1. 2
“Wyatt tackled me,” Mira says through her easing sobs. “He wouldn’t let me go.”
Mr. Volpe’s glare takes on a different quality, his eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly. I get the sense he’s changed his mind about something.
“Posy, take her inside,” he says to his wife. “Get her cleaned up while I have a word with Mr. Foster here.”
Mira glances over, finally seeming to notice me. She immediately tries to come for me, but her mother has her by the arm.
“Daddy, he didn’t mean to hurt me. He was trying to stop me from getting hurt. He didn’t see anything. It was dark.” She’s pleading, her voice turning childlike as it rises with fear.
She’s begging for my life. My heart punches harder and harder in my chest. There is no way out. Tony’s arm is still slung around my shoulder. Mr. Volpe’s men surround me. I hear a creak as the iron gate behind me closes.
“Why don’t you come in, too, Mr. Foster?” Mr. Volpe says.
“Dario…” his wife warns.
“We’ll talk about your role in all of this later, wife. I see you and Mira have been playing your own games under my nose. Go clean up and then check on our boy. He’s probably tearing up the safe room.” He gestures for his wife to go ahead, and she casts him, and then me, a worried look. My guts cramp.
She escorts Mira inside, hurrying her toward the kitchen. Tony urges me after them, Ray joining him at my back.
I’ve only been invited past the foyer once before when I was a little. Some kids had messed with Mira on the playground, and I’d beaten the shit out of them. Mira’s parents brought me home for ice cream, and then Mr. Volpe gave me a ride home in his Porsche 911 with the top down. That was a long time ago.
“This way, Mr. Foster,” Mr. Volpe says, opening a door that looks to lead down to the basement.
I don’t want to go down there. Every instinct I have is screaming don’t go , but Mira’s upstairs and hurt and maybe still mad at me. I can’t leave her. I don’t think her parents would ever hurt her—honestly, she’s spoiled rotten—but I need to make sure she’s okay.
It’s not like I really have a choice with the way Ray and Tony crowd me down the stairs. At the bottom, the room opens to a huge gym. There’s a mat in the middle of the floor that looks to be regulation boxing ring size. Mira has mentioned that her dad boxes.
There’s all the other typical equipment, too—punching bags, free weights, machines, tractor tires and ropes for HIIT—everything you could want. The walls are mirrored. There are no windows and no obvious second exit—the perfect murder room.
My pulse races like crazy. It reeks like copper down here. Probably from the polished concrete.
God, let it be from the concrete.
Mr. Volpe nods to Ray, and he fetches two metal folding chairs from a stack, setting them up side by side, facing the mat.
Mr. Volpe sits, crosses his legs, and gestures for me to take a seat, too. When I do, I realize my jeans are zipped, but they’re not buttoned. My cheeks burn. Thankfully, Mr. Volpe isn’t looking at my face. He’s not big on eye contact, except for when he’s fucking with you.
“I see you were out with my daughter,” he starts, smoothing his slacks. Somehow, they’re still immaculately pressed and creased.
I cough to clear my throat. “Yes, sir.”
I’m not going to apologize. Mira is eighteen, we’re together, and one day, she’s going to be my wife. I’m terrified of this man, but only in my body. Not in my head. Not in my heart.
“I assume this isn’t the first time,” he says.
I nod. I didn’t figure he knew, but she’s an adult, and she can make her own choices. At least that’s what she’s always telling me.
His jaw tightens, and he’s silent for a moment until he seems to come to a decision. “Do you know what I do for a living, young man?” he asks.
Well, shit. He’s pretty clearly some kind of mobster, but I’m not about to say that. “You’re, ah, in business?”
He chuckles. Once. “Yes. I’m a businessman.” He glances over, his lips still curved in amusement. “And we hear you’re going to Wharton in the fall.”
“Yeah.”
“I suppose you plan to go into business, too, eh?”
I nod. I don’t know what he’s getting at or why we’re sitting side by side in an empty room in front of a wrestling mat, but I do know I’m in over my head. The gunshots and falling bodies echo in my head on repeat, and I’m sweating balls.
