LUCA - Her Ruthless Don: (Ruthlessly Obsessed Duet, Book 1)

Strangers In The Night

Strangers In The Night

The guy locked up in our basement is bad. He has to be.

The only men who end up in our basement are the bad ones. That’s what my father tells me.

I only didn’t believe him once—after one of his half-deads begged me to help him while I was delivering his daily meal.

I’d burst into the living room where Daddy and Mama were snuggled up on the couch, drinking whiskey and guffawing over an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, and I’d actually dared to challenge him. Because the half-dead had a family. Teenage daughters and a wife and a mother with cancer, who all depended on him.

“C’mere, Bel,” Daddy had said, turning off the TV and patting the seat beside him on the couch. Then he’d told Mama to bring him his laptop.

“Danny, that’s too much. She’s too young to be looking at all that,” Mama kept saying as he showed me pictures and news stories about what the man had done to other people. But Mama never told him not to do it. That wasn’t how their relationship worked.

So, I got shown while snuggled up under my father’s arm: pictures of dead men lying in pools of their own blood, little old ladies who’d had their life savings swindled, and girls even younger than his daughters forced into p**********n—all to line the pockets of the guy in our basement. All of this was explained to me by Daddy who smelled like Lava soap and Acqua Di Parma, while the man downstairs smelled like blood and misery. And I stopped believing the prisoners didn’t deserve everything my father did to them after that.

Until now.

I grab my light winter coat, shrug it on, and open the door to descend into our freezing unfinished basement. No matter how high Mama and I turn up the heat, we can’t ever get it warm in the basement. Even in the dead of summer. And it’s only the beginning of spring now. It’s been raining since early this morning, and Mama fretted about driving in it, before sending me downstairs to take the prisoner’s meal order.

The guy Daddy’s been keeping downstairs doesn’t look like a man. I thought that back when Daddy dragged him through our house, unconscious. And I think it now as I walk down the stairs into the strong metallic smell of stale blood and the even grosser stench of other bodily fluids.

I come to a stop outside the cell Daddy installed. Steel bars hang from the ceiling with a small gap left beneath. Just high enough to pass a plate under without me needing to open the door, but not high enough for the men to have any hope of escaping.

He’s going to die today. Or as Daddy calls it, “take a walk in the woods.”

I know because Daddy left the house with a shovel earlier this afternoon, grumbling about having to “do this s**t in the rain.” And Mama told me to take the man’s order. She only makes special meals for the men Daddy puts in this cage when it’s going to be their last.

But the thing is, the guy inside the cage looks like a boy—a teenager. Maybe even the same age as me. Whip thin under all the blood from the cuts. And though his face is a mangled mess, I remember thinking the first day I came down to give him food that he was way too young to be here.

Also, way too pretty. That was the other thing I thought on that first day when I slipped the one meal a day Daddy allows under the bars—that he was one of those boys. Pretty like you see on TV, even as he accepted the hot plate of food with chattering teeth.

He took the food, but he didn’t say anything else. Didn’t try to bribe me or bargain with me like some of the other guys had after their first beatings. Maybe that’s why I lingered outside the cage a little longer than I should have. Daddy hadn’t touched the new guy’s face, I noticed. Yet… I pre-mourned the end of his perfect looks as I watched the play of shadow over his high cheekbones and strong jaw and marveled at how sharply his crystal blue eyes contrasted with his dark wavy hair.

I guess looks are something we have in common. Mama’s always saying I’m pretty like the girls on TV. Daddy says that’s why he told her to name me Bella, because I was the cutest baby he’d ever seen, even more beautiful than his real kids when they came out—and not just because I’m a girl and they’re boys.

But today, while I stand outside the cage, still pretty and upright, the boy just lies on the concrete floor, a pile of blood covered bones. Teeth no longer chattering, even though the basement remains the same bitter cold. Face no longer like the boys on TV.

“What do you want to eat for today’s meal. I’m here to take your order,” I tell him.

He doesn’t answer. But I know he’s awake, because the one bright blue eye that isn’t swollen shut stares back at me, angry and electric. Still fighting, even after his body’s given out.

I have to get him out of here. The words materialize in my head—not as a thought, but as a decision already made. My breath catches, as a previously unseen line between right and wrong appears in the sand of my soul, and I take my first step out of the shady grey area where I’d lived my entire life.

Up until now.

Because I know what I have to do. I have to get him out of here, away from Daddy’s grave. Even though, unlike a lot of the full-grown men I’ve brought food to down here, the boy hadn’t begged me to help him escape. Not even once.

Maybe that’s why I feel so compelled to get him out of Daddy’s cage.

“You can have anything you want,” I tell the boy, loud enough for Mama to hear up in the kitchen beyond the open basement door. “Anything. Mama’s going to the store special for you, and she’s a really good cook.”

It’s been a week. And a week is usually enough time for the men to become desperate for my father’s beatings to end with a meal made especially for them. But the boy only stares at me through the one eye. Like he’s imagining busting out of the cage and wrapping his long fingers around my neck.

“Please say something,” I whisper. “We need her to leave the house if I’m going to help you escape.”

The one eye wavers, confusion taking over his formerly unblinking stare.

“You don’t have his order yet?”

I look up. Mama’s at the top of the stairs. Just far enough down that I can see her heeled black boots and some dark brown leg beneath her wool midi skirt. But not far enough that she can see into the cell.

She always gets dressed up to go out—even if she’s only going to the grocery store. But she never comes down here when there’s someone in the cage. Daddy says she’s not as strong as me.

