood. Javier and Madeline did the same thing. They live a couple streets over from Mamá.
All the Mancinellis, except for Carmine, grew up there too.
His parents had a home farther out in Queens along the coast. Carmine’s parents got married at nineteen when his mother got pregnant with him.
Paola’s and Cesare’s fathers forced them into the marriage, then basically exiled them to a beautiful, sprawling home far away from everyone else.
However, Carmine and his wife, Serafina, now have a home in the neighborhood too.
As teens, we generally stayed away with our own groups of friends, but every once in a while, our paths would cross.
There was one particular time where it exploded in our faces.
All of my generation’s members of the Four Families wound up at the same high school party.
We were keeping to ourselves until Maria Mancinelli’s friend tried to approach Joaquin because she had a crush on him.
Joaquin was a senior when the girls were freshmen.
He was flattered by the attention but not interested.
It was super noisy, and Maria misheard what Javier said, thinking my brother claimed the girls were flat-chested bitches.
Instead, Javier basically told Joaquin Tío Enrique would flatten him like a dead dog if he went anywhere near girls so much younger than him.
Maria told Carmine and Gabriele, who then called over the rest of their family.
The Kutsenkos and Andreyevs heard and thought my brother insulted a girl, so they got involved since they love to fancy themselves every woman’s knight in shining armor.
Fucking hypocrites to the nth degree. Then the O’Rourkes chimed in, egging on both sides.
It turned into a syndicate melee with guns and knives.
Everyone who wasn’t in a syndicate took off in different directions once the fight broke out.
At least we waited until the outsiders fled before we drew those weapons.
We barely got out in the nick of time when we heard the sirens.
It was actually Maria who got us all off the hook with the cops.
She recognized some officer whose father was in the Mafia.
She explained who was there and why the fight happened. Before we knew it, the cops were gone.
All the syndicate members hid in nearby yards or behind trees at a park, waiting to see what would happen.
The outcome was all Four Families’ leaders were absolutely livid.
The old bratva pakhan tortured the Kutsenkos and Andreyevs, just like he’d done while training them.
Don Salvatore, Tío Enrique, and Liam O’Rourke—the mob boss—lit into their respective family members.
It was apparently a jumble of languages among all the men; native tongues mixed with English.
None of the leaders had been that angry in decades. Probably the entire time they’d led their families. I nearly cringe remembering that, but I don’t want Liesel to misunderstand.
“You seem deep in thought, Daddy.”
I reach across my lap to clasp Liesel’s hand then draw them onto my thigh. “Just remembering something from high school about a fight that broke out among members of the Four Families.”
“Four Families?”
“Yes. One of the Mafia wives in New York named us that. It’s the families who lead the mob, the Mafia, the Cartel, and the bratva. The Irish mob are the O’Rourkes. The Russian bratva are the Kutsenkos. The Mafia are the Mancinellis. The Cartel is us.”
Her lips turn down, and her head tilts away from me. “Do you really have that much to do with each other?”
She’s already admitted to her family that I’m in a cartel. It’s time for me to explain what that truly means.
“Unfortunately, yes, chiquita, we do. You’ve seen how we sometimes have overlapping clients and deals. It’s hardly our preference. We also own rival businesses and generally try to fuck each other over as frequently as we can.”
“What does that look like?”
I remain silent. Her brow furrows at my piercing stare.
“Jorge—”
“Liesel, this is something that’ll always be part of our relationship. There’s a lot I’ll never tell you. I can’t. It wouldn’t be safe for you to know if I did.”
“As in safe from these rivals?”
“No, not so much from them. I mean not safe if law enforcement detained you or arrested you.”
She swallows as she considers what I’ve just said.
“Chica?”
She looks like there’s more she wants to say, but she’s weighing her words. I hate that there’s anything she’s uncertain about between us or uncertain she can say to me. My thumb glides over the back of her hand, hopefully offering her some reassurance.
“If we marry, could they make me testify against you?”
“Supposedly, no, but there’re certainly ways they can work around that. They can make you testify about my family members or even about members of rival syndicates, hoping to back you into a corner where you’ll divulge things about me.”
Her eyes water, and my heart breaks. Is this too much for her? Her free hand rests on my chest as she twists to look at me.
“Jorge, I can’t imagine anyone doing that to me, putting me in that kind of position.
It hurts my heart to think somebody would attempt to make me betray you.
I would never do that. Even if this doesn’t work out between us, I wouldn’t do that to you.
And after all your family’s done to help me, I would never do that to them.
But considering what you’ve said two other families have done to me, I’ll sing like a fucking canary to get back at them. ”
“I appreciate that sentiment, little one, but the less you know, the less likely you are to be trapped in the middle. Even if you wanted to help my family like that, I never want you in that position. It’s too dangerous.
I don’t fear the other syndicates retaliating if you testified against them, but they would target the rest of us.
It’s better if you simply have nothing to do with any of it.
That also means not only will I lie by omission—keeping things from you, giving you these blank stares—I’ll also tell you outright lies.
I’ll look you in the eye and make up some story that doesn’t even remotely resemble the truth.
But again, I’ll do it to protect you and my family along with the people who rely on us for their safety and their jobs.
It’ll never be about just me. If I could tell you the truth and avoid being deceptive, I would. ”
She stares at me for a long moment, and I notice her eyes drift to my shirt collar, then back up to me. I’m not sure at first why she did that, then it dawns on me.
“Liesel, you will never see me come home with lipstick on my shirt or smelling of another woman, and not because I changed first. You will see me in clothes I didn’t leave the house in because I needed to change for other reasons.
There are very few limitations to what I’ll do to protect you and the people I love or have a duty toward.
But infidelity is a line I will never, ever, ever cross.
There will always be another way. I couldn’t do that to you.
I couldn’t live with the shame of that. And my family would castrate, then murder me, my mother being at the front of the line with a rusty knife.
Cheating is just something that never happens in my family.
It’s simply too dishonorable and too hurtful to consider. ”
Now’s the time I need to admit to at least one of our business endeavors.