The Woman at the Docks: A Mafia Romance Read online

  "I don't know why you're trying to sell me on it when it is clear I don't have a choice," she grumbled, plowing into my shoulder as she passed, making her way to the SUV, climbing in.

  "Trust me, I know," I told my men when they tried to hold back smiles. "Andy, you're coming with us right now. I need Michael to run to the all-night store. I will send you a list of what we need. Throw in some extra shit for you and Andy, since we are all going to be spending a lot of time there until we figure out what happened to her sister."

  "I'll meet you back at the rental," Andy agreed, nodding, shuffling off.

  "You could put your ego aside for a moment, and realize that this is good that we are taking over."

  "She's my sister. I can't blindly trust someone I just met, someone who would kill me without blinking if that was what his boss told him."

  I couldn't argue with that.

  It was true.

  Family over everything.

  When they opened up the books and you got made, you swore it. That even if your grandmother was on her deathbed, if your boss needed you, you went. Case closed.

  "I'm not saying you can't be involved in some of this. I am saying we have the experiences and resources to make sure this is done right. What were you going to do if you found yourself caught by these guys? You had no backup, no weapon. We are better equipped. But that doesn't mean you can't be involved."

  "You just need to keep your thumb on me, so I don't screw up your plans for revenge."

  "You don't want revenge? Even if you get your sister—and whoever else was in that container —out, you don't want them to pay for what they've done?"

  I knew I had her there.

  I didn't have a sister.

  But if someone grabbed one of my aunts or little cousins? There would be a fuckuva lot of pain before they were granted the sweet release of death. I couldn't imagine Romy felt anything less than that.

  "I figured I would call the police about it."

  "Right. That's not the kind of revenge I'm talking about, and you know it."

  "I don't think I could kill someone."

  "You'd be surprised what you can do when you face up evil and realize it put its hand on someone you love. But no one is asking you to kill anyone. We're saying don't get in our way."

  "I guess that makes sense," she conceded.

  "What?" I asked when she let out a snort.

  "If you'd told me a couple weeks ago that I would be making some sort of alliance with a member of the New Jersey mafia to try to find my sister abducted by human traffickers, I would have thought you were in need of serious mental help."

  "We will fix this, Romy. Just give me some time."

  "I can't imagine many people end up trusting the mob."

  "And yet?" I prompted, sensing she wasn't done speaking.

  "And yet I can't help but feel that I can trust you."

  "You can," I assured her.

  I didn't give my word often.

  You never knew who might screw up, need to be punished, need to be taken out. So you couldn't give them any assurances.

  But I gave her one.

  And I would do everything in my fucking power to keep it.

  Chapter Six

  Romy

  Beauty is a curse.

  Those were words my mother had said to us so often that they were a fundamental part of our psyches from a young age.

  She claimed she cried when we were both born because we'd both been too pretty, would only grow up into very beautiful women. And that beauty, it does something ugly to men, mi vida," she explained to me one evening as we were cooking dinner in our makeshift apartment in a rundown neighborhood a couple weeks after she'd officially left my father.

  At that age, I had no reason to doubt those words.

  My mother had been the kind of stunning that had men stopping in their tracks, getting slaps from their wives when they passed her on the street. She'd been thin but curvy in her youth, all boobs and hips and butt. Even being naive of such things, I had always been fascinated by the way a sundress—her daily attire—slid over her curves, wondering if I would inherit a figure like hers once I grew up. Her hair had been a long sheet of gleaming black around a gentle face with large dark eyes and flawless skin.

  So she'd been beautiful for sure.

  And my father had something evil in him.

  It was faulty logic, of course, that her beauty had done that to him, but I hadn't known better at the time.

  She'd been so pretty it could be hard to look at. And yet my father would throw her across a room like a rag doll, would pull her up by her throat and spit in her face, calling her names no child should ever hear about their mother.

  Whore.

  Slut.

  Bitch.

  Cunt.

  "We should all run away," I whispered to her one night, clinging to her on the bathroom floor while she sobbed, her eye nearly swollen closed, her lip bleeding, a small patch of hair missing from right behind her ear from where my father had pulled her up by it.

  "That is a nice fantasy, Romina," she'd told me, giving me a reassuring squeeze. "But we live in a not-so-nice reality. I'm sorry to say it. But it is true. We can't leave."

  "But why?" I begged, my heart turning to dust in my chest.

  "We have nowhere to go, mija," she told me, reaching up to stroke my hair.

  "We can go back to your home." She'd told me about Venezuela all the time. About her family. About the food. About their way of life. It seemed clear to me that she missed it.

  "No, we can't."

  "Why not? Our family is there."

  "It is not how it was anymore, Romina. There is unrest. There are many people snatched off the streets. We can't go back now. Someday, I hope."

  She ended up staying with my father for another five years. Until I was old enough to understand his abuse, to get stubborn enough to fight against it.

