Page 78 of Unforgivable Ties

His whispered endearments twined around us like invisible silk threads, binding us together in the afterglow of our shared pleasure. His hands, rough and calloused from years of being in the mafia, traced soothing patterns over the sensitive skin of my shoulders.

Slowly and quietly, the invisible thread of sweet nothings broke. I had a feeling that whatever he was saying to me in Italian was something he would never tell me in English. So, as much as I wanted to know, I wouldn’t ask.

Stephanie

It was the weekend, but I still wasn’t free of working for Cesare. It was exhausting sometimes; spending all week at school, studying, then going to work after the school day and on the weekends.

I didn’t have a say in my schedule, either. It was almost always at nighttime, when the mafiosos were up to god knows what and were more likely to get hurt.

I grumbled to myself as I sat my backpack down. Hopefully I’d have time for a nap.

“Stephanie,” Cesare said, bursting into the medical bay.

Or not.

“Good, you’re here. I need help with something,” he said, adjusting his glasses that had gone askew on his nose.

Cesare looked oddly frazzled. It was unsettling, because the older man was always calm and collected, no matter how dire the situation we were dealing with was.

“Is there a patient in the recovery room that needs help?” I asked.

“No,” Cesare replied, shaking his head with noticeable frustration. His usually immaculate grey hair was messed up, a few strands falling into his eyes. “It’s not that. Follow me.”

The confusion had me raising an eyebrow. If it wasn’t a medical emergency, what could possibly have Cesare so unsettled?

I trailed behind him, and he walked into a room he had explicitly told me not to enter. I stopped at the doorway, heeding the directions that he had previously given me.

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to come back here,” I said nervously, not even daring to look inside to see what was in the room.

“Disregard that,” he said, not hiding the annoyance in his voice.

My heart pounded as I walked through the door. What could possibly be so special about this room that I wasn’t allowed to know about it?

It was a morgue.

My heartbeat lessened—it wasn’t surprising, given that Cesare couldn’t save every mafioso that came through here. I shivered from the cold as I looked around the room, taking everything in.

A dead man laid on the table, his body already cut open for an autopsy that had been left unfinished. His sightless eyes stared at the ceiling, the life once residing in them extinguished.

“Put on scrubs,” Cesare instructed me, hovering back over the man. “They’re in the back cabinet.”

I nodded, walking over to the cabinet. Vincenzo would have killed me for doing it, but I just stood behind a screen as I changed into them. After months of working with Cesare, it was very apparent he had no physical interest in me, and saw me just as a student.

When I emerged from behind the screen, Cesare was working meticulously over the body. There was no sound but theghoulish hum of the overhead lights and the chrome clink of Cesare’s tools as he carefully navigated through the open cavity before him. He did not look up at me until I moved to his side.

“We had twelve bodies come in today,” he said, clicking his tongue with irritation. “I can’t have you just attending to the men anymore. I need your help with this.”

I looked at the steel doors on the wall that housed the deceased. Twelve bodies. I swallowed hard, imagining the cadavers waiting in the cold silence behind them; their life stories abruptly ended and now subject to our impartial examination.

“Um, Cesare,” I said, not wanting to question a licensed medical doctor. “Aren’t bodies ok to autopsy for two to three days? Why prioritize this over helping the hurt men?”

“Autopsy?” he said, snapping his head up to look at me. “Do you think we do autopsies here?”

An uneasy feeling settled in the pit of my stomach as I met Cesare’s gaze. His eyes were hard and cold, revealing a reality much grimmer than I had imagined.

“Surely, you don’t mean...” I breathed, looking down into the man’s cut open body. Half of the organs were missing; removed with surgical precision.

Cesare’s lips tightened into a thin line. “We are here to harvest, not autopsy,” he said curtly, returning his attention to the cadaver on the table. “And time is of the essence.”

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