My father wasn’t an affectionate man, in fact, he’d never told me he loved me, hadn’t hugged me, shown me any kind of caring or nurturing touch in my eighteen years. I’d come to accept that although I was his flesh and blood, he saw me as nothing more than a commodity. Something he owned. Something he could use to up his status as underboss.
He was the king and I was a pawn in his game of chess.
My father flicked his hand toward the door, a silent, “get out”.
I felt my shoulders sag forward, and hated myself for showing any kind of weakness in front of him.
I left and shut his office door behind me and leaned against it, feeling my mother’s gaze on me. I lifted my head and stared at her. She stood down the hall wringing her hands together, a horrified look on her face.
Fernanda Bianchi was as much a prisoner and board game piece as I was. She, too, had been given to my father when she was barely eighteen, their marriage arranged, my mother forced to be with an older man who treated her like nothing but a vessel for his heirs.
We were all just tools, bargaining chips to them. The weaker sex, as they called us.
My fifteen-year-old sister, Claudia, had a spirit that I wish I’d possessed, a fire in her veins that I wanted for my own, and a freethinking mind that I envied. She didn’t care about rules or traditions no matter how many times Father scolded her, or Mother talked to her. She lived by her own rules, and as much as I loved her for it, I also worried for her and the world we lived in. If a woman couldn't be submissive to the men in our lives on their own… it was beaten into them.
Then there was my twenty-one-year-old brother Gio, who was just as ruthless and coldhearted as our father---as every man in the underworld kingdom--was a prisoner, too. He’d been warped and twisted up, indoctrinated into all things mafia that it’s just who he was now. But even the life he led, the rules and expectations for his life hadn’t made him evil. Not truly. Not yet.
“Passerotta.” Sparrow.
It was the nickname my mother and brother had given me when I was a child because they said I fluttered around constantly, little wings taking me from one place to another.
My mother’s voice was soft, submissive, and I heard a hint of sympathy laced in that lone word. Although I knew she probably didn’t want this life for me, she didn’t say otherwise. My father had shaped my mother into the woman who stood before me; softly spoken, eyes always diverted to the ground when he was in the room, her appearance always perfect.
I wondered how she could find any happiness.
I knew he hit her when he was mad, when she didn’t do what he said, when he wasn’t happy enough with… anything.
“Mamma,” I choked out and covered my mouth with a hand, refusing to cry even though my eyes watered. I was an adult, an eighteen-year-old woman who was crying and rushing to her mother for comfort. And I felt no shame in that.
“Come, darling” she said softly and held her hand out to me.
I slipped my palm in hers and let her lead me down the hallway, around the corner, and followed her as we descended the stairs. She took me to the gardens, a place I knew was where she found her solitude, where she felt safe and free.
I felt the tears start to fall as we sat on the wrought iron bench and stared at the blooming roses. The gardens were meticulously landscaped, mainly by the workers coming in daily to tend to it as if it were a religion, but my mother could also be found here during her free time.
“Mamma,” I whispered her name again and felt her hand cover mine, which rested on my lap. As I sat beside my mother I felt like a little girl again. I felt as vulnerable as one. “He's the bratva.” My mother knew this, yet I said it again, as if it would make a difference, change my fate.
She didn’t speak, but her silence was comforting in itself.
“Does Gio know? Claudia?” They’d know eventually, sooner rather than later.
“Gio was told.” She shifted beside me. “He wasn’t pleased with your father’s decision, but there wasn’t anything to be done. The deal had already been made.”
The deal had already been made.
I looked at my very traditional Italian mother and waited until she glanced at me. I stared up into her crystalline blue eyes, ones the exact same shade as mine. It was the only thing all three of us had inherited from her. Where she was fair skin and blonde hair, me and my siblings took after my father’s darker Sicilian side with our olive skin tone and black hair.
“In life we have to make sacrifices.” She swallowed. “We have to do things we don’t want for things to stay positive.” She lifted her hand and cupped the side of my face.
I’d grown up knowing the Russian mafia was the enemy, a dangerous and brutal organization, one my father said was filled with savages.
She smoothed her thumb over my cheek and dropped her hand back to her lap, glancing at the gardens once more. I did the same.
“Amara,” she said my name softly and my throat tightened.
I knew that tone. It was the one she used when things were lost, when there was nothing to do but obey.
I closed my eyes and felt more tears move down my cheeks. I knew the man I was to marry would be cruel. He’d be like my father… he’d be like all the men in our world. And there was nothing I could do. Running wasn’t an option. I had security with me constantly, a precaution my father took because there were men, bad men like him, who would use me to get to him. I had no money, no real friends to turn to for help. I had nothing to my name aside from what was in the home behind me.