  I got between them many times, something that infuriated my father, but he stormed out, left her alone.

  Until one day, he didn't back down. And he didn't care anymore that I was his daughter. Maybe because at that point, I started to look a lot like my mother.

  He'd knocked out a tooth and given me a concussion.

  It turned out that my mother was willing to endure his torment to give us what she thought of as a better life. But she found even more strength when his hands touched me.

  She'd waited until he was asleep that night, lubricated by more beers than she usually kept in the house because alcohol made him mean before it made him finally pass out.

  Then she quietly packed a bag, came into my room, instructed me to pack one as well, telling me what to put in it. Then she snuck over to Celenia's room, packing her bag for her, then pulling her out of bed.

  We made our escape dressed in flannel pajama sets. I would always remember my sister exactly that way. With pastel mermaid printed pajamas, messy hair, and confused eyes, her school bag slung over her shoulder.

  My mother didn't have a car of her own, and I recalled feeling my stomach twisted into painful knots as we walked down the street, eyes watching us as we went by with ducked heads, wanting to avoid trouble, all the while terrified my father would wake up, would come looking for us, drag us home.

  We walked for long enough for Celenia to start whining about her aching legs. And I remember being annoyed with her for not understanding how important this was, even though I knew I had spent so much of my time shielding her from the ugly reality of what our father did to our mother, that she couldn't have known how dire it was, how much we needed to get away.

  Eventually, we made it to the basement under a local dry cleaner, finding it set up as a makeshift home with about ten people already living there on cots or mattresses on the floor. There was a refrigerator and an old dresser with a hot plate situated on it.

  There were two sets of single mothers there, each with two children, two middle-aged ladies, two elderly women, and two older men.

/>   With the three of us, we were fifteen.

  It wasn't like a family. It sounds like it should have been, all these people cramped together in a small space, all trying to save some money, build a better life for themselves.

  But most everyone there worked two or three jobs, only dropping in to sleep, often grumbling about the noises of the younger children who didn't understand the seriousness of all our situations.

  My mother had been one of those people working three jobs. A cleaning lady, a babysitter, and a yard worker.

  And I finally realized, when I saw all the stacks of money she carefully hid away when no one else was home to see her, why she couldn't leave my father for all those years, why she felt she had nowhere to go.

  Because while we had been born in the U.S., while we were legal, she wasn't. And she lived in fear every day of someone finding that out, of sending her back, leaving us to the mercy of our father.

  Armed with this new knowledge, any remnants of my childhood slipped away, making me step into the shoes of mother to Celenia who had previously been making me angry with her complaints, with her demands to see our father.

  I packed her lunch for school, cutting off the crusts of her sandwiches. I walked her to school. I ran from my school to hers after my classes let out, not wanting her to walk home alone in our neighborhood.

  When Mom wasn't around, but the guys we lived with were lurking around, I made her throw on her shoes and go with me to the park, to a nicer neighborhood where we would window shop, to the movies if we scraped together enough money.

  My mother taught me how to French braid hair. I taught Celenia. My mother showed me how to make empanadas. I was the one to stand over that hot plate and help Celenia learn. Makeup talks, boy talks, changing body talks, sex talks. Celenia and I had all of those on our long walks when we dreamed of a future where we might be able to go into one of those stores and treat ourselves to something pretty.

  Those were our secret wishes, ones that guilt kept us from ever uttering to our overworked mother.

  Much to our mother's—and maybe even mine at times—worries and fears, Celenia not only followed in our mother's shoes in terms of beauty, but somehow managed to well surpass her. It didn't seem possible. Until she was fourteen and wearing out mother's old sundresses like they'd been stitched just for her.

  It was also that summer, the one where she turned fourteen, when we'd finally managed to move out of that basement, partially because I had been working for years, was legal, could qualify to sign for a lease.

  I had been taking classes at the local college after having found the balls to track down my father and demand he pay seeing as he hadn't paid a cent in child support since then. He, being with a new woman who had no idea he'd had any children, had thrown me just enough to get me started.

  Things had finally, finally started to get better for the three of us.

  And then one of the women my mother had been working for, handling a brat of an eight-year-old who told ugly lies about how he was treated to gain attention from his never-present parents, had accused her of stealing her diamond necklace.

  And then reported her.

  Sometimes, I could still hear her cries as she was pulled away from us, as Celenia was dragged into foster care until they could go through the process of allowing her to be in my custody.

  But it wasn't the same.

  Just the two of us.

  The absence of our mother was a gaping wound in our hearts, in our psyches, it became bigger than anything else we had going on.

  Until, eventually, we made the decision to get our passports, to gather what was left of our savings, to break our lease, and to go to our mother's homeland for the first time.

  We hadn't known what to expect. Aside from stories about our family we'd never met and the food they all used to make together, we didn't know much about our mother's hometown.

