Songs of Us ~ A Mafia Romance

six~seia

I stared at him.

"I-", I stuttered, looking down at my hand pressing the hole in his shoulder, feeling the pulsing flow of his blood. Damn it. I pushed harder. "I don't even know your name"

He gave a weak smile. "William"

I nodded. And his eyes began to flutter shut.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I let him lay down and placed an oxygen mask over his mouth.

I didn't have a license but he had a gunshot wound and I knew the treatment methods of gun-inflicted injuries.

So fuck it all.

I looked at the person that drove us here. He was on the phone shouting at someone in Italian.

"Hey!", I shouted. "Grab me the tray"
"What-"

"I said grab me the god-damn tray! NOW!"
As he did that I ran over to the glass cupboard near the water dispenser and quickly found local anesthesia that was enough to sedate and numb the pain for him and a syringe. I quickly injected him just as the person that drove us here brought the silvered tray filled with common operating instruments inside a glass, sanitary box.

"What's your name", I asked him as I rolled up my sleeves.
"Emille"

I nodded tightly and turned my neck back and forth, letting myself remember the steps of procedure that I had memorized time and time again, fill my head.

It was like I could visualize it as clear as day with a bit of digging. A small amount of confidence brimmed over in my chest and I heaved a sigh. "Alright, Emille. Make sure no one enters this room. I need to focus"

I prayed before I began. I had never believed in God or any higher, divine entity, so I prayed to whoever or whatever would listen to me.

There goes my plans to watch true-crime documentaries and unwind with pizza and wine. 

Her name was Ida and the house-cook had a smile as warm as the apple pie she had given me. I sat in the massive marble table island in the middle of the even more massive kitchen. The house wasn't what I expected from the head of a mafia. It wasn't cold and steel-like. It was warm and well-decorated but simple at the same time. It felt lived in and that somehow comforted me in the fact that he was after all human. He may kill people but I remembered how it was most commonly and most always those who were known to hurt.

Or maybe I was being stupid and ridiculous and maybe he found joy in killing.

But one thing was for sure, this apple pie was to die for.

"This is incredibly delicious", I said as I swallowed another hearty bite of the pie.

Ida gave a buttery chuckle the white wisps in her hair falling loose from her bun. "That was my mother's recipe, that pie is! I never liked apples growing up but whenever she would make this pie, I devoured it as if apples were chocolate!"

I gave her a smile. My mother was lost somewhere. I could remember the screams from that day. Her cries to let her go, the tears that fell from my cheeks as I begged for her to hold me, her red face as she shouted at the men to let her go.

My father was beaten and bruised and unconscious on the floor after the immigration officers had beat him up. My mother screamed and fought to get to me but they dragged her away with my father and the next thing I remember was sitting in a cold, white room where a lady that spoke a language that I wasn't familiar with tried to offer me a bowl of cereal.

That language turns out was English. It wasn't Urdu, which was the tongue my mother used to sing me lullabies; the language my father used to tell me stories of the stars and sky. The cereal tasted foreign, not like the salty flatbreads my mother would cook over the flame and the rich, earthy curry made of saffron, coconut milk and an array of spices. And I realized the lady, with her blonde hair and fair skin, unlike the dark curls and sunny brown skin of my parents, was a caseworker.