Games We Play - Round 1: Never Have I Ever (18+ dark mafia romance)

Chapter 1 & 2 (Matteo)

Matteo

Chapter 1

Palermo, Sicily, Italy – August 8th, 2019

The phone on the wall in Matteo's room rings around 11am, waking him up from a dreamless sleep. It's his father. No one ever calls the landline – no one would ever bother to learn the extension to each room. He's also the only person on the planet who still uses landlines.

"Come see me in my office please," Is all he says before hanging up. He sounds serious, like he needs to talk business. Not business in a figurative sense, as in, talk about some shit Matteo pulled. Business in the literal sense –business.

Matteo started suspecting that his father wasn't really a restaurant "manager" when he was around eight years old. One night after having stayed up past bedtime downstairs in his father's restaurant, he saw a man coming in with a gun in his hand. He pointed it at one of his father's friends who was standing behind the counter. The said something in a foreign language before he shot the guy point blank.

The man didn't even clock Matteo hiding under a table in the corner; he just turned around and left. When his father found him bawling his eyes out as he came in from the back, he told him to stop crying and that it would be taken care of.

"We don't cry when this happens. We take care of it, and we move on."

Matteo didn't know what 'take care of it' meant, but the next morning there was no blood on the walls and no dead body on the floor when he went downstairs for breakfast.

That same day during dinner, his father announced that they would be moving to the outskirts of Palermo. 'To the countryside' because he was 'tired of living in the city'. They moved out of their townhouse in the city to a big villa with a garden pool and a sea view, never to return.

That's when Matteo started seeing less of his father. He would only come home during the weekends, which he would usually spend in his office with all types of people who would come in to 'visit'.

His mother became even more distant than she usually was. Now that they were living in a house with ten bedrooms and two floors, she would rarely show her face. She started growing vegetables in the garden and made herself busy with the greenhouses on their property. Since their father was away during the week, Matteo and his two siblings grew up surrounded by their maids, nannies, and cooks. The nannies never lasted long. Not because the children were too much to handle – they were just fired for reasons that were never explained to them by their parents.

They learned to take care of themselves. Looking back at it now, Matteo thinks that the way they grew up made them bond in a ride-or-die, family-comes-first, loyalty-is-key type of way.

During one summer in 2014 his brother Marco had asked him whether he'd ever seen his mother coming inside with vegetables from that greenhouse she was always tending to. Matteo couldn't answer him.

That night, the two of them managed to sneak into one of the houses said vegetables supposedly grew. The insides were filled with stacks upon stacks of packages; wrapped and sealed with duct tape.

Their father called them into his office the very next day (Matteo vividly remembers it was a Tuesday). He'd seen them on the cameras outside. Then he started explaining their family history. That's the first time Matteo heard the words 'cosa nostra' coming from his father's mouth.

Matteo and his brother have always grown up surrounded by mafia action movies, violent video games, and board games such as Monopoly or Poker. They had heard stories about the Sicilian mafia (people at school would also sometimes talk about it), but they never knew what role their family played in all of it.