“Where’s Mira?” I ask.
Mr. Volpe leans back in his chair and folds his hands in his lap. “Upstairs with her mother. Getting patched up.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt her, sir,” I rush to say. “She was running for the house.”
“I understand.” He flashes me a quick, cold smile. “Mira is impulsive. Just like her mother. They both let their emotions make their decisions.”
It’s not a lie. Mira is this weird combination of ditzy girly-girl and pure analytical brilliance. You’d never guess unless you saw her in action, but I’ve been to every one of her Odyssey of the Mind and Math Olympiad practices, and I’ve seen the video of the competitions.
“I wanted to tell you,” I say, just to be clear. “Mira wanted to keep it between us.” It’s basically the only thing we argue about.
“I don’t doubt that.” Mr. Volpe sighs. “She knows I wouldn’t approve.”
I straighten my spine. “I haven’t disrespected her. I’m serious about her, sir. I’m going to marry her. After I finish school and get a job. We’ve got a plan.”
He nods again, very slowly. “A plan, eh?”
“Yes.” My voice doesn’t shake, but my hands would be if I hadn’t shoved them under my thighs.
Mr. Volpe draws in a breath, takes his phone from his pocket, and makes a call. “Bring him into the gym.”
I hear Vinnie say, “Yes, boss.”
“I suppose Mira hasn’t told you much about my business?” he turns and asks.
I shake my head.
“It’s what you’d call a family business. I was born into it. So was Mira’s mother. So was Mira.”
My guts slither into a knot. I’ve seen too many Scorsese movies to misunderstand him.
“Her mother and I will go to any length to make Mira happy, but there are certain choices she just doesn’t get to make. She didn’t get to choose her blood, and I think you’ve known her long enough to know that she’d never willingly turn her back on her family.”
I do know that. I can’t wait to leave my parents’ house, but Mira never even considered leaving town for school.
A scuffle sounds from behind a door I’d assumed led to the bathroom. It flies open, and Vinnie wrangles a struggling man with white-blond hair, wearing head-to-toe black, into the room. Tony helps force the man to his knees in the middle of the mat.
The man sees Mr. Volpe and spits, swearing a blue streak in a foreign language that sounds like Russian.
Mr. Volpe rises to his feet, smirking. He answers the man in his own language, and the man falls quiet, his already pale face blanching gray.
“Do you love my daughter?” Mr. Volpe asks without turning his head to look at me.
“Yes, sir.”
“This man came to kill her. And her mother and me and everyone else she cares about. You saw that for yourself.”
My stomach twists tighter and tighter. “Yes, sir,” I mutter when I can’t take the silence any longer.
“He’s not the first to come after us. And he won’t be the last.” Mr. Volpe exhales. “I can’t say he didn’t have good cause. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, eh, Mr. Foster?”
I grunt. My dad says that when he steals a deal out from under one of the other VPs at work or cuts someone off in a zipper merge. I’ve never known what the fuck it’s supposed to mean. Dogs don’t eat each other.
“Eat or be eaten.” He sighs again and reaches behind his back, slips his hand under his jacket, and pulls out a gun.
I don’t know guns. My dad’s a Republican, but he’s the golf kind, not the hunting kind.
The gun is matte black, but otherwise, it looks like a toy. I think I still have one just like it in the back of my closet, but it’s bright orange and shoots little blue foam bullets that get everywhere and drive my mom nuts.
It’s not a toy. Not with the way the man on the mat just got very, very still.
Mr. Volpe aims the gun at the man’s head. The man squeezes his eyes shut. My stomach lurches, acid burning my throat.
How do I stop this?
Instinct screams at my body to run, but at the same time, it paralyzes me.
“Sir,” I say, and I don’t know if it’s a plea or a question or what.
Mr. Volpe sighs a final time and somehow flips the gun so he’s offering it to me. “You know what you have to do,” he says to me, those cold fish eyes boring into me.
“Sir?”
“This man attacked us. If Mira had been home, and she got caught in the crossfire, she’d be dead right now. If they caught her, they’d make her wish she was before they put a bullet in her brain. Without hesitation . Do you understand that?”
