Just What The Mafia Boss Ordered

Eddie’s POV The sky above me was grey and bleak, but given the events unfolding today, it seemed appropriate, and when the rain started falling around me, it was the icing on the cake. So many people showed up today, but one by one, they were walking away, making me feel lost and alone. How was I kidding? I was always alone. I sniffed a little, wiping my nose on my suit jacket sleeve. I hate wearing this suit, it reminded me of the one I wore two years earlier at this same cemetery when we had come to say goodbye to my parents, but my Nonna demanded it. When my parents died in a car accident, my grandparents took me in, they provided me with a roof over my head and the clothes on my back, but that was about it. They weren’t the warmest people in the world. I even slept in a different part of the house under the supervision of the house staff. The only thing I looked forward to were visits from my older cousin Anthony. He was in his twenties and was busy with work, but he always found time to spend with me no matter what he had on. He worked under my uncle for the family business, I wasn’t sure what that entailed, but I was sure he was busy. He took me to football practice and was always on the sidelines, cheering me on at my games. He was always the one busting my butt when my report card came home with less than stellar grades and helping me study, so I did better next time. We went camping for a whole two weeks over the summer when I brought home my end of year report card with straight As. But now, here again, saying goodbye to another person I care about, the only one I had left. No one would talk to me about how he died. Every time I asked, I always got my head bitten off, so I just stopped asking. There were so many secrets in my family, and I hated it. A large hand clamped down on my shoulder, causing me to jump slightly, and I looked up to see my Uncle Giuseppe looking down at me with a stern look on his face. “Esposito men don’t cry. If you are going to take over from me someday, then you need to know that. Make sure you rest up tonight because your training starts tomorrow.” Without another word, he turned away and walked away from his son’s grave without shedding a single tear or so a hint of sadness as he left me alone to ponder his words. What did he mean by training? And as for taking over, I’m only ten. What did he expect me to do? “Edward!” My Nonna barked from over by the car, my Nonno at her side with the same blank look on his face, “we are going now!” I cringed when she called me Edward. Everyone else always called me Eddie. I liked Eddie, Edward made it sound like I was permanently in trouble. But I guess with my grandparents, I kind of always was. To them, I was just a walking disappointment that they had to deal with until I turned eighteen. Nothing I ever did was good enough. Some days I wondered what I had done wrong, why they disliked me so much, and why didn’t they just put me in the foster system if I was such a bad kid. I placed my hand on my cousin’s headstone, fingertips tracing his name on the cold marble. “Say hello to my parents for me, Tony. I will miss you.” I walked back towards the town car waiting for me, dragging my feet to prolong the journey. I knew that I would get a ass chewing for it all the way back to their house but it was worth it. You notice that I called it there house? It was because I could never bring myself to call it my home. My parents always told me that your home was where your heart was and there was no heart in there house, not even mine. In the two years I had been with them, I hadn't even bothered to decorate the room they had given me other than having pictures of my parents and Tony on the side table. The next day I found out who my family really was, what they did for money and what my training meant. It meant me standing out in the snow without a coat, hat, or gloves while I practised shooting a gun, my fingers frozen from the cold. I was not allowed to come into the house until I could empty a clip into a target without missing it. After that training session, I came down with pneumonia and was recovering in the hospital for over a week. My grandparents told the doctor that I had wandered off without a coat, and it took them a while to find me when really, they knew exactly where I was the entire time as they were watching from the window. They didn’t do a thing to stop the torture or come to my rescue. My uncle said he was making me tougher, making me worthy of the Esposito name. I didn’t understand that Esposito was a name I inherited from my father. I had always felt nothing but love and understanding from my parents and couldn’t understand why I should have to earn it? Family shouldn’t be like that. Once I recovered from that incident and became proficient with a firearm, we moved on to hand-to-hand combat. I was knocked on my ass repeatedly by grown men who seemed to take pleasure in my pain, which left me covered head to toe in bruises over and over again. That was when I was pulled