I agree, which is why I don’t say what I’m really thinking. That this boy is too young to be taken for a walk in the woods. That we should let him go before Daddy gets home from digging the boy’s muddy grave.

But of course, if Mama were capable of going against Daddy on anything, we wouldn’t be living in the woods a good fifty miles away from any major town or city in Massachusetts.

So instead, I say, “Spaghetti and meatballs. That’s what he wants.”

“For real?” Mama asks, still just a third of a body at the top of the stairs. “That’s all?”

“That’s all,” I confirm. Hoping she believes me.

Eventually, her boots turn, and I let out a held breath as she picks her way back up the steps. Part of me thinks about waiting until I hear the front door close. But I don’t have much time. Daddy could be back any minute.

As soon as she clears the basement door I ask the boy, “Can you walk? I can drive you to a hospital in Daddy’s car. But I can’t get you up those stairs by myself.”

Moments tick by, and I begin to fear he’s too broken to get up.

But then with what looks like considerable effort, he raises himself to his forearms. And a few moments later, he’s on his feet. Swaying, but standing.

I let out a small breath of relief and run to the wall to retrieve the extra set of cell keys. They’ve been there for as long as I’ve been bringing food down to the bad men. But this is the first time in those ten years that I’ve ever touched them.

Trying not to think too hard about what I’m about to do, I grab the keys off the hook and return to the cage. “We have to wait until Mama leaves the house,” I say as I push the key into the lock. “But then we can go—”

A loud bang halts me, followed by the stomping of shoes—a lot of them. And then someone’s talking in the kitchen. The voice isn’t high-pitched and breathy, like my mother’s, but deep and clipped. And menacing.

“What are you doing here?” My mother’s voice is loud but trembling.

The menacing guy’s voice doesn’t carry as far as hers. I can only hear bits and pieces of what he says. “Where…that f**k…tell me…bitch!”

But those words are more than enough. My father would never call my mother a b***h, much less allow other men to do it. Nor had he ever brought other men here—not even ones from his own crew. Mama and me are what he hides from his real family and his crime family.

But we’re not hidden anymore.

I stand, frozen, trying to figure out what to do. Run up the stairs to help Mama or go to Daddy’s g*n cabinet?

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Mama answers, her voice shrill with panic.

And then there are no more decisions to make. The sound of a gunshot punches the air so loud, I suddenly have a clear understanding of why Daddy walks the guys so far from the house after their last meals.

Mama…

Grief erupts inside me, threatening to overwhelm my mind and empty my stomach—only to cut off abruptly when I hear footsteps at the top of the stairs. “Going to check the basement,” a nasal voice calls out.

There’s no more time to think about my beautiful mother bleeding out on the kitchen floor. I look around. There are two cabinets. One where Daddy keeps his guns, and one where he keeps his weights. A place to fight and a place to hide.

Hide, my gut tells me.

I jump over the weight bench and scramble toward the cabinet. Daddy isn’t like most fathers. He works out every single day—often in front of the caged men. So, his weight cabinet is mostly empty save for a few scattered ten-pound iron plates resting on the metal floor. I crawl inside it and close myself in with those cold weighted plates, just as the man who decided to investigate clears the last step.

I watch a scrawny guy in a tracksuit yell, “He’s down here!” through the cabinet’s narrow c***k.

The steps don’t creak but groan under the weight of the next guy who comes down, and my eyes widen when he appears in my slice of viewpoint.

My dad is the biggest person I’ve ever met in real life. But this guy is even bigger. A behemoth in a pea coat. My breath catches at the thought of the hurt he could inflict on somebody.

“Luca. f**k, Luca…What did that greasy f**k do to you? Motherfucker!”

It’s the same voice that spoke to my mother. The huge guy has an Italian accent. Not Boston Italian like Daddy, but like those ones you hear on TV. The kind that makes me think about horse heads, Emmy-winning HBO shows, and guys named Tony.

Big Italian Tony disappears from my vertically-sliced point of view and then reappears with the boy who used to be TV pretty. Tony isn’t carrying the boy, but he might as well be, he’s bent down so far under his arm to prop him up.

“We got the moolie mistress. Anybody else?”

“Daughter…” the boy croaks.

Fear ices my heart, and my hand quietly finds a weighted plate. When they open the door, I’ll throw the weight as hard as I can…

“But she’s gone,” The boy says hoarsely.

Big Italian Tony looks around, scanning the basement.

Later, when I go over these moments again and again in my nightmares, I’ll conclude that Big Italian Tony had to be wondering who put the key in the lock.

But right then all I can do is silently pray he believes the boy. Believes I’m no longer in the house.

My prayer is answered.

“Alright,” the guy says. “Let’s get you up to the car.”

I linger in the weight cabinet as long as I can stand it after they leave. I try to play it safe. Try to be cool. Two, maybe three minutes. But sooner than would be recommended by the National Council of Black People with Good Sense, I burst from my hiding place.

The image of my mother wounded on the kitchen floor is all I can think about as I run toward the stairs. Because there was only one gunshot. Maybe if I call an ambulance, she can be sav—

The explosion throws me off my feet. I fly through the air and land ugly, the back of my head hitting the concrete floor so hard a painful ringing immediately erupts between my ears.

Weird, I think now, and, in the years to come. Weird that the ringing was the thing I minded most in those painful moments before I passed out. Later, I’ll wonder why I wasn’t bothered that the world had gone completely dark…even though it was still midday.