Page 5 of Made Man

“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 longenough 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, butit’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.

---