feeling that more than one thing about Gabriel was going to surprise me as we got to know each other better.
Gabriel walked over to the couch and sat down, and I followed, setting the juice down. I was about to settle in myself when I realized I forgot silverware and napkins. I handed Gabriel the controller, having already navigated my smart TV to Netflix.
“Wanna look for something?”
Gabriel nodded, took the remote, and started flicking through. I watched him for a moment. It was like he was using foreign technology. He got the basic gist, but his fingers kept losing the buttons, and he needed to look down to find them again. Was his job that busy, or was he more of a beatnik than I was? I didn’t ask. I turned around and walked into the kitchen for silverware. I was pulling them out of the drawer when I heard the quick trailer of a mobster show I liked. They covered new crime families every week. The voices came and went with barely a linger compared to the ten or so seconds Gabriel was giving everything else.
“Oh!” I called over my shoulder. “Can we watch that one? I love it.”
“No.” Gabriel’s voice was rough and short. I didn’t know how to respond.
“Come on.” I grabbed a couple of napkins, the silverware, and ran back into the living room. “It’s really good.”
“I’m not really into those.” It was an obvious lie, but what a silly thing to lie about.
I reached over him and tried to take the remote, but he pulled it out of reach. I tried again, and he switched hands.
“Gabriel,” I growled. I dropped the silverware and napkins on the couch and foisted myself over the back, leaning across Gabriel, and the unexpected action caused him to slip up. I pulled the remote from his hand and stuck my tongue out at him. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to me winning.”
Gabriel didn’t laugh. “I don’t want to watch that.”
“Fine,” I conceded. “Just let me add it to my queue, and I’ll pick something else.”
I threaded back up the list, with Gabriel still protesting, and found the show. I opened my mouth to scold him for being such a brat about it when my eyes caught something shocking on the screen.
“In this week’s episode,” the quick trailer began as soon as I landed on the title, “we’ll cover one of Philly’s most notorious crime families, the Varassos.”
I watched in horror as the show dramatically scanned across three men, all with Gabriel’s same dark hair and mysterious, void-like eyes. When they scrolled over a fourth man, I felt like I was going to throw up. Standing there, with an expression that was unrelenting and cold, was Gabriel.
8
Gabriel
I watched my face flash across the television screen under the rain of dark, horror-film music and lighting that made me look like a serial killer, and my stomach bottomed out. I couldn’t believe my dumb fucking luck. Stacy was leagues better than any woman I’d ever dated before, and it just so happens that the morning after we spend the night together, she happens across a show that I didn’t even know existed about my family.
Didn’t they have to have permission to put that sort of shit on the television? Surely they weren’t just allowed to use our faces and names without our consent. I imagined telling Luca about it, and my bones were already going brittle from the pressure. Things had gone so south with Marco and Kelly because she found out who he was, and now I was sitting next to a woman as she discovered that the family business I’d spoken about earlier was not landscaping or a law firm as she was hoping, but actually an underground crime organization.
Stacy let out an awkward chuckle. “Wow. I’d always heard that stuff like this was scripted, but I never believed it. It was always cooler to think it was true.”
I could feel my face flush with confusion. “Wait, what?”
Stacy didn’t look over at me. In fact, her body was so rigidified that her knuckles were turning white around the remote.
“Yeah.” She forced out another laugh. “I mean, obviously, this stuff isn’t true, right?”
I didn’t know what to do. I could plainly see that Stacy was trying to convince herself just as much as she was waiting for me to confess I was actually a high-profile actor, and those other three men just happened to be guys who looked a devastating amount like me. I wanted to say those words to her, and more than anything, I wanted them to be true.
“Um.” I stammered over the best way to tell her that what she was looking at was true, or at least that the notion was true. The documentary was already putting a spin on events I knew the facts about.
“The Varasso family leaves a trail of bloodshed behind them wherever they go.” Luca’s worst-self appeared on the screen, one who looked like our dad and had none of the warmth his family brought him behind his eyes. “Luca Varasso, a man tasked with kidnapping and enslaving a young woman for slandering his family’s name.”
I hunched my brow. Yes, Molly had been kidnapped, but it was Luca who saved her from my father’s wrath and trained her in our business when everyone else just wanted to kill her and get it over with.
“Marco Varasso, who still wears the scars of a mysterious fire that is only dwarfed by his using an innocent waitress to launder money through a downtown eatery.”
That one stuck a bit closer. Yes, Marco had used Kelly’s restaurant to launder money out of in a desperate attempt to patch where my father had gone wrong with the Binachis, but he didn’t use Kelly. In fact, both of them have sworn on the bible itself that Marco did his best to keep Kelly out of it. It was her own brother who used her more to his benefit. The fire, however, happened when Marco was born because of a scorned runner for our family. Yeah, that runner didn’t survive that mistake, but how could my father let him? He succeeded in killing three of my would-be cousins and nearly ended both Marco and his mother’s lives.
“Alessandro Varasso.” I perked my ear for what the television host had to say about that. Alessandro was as close to me as any of my brothers were in terms of clean hands. He’d rough a guy up if he had to, but he’d never murdered before. “A California rowhouse turned into a bloodbath with him at the helm.”