27. Luna
27
LUNA
I know he’s coming because my father’s boots thunder down the narrow space in front of the cells like he’s a giant on a mission. My hands grip the bars, my desperation licking through the air, as if this will make him open the door and let me out instead of keeping me here like a caged animal. It’s what he did to me as a child every time I brought up my mother’s death and tried to get past him holding a knife to her throat. He’d lock me up down here until I acquiesced and told him I was mistaken. And he swore if I ever told my brothers, he’d keep me down here until I rotted into the ground and became nothing but a speck of dust.
I can smell the alcohol on his breath. I rear back, let my hands fall from the cool metal and take a step away from the bars. I feel hopeless and helpless. I don’t know how long I’ve been down here, but it seems like I never left from the first time he put me in here as a child. I know in reality, it can’t have been more than one or two days.
“I want to know who those men were back in Arizona and what you were doing with them.”
His voice is gruff, scathing. I feel like a child being scolded again. I feel like anything but human. Who treats a person this way?
My breath comes in hitched little gasps as I inhale the stale, musty air. This again. He really wants to know who those men were, and I don’t have the answer for him. This, I know, will only make him angrier than he already is.
His bloodshot eyes stare through me, unblinking. He’s put on weight since I last saw him, a paunch protruding ridiculously against his shorter frame. I don’t know how my brothers and I managed our height with our father being so short.
“Where’s Enzo?” I ask. “I want to speak with Enzo.”
My eldest brother has always had a soft spot for me. They all had, actually, but Enzo especially had always been my guiding light. He was hard, ruthless, damaged probably beyond repair at our father’s hands, but for me, he’s always been soft.
“Your brothers don’t want to see you,” my father spits. “Not after the shame you’ve brought upon our family name.”
“What shame is that, hmmm?” I dare to defy him. “That I chose to live my life my way? That I won’t bend to your rules? I’d love to see any one of you accept a marriage to a person you don’t want to be with.”
“If it’s convenient, that’s what we do in this business.”
“This business. I’m not part of this business.”
“Aren’t you? Who were those men ?”
His roar fills the cavernous dungeon, and I can swear I feel the ground shift with his anger. An anger I know all too well. My father has never hesitated when it comes to meting out his retribution. And his vengeance has always been cut-throat and swift. He could so very well annihilate me right here and right now in this very cell. I don’t think he’d even blink. He definitely wouldn’t shed a tear for me.
My mind strays to the time he had four men on their knees in our courtyard, their hands bound behind their backs. Four defenseless men, on their knees, about to meet their deaths. He hadn’t even asked anyone else to do the deed. He had stood behind each man and one by one, put a bullet in the back of their heads until each fell forward and left this world. He had made every one of his men watch, including my brothers. Enzo’s jaw had moved back and forth in anger, standing tall with his eyes fixed on a place beyond the bodies. Franco had stood with his eyes lowered to his feet. Danielo’s hand had started to flicker, a nervous habit he’d always had that my father said made him look weak. Coyin Junior, who hated carrying the namesake, looked through his father as though not really seeing him.
And me. I watched on with a mixture of horror and fury as my father looked up at my window, his eyes challenging me to open my mouth and say anything. He had expected me to be there. I held his gaze, the only one able to do so, my place at the table cemented. I may have been born a girl, but I was the lion amongst the four boys.
* * *
If I had known what the name would do to my father, I would have spit it out from the beginning. If only to watch him shrivel into himself with the fear I see in his eyes. It is only fleeting, but I see it nonetheless. And I relish it. Because it gives me something .
He doesn’t believe my whole story about how the men had been following me around then came to my rescue the night that he had sent his men to bring me back home. He doesn’t believe it one bit. Because you can’t go from stalking a girl to being her protector, he tells me. It sounds true to my own ears. I still don’t know what the men had wanted from me, although I’d had a suspicion, no matter how minuscule, that they’d been after my father. They want him. And nothing could have been truer than that niggling thought after the reaction he displays when I tell him their names.
“Names, Luna. I want names.”
He’s growing impatient as he watches me pace around the cage after telling my story. I’ve given him everything but identities. When that’s really all he wants to know.
“TJ. Attila.”
“Attila?”
His face blanches and his eyes go wide before he is able to revert his expression to the same stoic one he’s always had. The name Attila has affected him for some reason. He says nothing as he continues to watch me, no doubt wondering if I’m telling the truth. Obviously, there’s something about Attila that’s got him concerned. There must be some sort of history there. But I don’t know what that history is. And I may never know. If I end up dying down here in this dungeon, I may never know what it is that put that fear in my father’s eyes, no matter how temporary.