Page 31 of Bound to the Mafia King

“Valerio! Come to your father.”

Fuck no. I needed to get as far away from him as possible.

I looked back down the path I had come from and saw nothing but blackness, but when I turned back to face the front, I bumped into something hard. Or rather—someone.

Instantly, arms came to envelop me in their grasp. I felt my entire soul leave my body, and the screams that followed tore at something in my soul.

His electric eyes stared deep into my soul. “No escape here now, boy.”

“No!”

My body lurched forward, skin damp with sweat. My chest rose and fell erratically as I tried to calm my mind.

A dream, it had been just a dream.

But it had all felt so fucking real. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a nightmare.

“Fuck.” I dragged my hand over my face.

If that man weren’t dead, then I would have killed him myself. He was haunting me from the grave, and he didn’t want to leave me.

“So much for fucking therapy,” I grumbled under my breath.

I had spent two fucking years trying to get my mind back into place, only for these issues to find their way back to me again.

I pulled the sheets off my body and made my way to the one thing that I knew would help.

Violence had always offered me some form of reprieve, and it would be no different now.

Sweat dripped down my body as I threw punch after punch.

With each attack, I imagined my father’s face on the hard leather. I drilled my fist strike after strike, until I felt the raw and bleeding knuckles scream at me to stop, but I never did.

Grief was already such a complex emotion to sift through. But the grief of losing a toxic parent was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

Punch after punch, I surged my fists forward, trying to hit my way through the episode. The sun still lay behind the horizon, and the day had only just begun.

“You’re up earlier than normal.”

I snapped my neck behind me and made eye contact with my sister-in-law. She leaned against the door frame of the gym. She was dressed in her athleisure, and she looked like she was fresh out of bed. Ever since becoming a mother, she had become domesticated. You would never guess that she was the leader of one of the most feared and wanted Mafia Families on the East Coast.

Motherhood suited her, it made her soft. It made her more humane.

“Sister,” I drawled. “I would say good morning, but seeing your glare so early is not as pleasant as one would think.”

“Ha, ha. You are ever the comedian, Valerio.” She kicked off her spot by the door and walked into the makeshift gym. “Nightmare?”

My eyebrows pulled together in a scowl. “No.”

I hated how easily she saw right through me. When I had first started therapy, she had been the person to wake me from my first nightmare. She had sat with me and calmed me until my chest stopped beating and my breathing had calmed.

It was the first time I had ever allowed anyone to truly comfort me. It had been a momentary lapse of judgment on my part. As the underboss, I was not allowed to have such emotions. I had ignored the incident ever since it happened after I had asked her to never speak of it again.

She was the only one who knew about it, and I cursed the day that she discovered my truth. I didn’t like looking weak in the eyes of others, especially my own family.

“You know it's okay to talk about it.”

“There is nothing to talk about.”

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