Page 66 of Consumed By the Mafia

“What do you mean?” Her question was soft, encouraging without pushing or poking too painfully. Or maybe that was her touch.

Ryoma dragged in a hard breath, pushed it out again, and tried not to get lost in the details of that last fight. The yelling, abuse, the tears. He tried not to remember the impact of his knees on the floor or the sight of his mother’s blood spilling in waves over the platform edge where the leader of their group usually sat.

Finally, he found his voice. “When I was twenty-five, and Fuyu had just turned twenty-one, my father had the family gather for a big dinner and announced, proudly, that Fuyu was to be married. She had been promised years earlier, but our parents had never said a word—to her or me.”

“Seriously?”

Ryoma nodded solemnly. “But it wasn’t just that they were marrying her to a man she didn’t choose,” he said, his voice tightening with unresolved anger. “It waswho.” He felt the tension coiling his muscles and tilted his head back to glare up at the ceiling. “The man who was acting as our local boss, the younger brother of the Harada-kai’s real boss. He was fifty-eight-years-old, a two-time widower, and our father was handing Fuyu over to him on a silver fucking platter.”

He couldn’t see Abby’s reaction, but he felt it in the way her hands tensed. The way her weight shifted at his side. The way her forceful exhale rushed down his arm before she turned her head to press her forehead into his shoulder. “That’s bullshit. Why—how—could they do that?”

He willed some of his own remembered aggression to seep from his muscles. There was nothing else he could do with it, anyway. “If I understood the answer to that, I might not have reacted the way I did,” he whispered.

Abby was silent for several seconds. “What …didyou do?”

“I lost my shit.”

He didn’t even remember the words anymore, not really. Just the yelling. Raised voices, screaming, glass and ceramic shattering as things flew through the air and shattered that weren’t meant to be thrown. A general sense of frenzy. It was still a haze, even so many years later. He remembered Fuyu had pressed herself against the far wall and eventually slid to her knees, crying uncontrollably. He remembered that. He remembered her watching him, somewhere between hopeful and horrified. He remembered thinking, at the time, she was rooting for him.

What a fool he’d been.

Ryoma blinked away an unfamiliar burning and straightened. “We fought, for real, so loud that it drew attention. It was late and eventually we all got hauled in front ofhim.” He refused to speak his former boss’s name. The man had stripped him of everything—everythingincluded any respect he’d ever held for the Harada-kai and its masters. “Fuyu was escorted from the room like a captive princess, and when the situation was explained, I was offered one chance to apologize for my transgression.”

“Your what?” Abby interrupted, her tone aghast.

He huffed. “Yeah. I think I told him to fuck off or something.” Part of him did sort of regret that, but he couldn’t fullyregret the separation. He could never have endured watching his baby sister be shackled to that wife killer. Ryoma swallowed hard. “I expected they’d demand my pinky, or toss me in the bay, or some shit. But it was so much fucking worse than that.”

Abby stroked her hand over his chest, probably feeling the way his heartrate had spiked. “Baby, whatever it is, it’s already done. You don’t have to talk about it if it hurts too much.”

Ryoma had no idea what sound escaped him, but he hauled Abby up into his lap and found the warm, tantalizing line of her throat with his lips. “It’s always gonna fucking hurt, baby girl,” he murmured as he folded his arms properly around her and let himself taste her skin. “But it’s my story. You should know it.” He licked up the underside of her jaw as her arms circled his neck.

Abby teased her fingers into his hair, her hips rocking gently over his. “You were exiled … because you couldn’t accept the engagement?”

He rumbled, pulled away from the temptation of her, and moved a hand to cup her face. “Yes, and no.” His thumb swept along the curve of her cheekbone absently. “I was exiled for threatening to gut him like a fish if he laid a hand on my innocent sister. But only after—” His voice choked for just a moment. A singular moment in which Abby leaned forward and pressed her lips to his forehead.

“You’ll gut me?” A single wave of his hand was all it took for another soldier to haul Ryoma’s quietly sobbing mother off the floor and up to the monster’s side. The man who intended to marry and defile his sister took hold of her by the back of her throat and produced a blade from within hisother sleeve. “Like this?”

Ryoma’s heart dropped to his feet as his knees hit the hard concrete floor.

His father’s wail filled the room.

The monster dropped Ryoma’s mother like a sack, letting her gurgling, bleeding, still twitching form crumble to the floor. “Your mother is dead now because of you, boy. That is the only thing you will take with you into the world from this night forward, do you understand?” Even as Ryoma’s father raced forward to cradle his wife, the monster continued. “Take a good, long look, for this is the last you will see of your family.” He stepped slightly aside, as if not wanting to obscure Ryoma’s view.

And stare Ryoma did. He couldn’t look away. All he could see was his mother’s lifeblood, running everywhere, and his father kneeling over her.

“If you have any last words for your failure,” the monster said, speaking to Ryoma’s father, “say them now.”

Ryoma couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. He didn’t care anymore if they killed him next. His mother was dead … because of him.

His father lifted a tearful, furious glare at him. “It should be you on this floor!” He spat viciously in Ryoma’s direction, then turned his shoulder.

The monster let out a low, dark laugh before sweeping his arm forward. He still held the blade that dripped with his own subordinate’s blood and locked eyes with Ryoma. “I hereby banish you,” he said. “You are unwelcome, forever more. You will discard everything the Harada-kai has ever given you or enabledyou to gain. Empty your pockets, step out of your clothes. You have nothing, neither tangible or otherwise. Youarenothing.”

Ryoma dragged himself back to the present before he could relive that devastation yet again. The order had been expanded to include a specified warning that if he should ever return, even only close enough to be seen, every single blood relative he had remaining would be slain. Including any children Fuyu might birth.

It was the visceral guilt over his mother’s death, and the very real threat to his sister’s future, that had compelled him to cooperate that night.

“Ryoma,” Abby whispered, sadness coloring her voice, when he explained the rest. The details. She lowered herself enough to nuzzle against his throat. “I’m so sorry. That’s … I can’t imagine. And just this morning I had such a stupid pity-party.”

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