A Year Away From Her

Chapter 1

My life has never been normal.

First of all, my family is apart of one of the biggest mafias in the United States. We have locations across the country, but the main location was in Dallas, Texas, which housed the leader and his wife. Well, let's just say the leader and his wife happen to be my parents, Carlo and Amara Giuliani. Which made me, Daniella Giuliani, the one who would take over the mafia once my dad decides the time is right for me.

However, we are not the only mafia who reside in Texas. The De Rossi Family, another large mafia in the United States, has their headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Now, I know what you are thinking, there has to be a rivalry between us, especially on the idea of sharing one state together, but no, that's not the case. Salvatore De Rossi happened to be my father's best friend, and since they always spent so much time together, resulted in Elena De Rossi and my mother becoming best friends.

Don't get me wrong, I think their friendship is amazing and I'm glad that Uncle Salvatore and Aunt Elena are in my life. But, I think it was a little weird that both Aunt Elena and my mother got pregnant around the same time. In my opinion, I think it was planned, but they always say it was just a coincidence. Anyways, three months before my birth, Uncle Salvatore and Aunt Elena brought my best friend Viviana De Rossi into the world, the next leader in the De Rossi Family.

Because of our parents relationship and how close we were in age, we were always together. At one point, when we were still in diapers, I would cry so much and my parents never knew what to do. Nothing helped, until they decided to go the De Rossi's house and the second they put me next to Vivi, my crying stopped. Because of this, our parents thought it would be better if we lived next to each other, for the De Rossi's lived an hour away from us at the time. And that's exactly what happened. Our parents bought a large piece of land together and built their new mansions one mile from each other.

By the time we were both five, our parents thought they needed to make their alliance official and the only way they thought to do that was to announce that Vivi and I would be married when we were twenty-five. Yes, both of our mafias were huge, but they were nothing compared to the ones in Chicago or New York, and they both wanted to ensure their hold on Texas.

Of course, little five year old me didn't really understand anything that was going on, just that Vivi was going to be my wife, but we always played husband and wife as kids. Viviana was always the husband we when played, because she more of a tomboy growing up, but she still had killer sense of fashion while I was and still am you're typical girl. For the longest time, we both just thought our marriage would be like that, a childhood game. But as we got older, it finally clicked with me that my best friend was going to be my wife and that it wasn't a game. She was going to be the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with and we were going to run one large mafia together. I had to accept that I wasn't going to find love, and that I should just learn to love my best friend.

Throughout elementary and middle school, it was great having Vivi by my side all the time. It always meant that I had a someone to turn to whenever I felt lonely at school or if someone tried to bully me in middle school, she was always there to stand up to my bully for me because I had always been on the shy end and never said anything to my parents, but Vivi did. As a young teen, I loved having Vivi there to protect me and she loved being around me. It was a win-win situation.

Until we hit high school, everything changed. It was also then, every summer we would go to Italy to see Viviana's grandfather. He loved Vivi and wanted to teach her the ropes of the mafia, for he did not like the way her father was running everything. But it was also then, that her grandfather started planting things in Vivi's mind that she had to be extra protective of me and was not let anyone touch me as we got older. She had to make it known to everyone around her that I was her's and no one was to bother me.