The Woman in the Back Room by Jessica Gadziala

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter One

Santi

 

 

 

 

The casket had been in the ground for a week.

I was acutely aware of the fact that both my brother and my mother couldn't quite wrap their heads around the rage I'd been feeling for the past two weeks.

We'd been legally separated for over a year. We hadn't been romantically involved for, fuck, two years before that.

For chrissakes, she'd been involved with someone else for months. I'd been too busy with work to date, but I was free to do the same. We'd been biding our time for the divorce.

I wasn't furious because someone killed the love of my life. Far from it. We'd married because of an accidental pregnancy when we were practically kids ourselves. We'd tried and failed to make it work for years after that.

I wasn't heartbroken.

Well, I was.

But not for myself.

She'd only been my wife by technicality because we were trying to transition toward divorce in a slow way that wasn't going to be too upsetting.

For our son.

I was heartbroken for him.

For the loss he was experiencing.

For the future he'd have that would no longer have his mother in it.

"Ottavio, bud, come out," I demanded, knocking on his door for the third time that morning.

"No," he snapped back.

I was trying to give him some space for his grief. I knew he had mixed messages in his life about emotions. His mother had always encouraged the healthy expression of them, while my family was, by necessity, the stiff-upper-lip sort.

He'd cried on my shoulder when I'd needed to give him the news, after Lorenzo practically dragged me upstairs in our childhood home to force me to shower and change, get the blood off of me.

He'd cried beside me at the church, then the gravesite.

But ever since then, he'd been shutting me out.

Some mornings, I could tell he'd cried himself to sleep from the puffy eyes across the breakfast table. But when I asked him about it, he shrugged, he said he was fine, he told me he didn't want to talk about it.

I wasn't good with the soft stuff.

That was where his mother had shined.

Brit had been the one he went to with all his kid troubles, with all his scrapes and bruises—both physical and emotional.

That was what moms did, right?

They gave their kids a soft place to land.

But because she handled that in the past, Ottavio was having a rough time accepting it from me.

And, to be fair, I wasn't as soft as Brit. I hadn't been raised that way. The life I'd been in until I opted out at eighteen to start my family had been rough and dark and ugly. My own father was a monster among men. My mother had been absent. I had no examples of how to be open and comforting.

Which was a big reason Brit and I never got along.

We'd been days away from breaking up before the stick turned blue because we'd been so incompatible.

But after that, it wasn't about us.

It was about Ottavio.

So she threw everything she had into him.

I threw much of myself into work, setting us up, giving us the kind of life I wanted us to have, but without the blood money attached to it.

I'd dropped the ball.

I could see that now.

I'd been around. I wasn't an absent father. I was home for dinner. I did family outings on weekends. I'd even attempted to help Ottavio through Scouts before we both realized he was a city kid through and through, and there was almost no reason to learn wilderness skills.

I'd always been a big part of my son's life.

But I hadn't been that part.

The part that he needed so badly right then.

"It's okay," my mother said, giving my shoulder a squeeze. "He'll come out eventually. Ottavio, honey, I'm making pancakes," she called through the door before leading me away. "He will follow his stomach out here eventually," she assured me.

"I can't get through to him," I said, dropping down on the stool at the white marble island as my mother got to work behind it.

"Gee, I wonder where he got those stubborn Costa genes from," she said, shooting me a raised brow.

And, yeah, I'll admit it, I hadn't exactly been open with her when she'd suddenly come back into my life, either. But I'd spent almost my entire life thinking she was dead, that my father had murdered her. I'd barely had memories of her. Enz did, being older, but my memories of her were faded around the edges, nothing was concrete.

Without her, I'd grown up to make myself hard and cold so my father and his men couldn't hurt me.

So when she came back, that was all I had to give her.

Hard and cold.

It had been a long, slow process toward reconnecting. Or, really, connecting at all.

"Listen, Santiago," she said, leaning her forearms down on the counter. "He lost his mom. You lost your mom too. Try to remember how that felt. Then approach him the way you would have wanted someone to approach you in your grief."

That was good advice.

Even if my memories of that time weren't as clear as I would have liked them to be.

I remembered feeling lonely and angry more so than anything else.

My own father, being the one who made my mother disappear, and genuinely having no interest in being a parent, was never around.

I was there for Ottavio.

Even if he didn't want me to be.

But maybe I needed to, I don't know, take him to the movies or something. Show him I was there for one-on-one time, that he wasn't alone.

"That's your brother," my mother said, walking over toward the door at the sound of the buzzer, letting him up, then getting back to her pancakes. "Does Ottavio like chocolate chips in his pancakes?" she asked.

"Brit never let him try," I told her. "She was the green-smoothie kind of mom."

Maybe I could get him one.

Or would he think that was like me trying to replace her?

I was so fucking out of my depths here.

"Ma," my brother said, kissing her cheek as he moved into the kitchen. "Santi," he greeted. "Where's the kid?"

"Avoiding me," I explained.

"That's why I'm here, actually. Why I wanted Ma here too," Lorenzo added. "I want to talk to you about something."

"About what?" I asked, stiffening.

I wasn't used to our new dynamic. In the past, he'd always just been my big brother. Did I listen to his council? Sure. But I didn't have to take his advice.

Now, though, he was more than just by brother.

He was more than just my boss.

He was the Capo dei Capi.

If he wanted me to do something, I didn't have a fuckuva lot of say about it.

"The kid," he explained.

"What about him?" I asked, stiffening.

"You're going to need help," he said. "More help than Ma can even give."

"I am happy to help, though, Santi," she cut in. "I want to make that clear."

"She is, but she has some catching up to do in life," Lorenzo said.

He was right.

Of course he was.

