Page 17 of The Mob: Shio Cuppacio
“Family! You’re good in here?” Niccoli, with his piercing blue eyes, looked past my father, making my mother push me further behind her. I could still feel her shaking and hated that I couldn’t do anything about it.
“Yes, cousin. I’m good here. Is everything all right with Don?”
Niccoli didn’t take his eyes from where he knew I was, which was behind my mother. “All good. I need the boys. All of them.”
Sprinting as if she’d drunk seven energy drinks, my mother appeared on the side of my father, leaving me standing in the hall. “Don says they have no training while he is away. He’s not coming anywhere with you.”
Niccoli’s smile dropped, and he looked at my mother with sheer and utter disgust. All of the Cuppacio men were ruthless, greedy, and evil, but Niccoli was the worst because he was a snake. The mob seemed to look past his slithering ways, but my cousins and I didn’t. We saw him for exactly who he was.
“Sandro, you’re going to let your whore talk to me in this way?”
I could see my father’s shoulder tense.
“Slap that bitch before I do it!” Niccoli barked.
Before he could walk into our home, my father slammed the door in his face and rushed my mother. Before he could lay a hand on her, I was pulling the back of his shirt. He’d forced her against the wall and punched above her head. She didn’t scream. She didn’t yell. She simply glared at my father with weary and tired eyes.
“You have to act like I’ve hit you when I open the door,” he said through clenched teeth.
Reaching behind him, he snatched me to his side. The two of us locked eyes. He let my mother go, kept his grip firm on my shoulder, and opened the door back.
My mother pressed her hand against her face and cried as if she’d gotten hit just as my father had instructed.
Me, though? There was no pretending. There was no one on the planet I hated more than Niccoli, and that said a lot since I hated all the Cuppacio men. There were times like this when I even hated my father. The good he did when no one was looking meant nothing if he was Satan anytime there was an audience.
“Shio fucking Cuppacio. Ready to die?” Niccoli grinned sneakily as if he were talking to his enemy instead of a child, who had only been able to read for three years.
Snatching away from my father, I stepped out of the door, where there was some form of love, into the real world and next to the snake.
My mother was still pretending, but was focused on me. Niccoli nudged me aggressively with his shoulder, but I kept my sights on Sandro. My mother’s cries intensified, and I knew that she’d gone from faking it to weeping in real life. She knew what happened anytime I was not under the protection that our roof provided, only when it was just us three.
My father could console and pour into us behind closed doors, but he couldn’t and wouldn’t protect us from his own family, so I knew that in the real world, he’d leave me outto drown just the same. It was then that I concluded that if someone couldn’t love me fully, wholly, and out loud, they couldn’t love me at all. If I had no intention of loving someone, I wouldn’t give them a false sense of hope that I would. Because that was what my father was to us. A temporary relief. A false sense of hope.
Unblinking, I used the back of my hand to swipe at my nose. My father was such a great pretender that the hateful glare he shot me almost seemed real. Maybe it was—maybe he really did hate us, but pretended he loved us. Either way, I was done with the whiplash. He was right; my mother deserved better, and even if it took my last breath, she’d get it.
“Be watchful, stand firm in the faith; be men of courage; be strong. Let all that you do be done in love. Corinthians 16:13-14. I’m always listening, father.”
Grabbing my shirt, Niccoli dragged me away, and I kept my eyes locked on my father until my home was no longer in view.
I hadn’t been herein a while. Truth be told, I didn’t know why the fuck I was here to begin with. This was grave number two of two. Five or so miles back, you could find my father’s original resting spot. When Don killed all of the men, we were young as fuck. Although we couldn’t be happier that the Cuppacios’ reign had ended, we were still faced with a few fears. We’d been stuck with women and children to provide for, and we’d barely had hair on our dicks. Then, we had to bury all of these men.
Ezio had stumbled upon some safes, and after paying a few of the women who wanted to leave, we bought the cheapest plots available and buried them niggas in a row. They had inexpensive gray headstones above the ground, which had been a requirement of the gravesite, and their caskets were no more than cheap pine boxes. Hell, we’d even buried them in suitsfrom their closets. They didn’t deserve proper burials, but we had to lay them to rest at the very least. Now, here I was, on a gloomy day with gray clouds hovering above in my windy-ass city, staring at the granite like it was about to talk back.
Lifting my head, I popped my neck and sighed. Grabbing my left wrist with my right palm, I crossed my arms in front of me. “What the fuck done happened now?”
“I’m surprised I didn’t find you with your dick out, using this muthafucka as your personal toilet,” his voice sounded as his body appeared to the right of me.
I angled my head to get a good look at the only person on this planet who could have found me. Scoffing, I looked back at the four-foot-tall black granite slab that displayed his name, birth date, and death date. I couldn’t bring myself to have “loving father and husband” engraved on it because that would have been a lie.
“How the fuck you find me,Don?” I asked again.
Doing a one-eighty, I faced Demise Rinaldi completely. Just as I was in a suit and tie, so was Demise. It was rare that you caught that nigga in street clothes these days, and as of late, I’d been in my mafia attire more than normal.
The left side of his mouth curved up, and I knew this nigga was about to come out of his mouth with some slick shit. That was Don, though. He either said some shit that made you want to beat his ass or kill his ass. There was no in between. The nigga didn’t know when to turn his ignorance off to save his fucking life.
Sizing him up, I swiped my thumb across my nose, getting annoyed with his silence. “What the fuck you want, Don?”
He took a step closer in my direction, and I didn’t know who the fuck this nigga thought he was intimidating, but it damn sure wasn’t me. Often, Don was granted approbation from a nigga because, technically, he was my boss and was responsible forhow my family ate. But us Cuppacios had been handling shit for a long time before he brought his ass around. He had a lot of shit with him, but he hadn’t dangled any bread and butter over our faces, and that kept him on this side of the earth because we didn’t give a fuck.
