An Arranged Marriage To The Mafia...?

I swallowed back the nervous bile that bubbled inside my throat, it made my head spin in a dizzy frenzy, it made my heart accelerate and beat at incredible speeds. The wave of red washed over the walls, the screams deafened what Ethan was trying to say, his eyes were blood shot and filled with anger, his temples bulging in raged ideas; this was a plan of revenge. The massacre had taken a whole of ten minutes, the heavy gun fire, the shining, dripping blood splatter, the copper taste at the back of my tongue and the smell of death. It made my stomach twist, turn and churn in horrified disgust.

The cold air hit my lungs with a sharp burning sting, my eyes were wide open in the darkness, my body damp with sweat and panic. A nightmare, I sighed and breathed heavily, it was all just a nightmare. My hand fell across the pale cotton sheets and for a second I was thankful for something familiar. That was until the heavy breathing echoed through the dark and the jaded figure of Ethan sprawled across a sofa which had been pushed into the corner of the room.

I rolled my eyes and tiptoed over the soft plush carpet covering my sleeping fiancé in a light blanket, a part of me was thankful to see him, safe and sound sleeping lazily in the comfort of his own home rather than cold and lifeless in a gutter some place. I moved my socked feet from the room and down the hall retracing my earlier steps and finding myself in a small bistro type kitchen.

"Couldn't sleep love?" Maria Radev's voice whispered kindly through the dark eatery, the shallow shine of digital appliances the only source of light as I shook my head and sat down in a wooden stool by her side. "Me neither dear. I never can when they disappear like that."

The small, short and typically Italian woman open the freezer door, the glow of the light illuminating her thick robe, her hair tightly spun in multi-coloured rollers, her feet hidden in a pair of warming slippers as she pulled a tub of ice-cream off the second shelf and grabbed a pair of spoons on her way back to the bench.

Eagerly I grasped a spoon in my hand and dug the tip into the cool goodness of cookie dough ice-cream.

"Some things get easier." her face was warm in the cool dark, "The idea of being forced together, it rubs off in the end and you learn that it's not the worst thing in the world." I scoffed at her and rolled my eyes, she smiled fondly at my reaction. "But somethings, some things get harder." Her eyes grew dark, "It never grows easier to bury your friends, your allies and colleagues, your family. I wait for that day. The day I see one of my children burried before me; I pray it never comes."

Dread pooled in every word and for a moment there was an unmentioned silence. "Get some sleep dear. Tomorrow may not be any easier."

My head nodded on it's own accord as the elderly woman patted my hand soothingly, my feet once more grazing the carpet and slipping through the hallways and the off-white door with the simple silver handle. The scene had changed from the moment I had left, Ethan no longer lay uncomfortably across the sofa but rather found his place on the right of the large bed, his head almost burried in the plush fabrics of bed clothes. I contemplated the sofa, the thinning cushions, the raised arms, the small size, the mental image of the perculiar angle that Ethan's neck had laid at made found me reluctantly pulling the comforter back from the matress, my body sliding by my now fiancé; a motion I suspected I suddenly had to get very used to.

I lay awake for a while, Ethan's shallow breathing the soundtrack to my timeless thoughts. I contemplated Maria's words, my father's actions and I estimated to a greater degree my mother's opinions. Would she have been disappointed? would she have agreed? would my mother have approved of my entire life being pre-arranged? I rolled to my side incredibly softly as if I were afraid that Ethan was mocking sleep and in actual fact wide awake and listening to my thoughts.

What had Maria meant before she slipped from the kitchen, 'Tomorrow may not be any easier.' I was well aware that this was not the end of an aging battle between families, I was more than certain that a war was on the brink of breaking out, I wasn't naïve enough to even suggest that everything would simply blow over and life would continue as it had before the shooting in my father's casino. However, I was naïve to the degree of believing that this waging war would not exceed the boundaries of control the Radev family held; I would have never suspected that there could possibly be a power so great it would threaten the very existance of my father and the family I had been inducted to.