Page 35 of My Mafia King

But who could see that far into the future?

I couldn’t. And no one else could.

Not my father. And not my mother.

Not that girl, for sure.

A warm wind blew that day, sweeping away the perfumed flowers from her grave. And I couldn’t pull away from her as I was still talking to her in my mind as if sitting on a blanket under an olive tree.

That day, standing by her grave, I told her about my life.

About my parents and what I had become.

By then, I was a made man.

My life was different.

Wild. Crazy. Merciless.

There were ups and downs, and to me, it was the logical thing to do. My uncle was part of the mafia and introduced me to his boss.

I fit right in.

I had nothing before that, and then I had everything.

And I was good at it.

I could finally control who and what was a part of my life.

But a tiny part of me had always wanted something different.

And I wanted her. I didn’t know that until I found myself in front of the tombstone bearing her name and her picture, telling me about who she had become.

I almost scraped her picture out of the stone but didn’t do it in the end. I figured she wouldn’t like that.

That was her place. And her life story, as short and tragic as it was, had a place there.

My story wasn’t much better, but I was alive, and that came with a lot of perks, especially power and money.

By the time the sun went down, I’d pulled away from the cemetery and the air imbued with timelessness, a fresh scent of flowers, and mixed memories, and headed to the small town, where I found a place to eat and someone to talk to.

The man I chatted with had lived there all his life and knew a thing or two about the other people’s lives.

The house belonging to the woman’s mother was unkept as the new owner couldn’t afford the expenses, and not many people were willing to work the land for free.

He gave me the owner's name, and I contacted him and offered to buy the house and the land the very next day.

He agreed to sell the property, and I bought it for next to nothing with no real plan to live there.

All I wanted was to have someone clean it up and fix the house. And later, I wanted to lease it in case those people were interested in tending to the olive trees.

I knew nothing about olives and orchards, so that was that.

From the same man, I learned more about the woman’s deceased husband. He was part of the Sicilian mafia, and his wife had been kidnapped and trafficked before he got her back.

And then he got into a war with those people, and he and his wife lost their lives.

Life was rough, and I knew that well since I was part of that kind of life.

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