Page 51 of Redeem

He nodded.

“What, so it’s some kind of mob family or something?” I asked, torn between disbelief and accepting that his wild explanation would make as much sense as any other.

“Yes, exactly,” he said.

I chuckled, shook my head. “Okay. So you’re a mafia prince. Continue,” I said.

“We were respected, strong, but my father didn’t know how to maintain it,” he said.

“Maintain it? You make it sound like a classic car or small business. I mean, if you’re a crime family, shouldn’t committing crime be enough?”

My voice was incredulous, but Ciprian looked at me patiently.

“It’s complex, but you’re right to compare it to a business. It is a business, a lucrative one, but it’s more than that. It’s a way of life, one that has bound families for decades. Like any business, any relationship, you have to build it. Protect it. My father couldn’t, and our clan fell apart.”

His face took on a far-off expression, one that I couldn’t quite interpret. It didn’t look like remorse, regret, but there was some loss to it, some sadness about the way things had turned out. Again, I cursed myself for empathizing with him, for wanting to make it better.

I couldn’t do that, couldn’t do anything but listen, so that was what I did.

“He liked to spend, didn’t treat others so well. It was unsustainable.”

“What do you mean, ‘didn’t treat others so well’?”

“Our clans operate on respect. Money helps, but if you don’t have money and you don’t have respect, you have nothing,” he said.

“And your father, he ran out of both?”

Ciprian nodded. “I was young, maybe twenty, when I got the scar,” he said.

Almost unconsciously, he reached up and touched the spot where I knew the scar was. I inhaled a shocked breath. “He did that to you?” I whispered, unable to comprehend a parent doing such a thing to his child.

“Not directly. But by that time, he had no respect, no money, and he was getting old. It was left to me to do his work.”

I didn’t ask for clarification about what “work” meant, but Ciprian explained anyway.

“By then, we’d lost almost everything, and we got by collecting debts for other clans. It was my first time solo. Didn’t get the money but I got this scar,” he said.

I remembered how vicious it looked, how I had quietly wondered how he survived it. “It should have killed you,” I said.

He gave a humorless laugh. “Probably. But it didn’t. Instead, it taught me a valuable lesson,” he said.

He went quiet then, and I waited, my heart beginning to pound. But when he didn’t speak, I finally asked, “What lesson?”

“Kill or be killed,” he said.

He locked eyes with me, and in that moment I saw him in an entirely different way. He was still himself, but there was a depth there that I hadn’t seen or had been too blind to notice. Instantly I could imagine it, the kind, gentle man I had known wreaking havoc, killing, probably without remorse.

I saw that plain as day, but it didn’t touch me the way it should have. I was making excuses for him, for myself, but the one thought I couldn’t shake was how grateful I was he’d managed to survive.

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“And go where? Do what? Leave my family, who I was? That wasn’t an option,” he said, shaking his head.

I didn’t point out that he said “was” and not “am,” and turned his words around in my head, considered his choice. Leave his family, the only he’d ever known. Would I have done that? I didn’t know, didn’t care to examine that question more deeply. Instead, I waited for him to continue.

“After that, I…lost myself,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

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