A Mirror of Eden

Chapter Thirteen: When the Queen Must Survive the First Hunt

Sienna Kaitlyn Leone

My head was pounding up a storm as I drowned the aspirin's back with the bottle of water I'd managed to find from behind the living room's bar so I didn't dare to leave out of my father's line of sight. He had us pressed into the living room in a tense silence that made even the twirl of the water bottle's cap seem like roller skates rolling harshly across the hardwood floors. His soft chatter with my mother up front was only a shell of a whisper but not low enough to not be distinct amongst everything else. He was still pissed, but my mother was trying to ensure he was at least below an eight before he spoke to all of us, despite her surely willful understanding. Hell, despite all of our sure understanding.

Seeing my father fight like that scarred the shit out of me. Part of my sitting with that contributed to my ongoing headache. I knew what my father was like behind the family man. I knew the monster that lingered within him all too well because it was that exact monster that molded the cunning and ruthlessness of my own. However, he'd never let his care slip so poignantly as he'd done just moments ago before our siblings.

Him and my mother went to extreme lengths to keep the business separated from the personal. They never wanted us to see them in such an element unless it was a matter of life or death, or in the case of Lina, Stef, and I a matter of training in the dealings of life and death. So for him to enact such will against Giovanni with Nanni and Tony's screams ever clear in the daylight and his nieces surely watching from the curtains was jarring. It was obscene, to a degree, and it proved just how dangerous Giovanni could be.

Although Giovanni couldn't hold a candle to my father on his best day, he could manipulate situations in his favor to see the fruitions he was eager to make happen come to light. Nobody was stupid enough to not recognize that which was why uncle Marcus spoke to us as he did. Giovanni knew that, unlike himself, my dad was more than a sperm donor. He was a father: present, caring, and willing to risk it all in the name of our defense. One wrong word of us or my mother and all bets would be off. He would not wait a second to cash such a check when he now held the power, no matter how frail, to make my father an enemy of the most decorated establishment of the mafia. And a hit on my father, we knew, was a hit on all of us because anyone bold enough to attempt the hit would go through any means necessary to get him including that which he loved most.

Especially that which he loved most.

The air in Venice was already different when we landed, but now it was damningly drastic. The family meeting had all of us planted, even those not deemed Leone's. Henry, Alex, and Leonardo sat off centered in a corner talking lightly amongst each other and I wanted nothing more to go and rest with my head on his shoulder. Antonio sat alongside Dante and Lina, while Sutton was in her own perch nearest her father who absently ran his hands through her hair. I watched as she placed a hand on his knee and gave him a silent assurance. Nanni sat between Stefano and Ilaria with her hands tucked between the both of theirs. Looking at her made my stomach churn. I wanted to strangle her still for running out into the midst, but the fact that she called for my father and even that wasn't enough to stop him made me worry at how deep Giovanni's advances could push at him. It took God's will through all of my uncles and brothers to keep him off, and still her voice which spoke with God's praises in each syllable barely touched him.