out of my school and moved to a homeschooling program. I didn’t want to leave my school. I had friends at school and football. I didn’t want to give it all up, but they didn’t give me a choice. I had a tutor who came by daily on my family’s payroll that taught me the usual. I leant English, math, history, Italian and science, and the tutor did so, ignoring the marks on my body. Then, after my tutor left for the day, the real work began, target practice, fighting lessons, knife skills, combat scenarios, you name it, I had to learn it. My uncle came past each week to check on my progress, and every week I could tell by how he looked at me that he wasn’t impressed. It hurt my feelings a lot. After four months of going to bed in tears with no one to turn to, to confide in, no one to tell me everything was okay, I turned it all off. There was no room in my life for any of it, no love, no compassion, no empathy, no dreams, just a burning desire to prove myself worthy of being the next Don Esposito. I would be even better than my uncle currently is, even if it were the last thing I did, and if they weren’t careful, I would burn it all down around them, enjoying every second of their pain and suffering. Present day I downed my glass of whiskey as I waited at the bar of Maximus Rossi’s club, waiting for him to be done with whatever meeting he was in and grace me with an audience. I never thought I would see the day when I would be waiting to talk to that man instead of just getting off on annoying the hell out of him, but recent revelations and events had changed our relationship. I had recently found out that the cousin I loved and said goodbye to all those years ago had fathered a child that my uncle had kept hidden. It turned out that she was involved with Max, so if I wanted to keep her in my life, I had to play nice. Nice was not normally a word in my vocabulary, but I was trying.  It was only early afternoon, so the club wasn’t open, which meant I had nothing to distract me while I waited, and I hated waiting. It was not in my nature. In all honesty, I should have still been celebrating my new role. I had achieved my lifelong goal. I was the Don of the entire Esposito family, and heads of families don’t wait. Hell, I was here as a courtesy. I normally just did what I wanted, when I wanted. Still, I knew I would not get through the front door of his building complex to visit my cousin without his approval unless I was up for a little bloodshed and considering we had just reached a truce after thirty years of war between our families, I wasn’t ready to start that again. I had everything I ever wanted in life now, which should mean that I was on cloud nine. However, even I had to admit that I had always been a little jealous of the Rossi family for as long as I could remember. We were in the same industry, but their family always seemed like that, a family. Mine was always just a business, everyone was out for themselves, and there was no love amongst us. Even the eternal bachelor Max Rossi settled down. I had been so mad about that, that I had even tried to out his secret life to her and flirted with her to piss him off. But, of course, now that I knew that she was my cousin, that creeped me out more than a little. The past four or so months had been a whirlwind. I had been so busy getting rid of the dead weight in our organization since I helped her escape that I hadn’t had a chance to get to know her too well. Alec’s betrayal of our family had created a huge mess to clean up. The loyalties of everyone in my organization had been brought under suspicion, and I needed to make sure that there was no one left who was loyal to that piece of s**t. After all of these months, I still hadn’t worked out how he had gotten back into my uncle’s compound when we had been exiled, and it was doing my head in. I didn’t know much about my cousin Addison, but I saw that she had her father’s kindness and fighting spirit, and I seemed to want to gravitate to her. It was like a piece of Tony had lived on long after he left this mortal world. Of course, if I wanted to keep my position, the rest of the family could never know of her existence, which she was totally okay with, but after everything her father had done for me growing up, I felt like I owed him a debt that I would repay to her. I tapped my glass on the bar, trying to get the bartender's attention, but she just continued with what she was doing and ignored me. She had her back to me, her dark brown, almost black hair tied up in a messy bun allowing me to see the tattoo on the back of her neck. I cleared my throat loud enough for her to hear me, “Excuse me can I get another, please.” I heard a small sigh before she spun around. I could see the look of annoyance on her face. I usually hated when someone gave me that look, but on her face, it looked hot. She was dressed in a simple pair of low rider jeans that showed off her curves, including her tight, perky little rear-end, a pair of high heel boots that turned her small 5’7 stature into leggy 5’11. The