The thought make my stomach turn.
Jackson’s eyes narrowed at me. Suddenly, it dawned on me that Jackson had no intention of honoring any type of surrender, especially with Gabriel’s gun still pointed straight at his skull. He’d lived a life of mediocrity, always being tossed aside by his Uncle, the leader of the Randolphs, in favor of his much more talented and dependable daughters. His own parents probably didn’t care much for him either. If Jackson were my son, I’d probably be pretty disgusted, too.
He didn’t come here to wave a gun around and scare a few Varassos. He came here to kill us.
More specifically, he came here to kill me. What better way to get under the kingpin’s skin than kill his beloved heir?.
The entire fiasco with Roman had been a ruse. A distraction; a way to draw out the only Varassos who were on duty late on a Sunday evening: Angelo’s sons. He’d definitely miscalculated with the drugs he stole; inserting himself in a situation with Chai was risky, and he was lucky he still had a head on his shoulders and a dick between his legs for attempting that.
There was no silencer on Jackson’s pistol. When he shot me, the entire block would hear it. It would cause a scene. The melodrama that unfurled in my imagination made me sick. Jackson, tearing away from the scene in his abomination of a vehicle, my brothers weeping over my dead body. My blood pooling in a dirty alleyway on the east side while, somewhere else in the city, Alana gave birth to a child that would never meet their father.
Internally, I found myself cursing my family. Cursing my father, my mother, and my grandfather for starting this whole empire in the first place, and for growing it to such magnitude that all our lives sat on such a fragile precipice. Because Jackson was right; King’s fall. It was inevitable.
If only I’d been some regular guy… I would still have two living parents. Probably would have gone to college, majored in something boring, but lucrative, like business management or bioengineering. Maybe I wouldn’t have met Alana, because I wouldn’t have been injured doing this job in the first place, wouldn’t have needed to stumble into an urgent care center in the middle of the night. Or, maybe I would have met Alana. Maybe we were destined to cross paths, no matter what either of our lives turned out to be. It certainly felt like that. Like we were meant to be together.
I met Jackson’s eyes, and knew that it would be the last thing I saw. He was willing to die by Gabriel’s bullet, as long as it meant that his family would know that he was responsible for the death of the illusive, indestructible Luca Varasso.
When the bang exploded, Gabriel’s gun fired a millisecond afterward. I saw a flash of red, Jackson’s corpse crumpling to the cement, before black spots overtook my vision and swallowed me whole.
-
Pain.
-
In the all-consuming darkness, a memory resurfaced.
Bright red hair, wide blue eyes like the ocean. Perfect porcelain skin, curving around the prettiest smile I’d ever seen.
Alana stared at me from across the table, fingers dancing on the rim of her coffee mug. Delicate steam lifted from it’s contents, the same kind of steam that had wrapped around us just minutes before in the shower.
It had been a good shower. She was still breathless and rosy-cheeked from it.
But, the expression on her face was one of somberness.
“What will I do if you die?” she asked, out of nowhere.
I furrowed my brow at her, reaching out to take her hand. “What’s with the morbidity over the breakfast table?”
“I’m serious, Luc,” she sighed. “How am I supposed to go on without you?”
I stood up from my chair and came around the other side of the table to sit beside her. Wrapping an arm around her shoulders, I pressed a kiss to her temple and brushed a single curl from her eyes.
“What brought this on?” I asked.
She shrugged, pouting slightly. “You just go out every night working for your father and I’m so worried all the time that you’re not going to come home to me.
“Hey,” I whispered, holding her close. “I’ll always come home to you.”
But, Alana frowned at me and wiggled away from my grasp. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Luca Varasso.”
I deflated. “You’re right.”
Alana turned back to her coffee, drumming her fingers on the china the way she did when she felt anxious or unsettled.
“Well,” I said. “I could take out a life insurance policy… we’d have to married for you to benefit from it, though, which my father would love to hear, but I know we both agree that’s not the best reason to get married...”
Alana heaved a loud sigh and stood up from the table. Her chair scooted back several inches and threatened to fall over backwards. I quickly settled a hand on the back of it to keep it upright, watching in confusion as she started pacing the small kitchen of our modest one bedroom apartment. She didn’t usually give in to her roiling moods like this. Most times, she was sweet and graceful, the calm in the eye of the raging, unstoppable storm that represented me. But, now, I could tell that she was on edge. Something was bothering her.