  We had been accustomed to apartment buildings and single-family homes separated by little yards.

  That wasn't what we were met with as we made our way down the street toward the address our mother had put on the last letter she'd sent to us.

  There was a high hill with little rectangular, brightly-colored homes seemingly stacked on top of each other all the way up to the top, occasionally broken up by a single green tree.

  "How do they get from home to home?" Celenia asked under her breath.

  I wanted to keep being the mom to her, imparting the wisdom that came from being eight years her senior.

  But just this once, I had no idea. Because I had been contemplating that myself.

  As it turned out, though you couldn't see it from the direction we'd come in, there were little streets of the barrio and staircases between all the homes as well as a town behind them.

  It wasn't long as we made our way down those little streets before we were discovered by someone claiming we looked just like our mother, though, clearly, these days, Celenia was the holder of most of the beauty in our family.

  This group of women had saved us from walking around cluelessly for hours, since we had no idea which house we were looking for, or even how they were situated so we could figure out the numbers. They led us toward the top of the hill to a bright red home, making Celenia and I shared a worried look, wondering how more than our mother and her mother could fit in that home. Would there be space for us? Had we made a major mistake?

  But then the door flew open.

  And our mother's arms closed around us.

  And then our grandmother's.

  Our aunts'.

  Our uncles'.

  It was there in our new home that I started to lose Celenia.

  She had our mother who no longer needed to work so hard. She had our grandmother. She had our aunts. All of these women with more wisdom to impart on her than I thought I could ever have.

  She clung to them, moved away from me.

  And, finally, in my early twenties, I was free to pursue my own interests.

  I got friends and occasionally dated.

  It was the following year we lost our grandmother. The one after that, our mother to a freak blood clot.

  For a long while, Celenia and I clung to each other as we tried to make sense of this new world, one without our mother.

  But then she started to find comfort in the arms of boys instead of me, leaving for days or weeks at a time despite my—and our family's—demands she come back to the barrio.

  Celenia had always been pampered, had been coddled, and as such, she'd developed a stubborn streak she had gotten too old to work out of her.

  Eventually, she moved out of our somewhat crowded home.

  And after a particularly nasty fight over one of the many men who had been salivating over her—that had been old enough to be her father—I had made the impulsive decision to leave, to head back to what had been my homeland, to finish my degree.

  I think a part of me always figured I would go back. When Celenia was older, when she was more interested in things like family, like sisterhood. When she'd gotten her wild out.

  But I guess I just never got around to it.

  We kept in touch via email and text and missed voicemails.

  But she never asked when I would be back.

  I never volunteered it either.

  And then I had gotten that call.

  The one that changed everything.

  The one that had me on a plane, my heart in my throat, my mother's words in my head once again.

  Beauty is a curse.

  I couldn't help but wonder if there had been some truth in her words. If Celenia almost unfathomable beauty had gotten the attention of evil men.

  And as each and every day passed, it seemed more and more likely that was exactly what had happened.

  "Romy?" Luca's voice called, making me snap out of my trip down memory lane. Bittersweet though it was, I was sad to be pulled back to the present. Where my sister was caught in predatory hands. And I couldn't shake the guilt at not be
ing around to try to stop it.

  "Yeah?"

  "We're here," he explained, making me look out the window to see the walls of the garage.

  "Oh."

  "I know I can't tell you not to worry about your sister. But we are going to find her, okay?"

  A part of me was starting to doubt it. Even with the new help. Even with better resources.

  I had promised myself, when I had made it home to ask around town about her, that I would never give up, never lose hope.

  But this deflated sensation in my chest felt a lot like defeat.

  "I bet every family of every trafficked person says that. I wonder how many are actually right," I murmured, looking out the windshield, feeling the burn of tears at the backs of my eyes.

  "Sweetheart, you're tired. You've got to be hungry. You don't mean any of this. Let's get you inside, fed, and then get you to bed. You'll feel less defeated in the morning. And maybe by then my men will have answers for you," he added, making me turn to find his eyes on me, swearing I found kindness there, compassion for me and my situation.

  It seemed strange and against everything I believed about criminals and morals that I would find comfort in a mafia underboss, that he would be a voice of reason in an impossible situation.

  "You're probably right," I agreed, not sure when the last time I ate something decent was. And I hadn't gotten a full night of sleep in over a week, believing that in doing so, I could be missing something important.

  There were advantages to working with someone else, even if it meant giving up control of the reins for a bit. Especially if the hands I was placing them in were more skilled than my own, knew how to handle them more successfully.

  There would be no ball dropping just because I got an extra hour of sleep. More eyes would be on the situation even when I wasn't around than there had been when it was all on me.

  "Michael will be back with the supplies soon. Then you can eat. Then get some sleep. Come on," Luca invited, climbing out, moving around the SUV before I could even reach for the door handle, pulling it open for me.

  I'll admit it.