Page 2 of Captive Bride

Benny takes pity on her, I can tell.

He says, “No, Rosaline, we’re good. You be careful out there. Take care of yourself.”

She smiles at him, but what he’s saying doesn’t exactly register. She skips out to join the other club-goers, and I think it’s sad; this is her life.

Clubbing every night, sleeping all day...no purpose, no family. She’s lost.

But she’s not to blame.

It’s the damn war with the Capulets, our rival family, the enemy. It’s always ongoing, the fighting, the battles. And once you’re in, there’s no escape.

Benny’s a good guy. He’s like the good angel on my shoulder always telling me the right thing to do when I need advice. And Merc, well, Merc is the angel of vice and depravity.

He encourages me to do very bad things, my partner in crime, so to speak.

We’re all hardened criminals by now. And yet these guys, my cousins, they’ve been with me since the beginning, each of us coming from our relative corners of the Montague kingdom.

We fucking run this town, by crime and underground business. We keep a low profile, the biggest crime family in town, the mafia. And yet, we’re at the tip of everyone’s tongue.

Infamy comes at a price.

It means you can’t hide and that you must stay loyal to your family.

There’s no escaping this life; I’m resigned to it. And yet, I hate my fucking life—it’s absent of light and happiness and anything worth living for.

“I feel so fucking bad for Rosaline,” I say to them.

“Yeah, well, you’re nice to her Tristan,” Benny says. “And that counts for something.”

I think of Rosaline, sad little Rosaline.

She’s a victim in all of this, torn apart by the two warring families in town.

I go to the bar at the side of the office. It’s made of pure gold, like everything else in this fucking dark life of mine. Money is everywhere, but the truth is absent.

I live the high life in every way that matters except for one thing...love.

I don’t know it and wouldn’t recognize it if it hit me in the face.

I pour myself a heavy drink of bourbon and take it down in one gulp. Being the gentleman that I am, I offer it to my cousins. They both partake with me and then we get down to business.

“So what’s going on tonight you guys? How’s business?” I ask.

Merc has a fire in his eyes, and I wonder why. What’s got this guy so excited?

“Come on, tell me. I can see something’s up.”

I can’t wait to know what kind of antics we’ll get up to tonight.

These are my guys, and we always hit the town late and do all manner of destructive things in the city. Sometimes, we have to commit crimes. Sometimes we just hang out and find new spots to pick up women.

It all flows into one big bad dream. Sure, I’ve become jaded, but you would, too, if you had to kill innocent people for blood money.

Once you’ve seen death come for so many people at your own hands, well, the meaning of life ceases to matter...it’s all blood, and I just wait for the day when sweet death will take my own soul to somewhere else, somewhere beyond all this fucking crime.

My family has turned me into a killing machine, a monster, so I don’t ever expect to have a normal happy life.

“Oh, something is definitely up,” Benny says.

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