black, signature club inferno tank top did nothing to hide her generous c-cup breasts that were threatening to spill out if she moved the wrong way, but I guess showing a bit of skin led to bigger tips in this world. As my eyes trailed up her body, it was like where’s wally, but with tattoos, I counted at least four, including a very large set of words on her right arm, which I couldn’t make out from that distance. On top of the tattoos, she had multiple piercings in both of her ears and a small ring in her nose. I watched as she made her way over, glaring daggers at me with her doe brown eyes. She was quite a beauty. She grabbed a bottle of whiskey from behind the counter, her eyes not leaving mine, challenging me as she poured me another drink. “See what asking nicely achieves? Not that I should be serving you right now since we aren’t open.” I couldn’t help but smirk. I wasn’t used to people talking back to me, especially hot angry women. “That other lovely lady didn’t have a problem giving me my last drink.” “The other lady isn’t in charge.” She countered before walking away. God, she was feisty. I liked feisty. I had had my fair share of women over the years, but I made a promise back when I was ten that I was not going to get attached to anyone ever again, so they came and went, none lasting long enough to cause any lasting attachment. Although ever since I took over, my grandparents had been on my back about needing an heir, a child to groom to take over from me when the time came. They had made a list of several candidates they wanted me to meet, marry and get pregnant. I knew all of their candidates, and they were beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but they were all insufferable, and I couldn’t bear the idea of being tied to them in any way. I would end up killing them, literally taking out my gun and shooting them point-blank. My world could be divided into two categories, those who have power and those that want to have it and these women belonged to families that would do anything they could to take it. Power was the only thing that they were loyal to. So, while I was waiting for my meeting with Max, I took it upon myself to look up other ways to do my duty that didn’t include whoring myself out. Thanks to modern medicine, I could have a child without getting my d**k wet, not that I didn’t enjoy that part, but with these women, I would rather chop it off with a rusty, blunt knife rather than have it anywhere near them. I was googling high-end surrogacy agencies when I heard Max below down from his office. I downed the drink, placing my phone on the counter as I pulled a few bills out of my wallet and threw them on the bar, including a nice tip for the feisty bartender before racing off. Max had been wary about letting me near his girl without him present, but at the end of the day, given that he had proof that I betrayed my family and the fact that I kind of liked her, there was no need to fear me, so he gave me his blessing but only if she agreed to it. I left his office when he called his guys to have them meet me out of the front of his apartment complex and escort me up to his home. As I walked down the stairs, I reached into my jacket pocket to find my phone, so I could call my driver and ask him to come back when I realized it wasn’t in my pocket. Miss Fiesty’s eyes were on me as I raced back to the bar, but when I got closer, I couldn’t see it anywhere. “You haven’t seen my….” Before I could finish my sentence, she reached under the bar, and when her hand came up, my phone was in it, “You should be very careful where you leave your phone, especially while unlocked. In the wrong hands, it could be disastrous.” “Looking through someone’s phone, especially mine, could be disastrous for the person doing the snooping.” I retorted as I grabbed my phone back. She shrugged casually, “Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t snoop then.” God, this girl was something else. Most women aren’t so bold around me. I tended to intimate any people I met, but not her. She seemed not to give a crap about who I was, and it was refreshing and a challenge. I pulled a business card out of my pocket and slid it across the bar towards her. “If you ever want to have a bit of fun, call me. My name is Eddie, Eddie Esposito.” “Zoe Harper.” She advised pushing the business card back towards me, “But you can take your card with you. I don’t think I will need it.” I grinned, walking away without taking the card back. I was good at reading people and had a sneaking suspicion that I would be hearing from her. I got into my vehicle, giving Joseph, my driver, bodyguard and the closest thing I had to an actual friend, the address for Max’s apartment complex. On the way over, I couldn’t help but think about Miss Zoe Harper, the bartender that turned me down. I wasn’t used to that. Women fell at my feet. So, I sent a text to my investigator and asked him to dig up as much information on her as he could. She had piqued my interest now, and I don’t think I could let it go.