She'd lost just as much as we both had with her being gone. More, even. And I'd been relying on her a lot since Brit was killed.

Life and work didn't stop for grief. You could pause it, put a pin in it, but some shit needed to be handled. Life had to get back on track.

So when I'd needed to work—either for my business, or for my brother—I'd been having my mom come and stay with Ottavio.

"Yeah," I agreed, nodding. "I've been looking into it," I added.

"Well, stop," Enzo said, snorting. "You can't just dial 1-800-Nanny and hire someone to work for you, Santi," he explained.

"I need someone. And not one of your guys," I added. The kid got enough testosterone in his world. I wanted him to be able to have a woman around. Even if it was just when I had to be at work.

"Yeah, well, you can't hire some poor woman who has no fucking idea what she's getting into either," Lorenzo insisted.

"I'm assuming you have a suggestion then," I said, waving out a hand.

My brother wasn't typically someone who came to you with problems. He came with solutions. So if he was showing up bitching about a nanny of some sort, the man already had an idea in mind.

It was an annoying trait in a brother, but an understandable one in a boss.

"I propose we let one of the Morellis do it."

"You can't be serious."

"They're allies, Santi. They didn't kill Brit. What's wrong with letting one of them help?"

"I just said I don't want one of your guys around here all the time," I reminded him.

"I'm not talking about a guy," he said, shaking his head.

"Since when do the Morellis have women on their payroll?"

"It's a gray area," Lorenzo said. "You know Giovani, right?" he asked.

We'd grown up with Gio. That was a bit of a stupid question. Though, to be fair, I hadn't seen the man in years, not since I'd left the Family.

"Yeah. I've got memories of him."

"I don't know if you'd remember his little sister," Lorenzo said, waiting for a response.

"I thought Elio was the youngest."

"Yeah, so did Gio's mother. Until a girl showed up at the door claiming to be Gio Sr.'s daughter from some out of town prostitute."

"When was this?" I asked. "Is she even old enough to do the job?"

"I dunno... eight or nine years back? You had a baby still, I'm pretty sure. She was seventeen at the time. Showed up because her ma wanted her to get in the business."

"What kind of mother wants her daughter to become a prostitute?" our mother grumbled as she whisked the pancake batter.

"The kind who is hooked on H and in debt to her pimp," Lorenzo supplied. "Gio Sr. had a paternity test run—like that was necessary with all the fucking around he did—"

"That poor doormat of a wife of his," Ma said, shaking her head. "Went from a negligent father who cheated on her mom to a negligent husband who cheated on her."

"But yeah, she's his," Lorenzo said. "And she was, essentially, a street kid. Rough around the edges, smart, knew how to handle herself. Gio was having trouble controlling her, so he decided to put her skills to use instead. She's done various jobs over the years, but he's refused to give her an actual position for obvious reasons."

"Those obvious, cemented-in-sexism reasons," our mother mumbled to herself as she tested the heat of the pan.

"If she's working for Gio Sr., why would she want to work for me? As a nanny?" Did I even want a former street kid taking care of my son when I wasn't around?

"She'd do it because I'd ask Gio Sr. as a favor. And because she'd be paid well to be a glorified babysitter. It's not like Ottavio needs help tying his shoes or anything anymore. But he does need someone around who knows about the Families, who can spot something being off, who would know how to respond to a sticky situation."

"I guess that's true," I admitted.

"Ottavio is going to have to go back to school eventually," Lorenzo went on.

He was right, too. I'd managed to get Ottavio out of school for a few weeks because of losing his mother. And I figured I could swing a couple more weeks with home instruction if he didn't seem ready, or I was worried about security. But he'd have to go back eventually.

"So, how much time is he even going to spend with the woman? Between getting home from school and bed on nights you're working late. A couple hours, max. It's not like she's going to be raising him."

"That's true," I agreed. The raising him was my sole responsibility now. It was more daunting a task than I could have ever realized before. No one else around to bounce ideas off of, to figure out the right course of action for every part of his life.

"She's going to need a room, though. Even if she's not living here full-time, on the nights or weekends when you have shit going on, you need someplace for her to feel comfortable. You have a back room, right?"

It was Brit's room.

Unofficially, but hers.

We hadn't shared a bed in ages.

Some nights, she passed out in Ottavio's room. But mostly, she was with him until he went to sleep, then she went into the back room.

I don't know if we were actually fooling Ottavio anymore. He wasn't a little kid. He had to have realized that his parents weren't together in the typical way, but we'd both decided to put off the talk of actual divorce and changes in living arrangements for another couple of months. We'd wanted to get through the holidays. We hadn't wanted Ottavio to always associate Thanksgiving and Christmas with a bad transition in his life.

Ultimately, it looks like that plan went to hell, though.

A divorce would have been much better than a death.

But we couldn't change that now.

I would make it right.

I would take it upon myself to slowly bleed out the bastard who stole his mom from him.

But we had to move forward.

With a new woman in that back room, apparently.

"Have you already worked this out with Gio Sr.?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

"We've talked about it, yeah."

"Has he talked about it with her?"

"Of course."

"Does she even have a choice in the matter?" I wanted to know if she was going to be giving up her life for us, then resenting us for it. I didn't need any more negativity around my son.

"She could have said no. It's not like she was the only person we could have called on. It's a feather in her cap, I'm sure," Lorenzo added, grabbing the first pancake—as pale and imperfect as it was—folding it up, dipping it in some syrup, then making his way to the door.

"When does she start?" I called.

"Tomorrow," he said, moving out into the hall.

"Enz," I called as he started to close the door.

"What?" he asked, brows furrowing.

"Does the woman have a name?" I asked, making a smirk tug at his lips.

"Alessa. Alessa Morelli."