I don’t know how I got here. Before Mira snuck out to meet me, I was hanging in my room, playing Madden online and shit-talking some kid who lives on the other side of the world while I ate Funyuns with my dog passed out and snoring on my feet.
“You’re going to marry my daughter, right?” He offers me the gun again. “You love her. If this man lives, he would kill her the first chance he gets.”
Blood roars in my ears. Everyone is standing around like this is nothing new, staring at me. Everyone except the man kneeling on the floor has a gun like Mr. Volpe’s and knows how to use it. They watch expectantly, and I can read the secondhand embarrassment on each of their faces. They know I don’t know how to shoot. They know I don’t have the balls.
Shame and fear clutches at my throat, tightens my asshole, ripping who I thought I was to shreds.
“Mr. Foster?” Mr. Volpe raises an eyebrow.
I don’t move.
He steps toward me, and I flinch. He grabs my hand and wraps my fingers around the metal. It’s warm from his hand.
He lifts my arm so I’m pointing the gun at the blond man. Like I’m a puppet.
The man breaks his silence in a sudden rush of Russian. He’s speaking to me. Begging. I don’t know a word of what he says, but the meaning in crystal clear. You don’t want to do this. You don’t have to. Please .
“Boy?” Mr. Volpe prompts. “He would’ve killed the woman you love. You’re going to let him live?”
He knows I am. I can hear the pity in his voice. The utter lack of surprise.
“I c-can’t.” My eyes burn.
The man begs louder. He’s not much older than me. He could be any kid from school. Any kid I play Madden with online.
“Sir,” I plead.
Mr. Volpe sighs one last time, and then so fast that I don’t even realize what he’s doing, he wraps his hand around mine and presses my finger to the trigger.
The blond man’s head explodes. Chunks splatter across the blue plastic mat. Someone screams.
It’s me.
The blond man slumps over like someone let the air out of him.
I guess they did.
I did.
I killed him.
No, it wasn’t me. It was Mr. Volpe, but it’s my finger on the trigger, even now, my shaking arm raised, aiming at the lifeless body crumpled on the basement floor.
Gently, Mr. Volpe presses my arm down and peels the gun from my weak grip. He clicks a button. The safety? And then he slides it into his back holster.
“Here’s what you’re gonna do, kid. You’re going to go home, take a shower, and get a good night’s sleep. And tomorrow, when my daughter texts you or calls or whatever, you’re gonna tell her that it’s over. It’s not her, it’s you. You’re going away to college, right? You need space to figure out who you are. Experience life. Whatever. Or ghost her. I don’t care. You disappear, and so does this body and gun with your prints all over it.”
He leans to speak directly into my ear, his breath hot on my neck. “I think we both know you’re not the man for her.” He claps me on the back and guides me up the stairs and out the front doors.
The neighborhood is dark and quiet except for a single squad car pulled over down the street, its red and blue lights lighting up a scene. An officer has two young men in hoodies lined up against the hood of his patrol car while his partner rummages through a backpack on the ground.
“Kids and their fireworks.” Mr. Volpe smirks and shakes his head. “Get home safe, now,” he says, urging me down the stairs with a hand to my back.
I take the first few steps like a zombie, and then I run like the devil is chasing after me.
He’s not.
He’s chuckling to himself as he goes back into his house and turns out the porchlight.
Wyatt
Pick up
Why won’t you pick up?
WYATT
Dad won’t let me leave the house
WYATT!!!
Hey
Where have you been?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Listen
…
…
…
I cant do this anymore
Wut?!?!?!?
Pick up the phone!!!
WYATT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Its not your fault. Its me
no shit
I’m not fucking around wyatt. Pick up the phone now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I don’t want to do long distance
This is just too much drama ok
WYATT
Just take care of yourself ok
WYATT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wyatt
You asshole
Ill never forgive you if you don’t PICK UP RIGHT NOW
Did you block me?
Unblock me motherfucker
Wyatt
Wyatt
Wyatt