Page 116 of Forced Vows

"She's the only leverage he had to convince me to agree to the blood alliance and he knew it."

"He'll keep his word because if he doesn't, the Genovese mafia will stop trusting him."

Kara is right. I extracted that promise from my uncle privately and it has nothing to do with Miceli's mafia.

But it's my uncle's desire for a strong alliance with them that will force him to keep the promise he made to me.

Chapter 37: RÓISE

Monday

"Are you really part of the mafia?" The question is hissed from one of my classmates sitting behind me during our Art and Community Engagement class.

You only have to take one class in this designation, but this is my third one. I've already taken a class on tactics and another on activism. I took that one my freshman year.

Because I see acting as more than a way to get famous. In fact, that was never my goal. My goal was to live out the lives of other characters for other people to enjoy.

Now, my goal is to graduate and hope that as an underboss's wife, I can volunteer in theater program for underserved youth. Or something.

I ignore the question because I don't know the guy who asked it. I mean, I know his name. It's Boaz. And I've seen him around, but he's not a friend.

I don't owe him anything, much less an explanation of whatever he thought he found on Google.

It has been a few weeks since my security detail increased by two and started following me around campus.

At first, when my friends asked what was up with that, I said I had a new overzealous head of security and they accepted it. Enough students at the school come from family with some level of personal security, it wasn't too big a deal.

I joked about preparing for the day I was famous enough to need this all the time and my friends laughed.

I thought I dodged the bullet that hit me so hard in middle school. After spending the rest of grade school and my first two years of middle school in anonymity, one of my classmate's parents dropped the bomb to their kid.

My dad was part of the Irish mob.

Which meant, I was part of the Irish mob. Suddenly, my friends were crossing the hall not to walk beside me, and kids were asking questions that made me sick to my stomach.

Did my dad kill people? Had I ever killed anyone? One of my former friends lost her phone and rumors I'd stolen it went through the school like wildfire.

At the request of the school administration, I did distance learning for the last two months of my 8th grade year. I was asked not to attend graduation.

The next year, I started high school in a different Burrough, using my middle name as my last name.

"I know a girl who went to middle school with you," Boaz says in a whisper loud enough to be heard by other students around us. "She says your uncle is the head of Irish organized crime in New York."

My face heats as other students around us hear his words and stare at me, waiting for a response.

They're going to be waiting a long time. Like forever.

The professor comes in and starts talking, but the whispering behind me doesn't stop. At least now it's not directed at me, but the classmates around us.

Finally, our professor, a gray haired woman who looks like Gloria Steinem, demands to know what all the chatter is about.

"We've got a real mobster in our classroom," Boaz replies promptly.

"Oh really?" The professor rolls her eyes. "And who might that be?"

She's that kind of teacher. She faces stuff head on and then gets us back on track. She's one of the profs who takes time to dispel urban myths around our profession especially.

She always has a few well-chosen words of logic and instructions to read a certain book, or visit a website with multiple sources (that don't all refer back to each other for god's sake – her words, not mine).

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