Empire (Muke Fic)

Chapter Four

“Have you noticed something a bit...weird...these past few weeks?”

“Weird how?”

“The Boss seems happier since that Lucas kid was made a made man and started hanging around him.”

The man looked at the other with squinted eyes from across the bar’s table, not quite following.

“Yeah, so, he made a friend, good for him, so what?”

“You fuck your friends in the ass?”

Beer spewed out from the denser man’s lips, and the man in front of him sighed, wiping his face clean of the alcoholic beverage with a napkin.

“He what?”

The still slightly damp man shuddered, shaking his head.

“You don’t wanna know what I walked in on the Boss and his Lucas kid doing.”

The other made a face, and a hand clapped down on either of their shoulders.

“Hello, boys. And just what are we talking about?”

They both froze at the soft voice and firm hands, turning to look at the woman affectionately - and appropriately - known to the mob as “Mamma Orso”, or, “Mama Bear”. Giovanni Di Giuseppantonio may be an intimidating man when business got right down to it, but his wife, Maria, was a whole other story. She was always intimidating, even when she had a child on her hip, like she usually did. There were a particular story of how the couple had met, which everyone accepted as fact, as neither Maria nor Giovanni denied it.

It was commonly said that Giovanni had been driving away from the cops, speeding down streets, having just shot a major threat to the mob, the gunshot alerting the police. He had jumped out of the car, into an alley, where a twenty year old Maria, who was known as Maria Alduino then, was comforting a small child. She had turned around to see the young Giovanni before her and heard the police sirens, and was easily able to put two and two together, and had ended up with the child on her hip, blazing down cops with her guns to provide a distraction as Giovanni drove away. She had gotten away with it, just like she’d gotten away with everything else. They got married five years later, Giovanni Di Giuseppantonio the only man brave enough to date her.

Mamma Orso was just as intimidating, if not more so, as the Red Don, so when the men looked up to see her, they almost wet their pants in fear at the realisation that she had overheard at least part of their conversation.

“We were just discussing the Boss.”

Maria smiled slightly, sitting down in a free seat at the table.

“And what was it that I heard about my Lucas?”

The two men exchanged worried looks, as Mamma Orso was notoriously protective of her children, and after ten years of raising him, she considered Luke as much as one of her children as her five year old and newborn daughters.

“Nothing, I don’t even remember mentioning him.”

Her smile remained just as sweet as she took out her gun, which was bright pink and had “Mamma Orso” etched into the side, placing it onto the table. If the men hadn’t been scared before then, they would have been then. Luke had gotten her that gun for her last birthday, and she treasured it like it was the Holy Grail.

“Good, because if I ever hear even a whisper of a bad word about my son, or his preferences, I won’t hesitate to make your lives a living hell before I drag your sorry asses over to Michael, you hear me? And you can pass that on to everyone else.”