Indebted to the Mafia King
Back in Charge

Eleni

I slam my hands down on my desk on the second floor of the Staten Island house, the long sleeves of my wedding dress dulling the thud. "What the fuck do you mean, you don't know?"

Amando, the man I've begun considering my capo, loosens his purple tie and shrugs. "Nobody knows who the fuck they are. I've got a couple reports they were at the church. The guard at the door said he never saw them come in. They're feds, obviously, but did you see the names on the badges?"

"No, I fucking didn't, because I was in the process of having my husband arrested at my wedding!" I suck in a deep breath and run my hands through my hair. I took it down sometime on the ride from the ballroom to here, but a few pins still plink onto the floor around my feet.

I'm losing it. The house is a swarm of activity-wives, trying to get everybody fed; capos, trying to figure this out; guests, just trying to figure out how a wedding went so wrong and they need a goddamn leader. They need me. No, they need the me who led them for two weeks the last time Dante got taken out of commission. I roll out my shoulders and let ice slide over the welter of panic and rage and I told you so burning beneath the lace of my fucking wedding dress.

"Get me Tony," I bark, "a black coffee, my navy suit from the bedroom, and Dante's secondary laptop from his office."

A few of the other men in the room scurry out, leaving me with Amando and a small handful of other guards. I start opening drawers, pulling out things I need. My favorite pistol and a few spare clips. A hair tie, which my heavily processed curls resist. One of the stupid stress balls Gianna kept pushing on me, this one shaped like the Statue of Liberty.

The door opens, and Tony walks in.

"You spotted them before I did," I say immediately. "How long before?"

He shakes his head. "Maybe a minute before they called for the dance. I don't know if they just walked in or what, but I watched them walk over to the wall and lean there. The one on the left, the taller one, was just hanging up a phone call." I study him for long enough that someone arrives with my suit, and a steaming coffee appears on my desk. His usually perfectly gelled hair is rumpled, and there's a wild look in his eyes. The jacket of his suit is missing, and his sleeves are rolled up to his elbows. I don't think he's lying.

I didn't expect that to be worse.

"Are they real feds?" I sip my coffee, then start pulling my suit pants on under my dress.

He shrugs. "An illegal gun kills you as dead as a legal one."

Bullshit answer, but it means Dante hasn't popped up on any police scanners. Finally, someone runs in with the spare laptop. I boot it up, wish I hadn't left mine at the apartment in the city, and start scanning his hard drive for any programs I left in there.

"Is there anything you know that I don't?" I ask.

"You know about the brigadier?" Tony glances around the room.

There's about eight people in here, not counting the two of us. Eight too many to say the word "rat." I nod.

"Then no." He scowls. "Two fucking days with the bastard, and he didn't give us another word."

No programs. I'm going to need to code something new. Fuck. I shoot the rest of the coffee, wince at the burn, then turn my back to the room. "Unzip me."

I don't know whose fingers find the metal at my back. It should have been Dante's, but instead, he chose not to listen to me about Henry fucking Alcott, and now he's spending our wedding night in jail. The dress sloughs off my body, and I grab the camisole someone brought with my suit and tug it on.

"Amando, I want you on the scanners. Check every frequency. The feds might have their own. Any whisper of where he's going, and you assemble a team." I shrug the jacket on, pull my hair out of the collar. "Dice, contact the ballroom, get any footage they have of the parking lot. I want to know what car they took him in, and I want that found. Tony, chase what we learned from the brigadier." I stare out the dark window ahead of me. "By whatever means necessary." "Zouzouni?"

I whip around to see Mama in the doorway, flanked by burly capos. Her mother-of-the-bride dress is wrinkled, her sweater hangs off one shoulder like she forgot about it, and her face is pale with worry.

"Mama." I step around the desk. "Now isn't a great time. Please, go back downsta―"

Worry transforms into anger in a split second. "No."

"What?"

"No." She crosses her arms. "I will not let you do this."

The thick layer of ice over my feelings makes me scowl. "Everybody else, out. Stand by the door if you fucking have to but close it behind you.'

Capos file out of the room. In the corner of my eye, Tony shoots me a look, but I ignore him to stare at Mama. The door shuts.

"I'm an adult," I say. "A married woman. You don't get to let me do things."

She shakes her head slowly. "I thought you were going to school, zouzouni."

"I am!" I throw my hands in the air. "But sometimes, the Saints need me."

"Dante needs you." She takes a step closer. "Forget this. Come downstairs and worry with the rest of us. Leave the business to people who know it."

"I know it," I reply. "I ran this organization for weeks. I've never really left it. People listen to me."

She quivers, and tears trail down her cheeks for what must be the hundredth time today. "Please. I we lost Christos to this life. We lost Baba. Do not make me lose you."

Dimly, I'm aware that the person I was this morning would've been devastated by those tears, by that statement.

"I don't have a choice," I say. "You're right, Dante needs me. Like this."

She takes another step forward, closing the distance between us, and reaches up. For a moment, I think she's going to stroke my hair, like when I was a little girl with a fever. I don't know what that will do to the ice in my chest. Something in my curls loosens, and she withdraws her hand with the red flower sitting in her palm. I completely forgot about that.

"This was for you to borrow," she says quietly. "I think I will take it back now."

Mama turns and walks out. A few capos-thankfully, less the ones I assigned tasks so I don't have to start breaking kneecaps-peer into the open doorway.

"You're guards, aren't you?" I ask sharply. "Get in here and fucking guard."

I return to the desk I've only really used as the Queen of the Saints and begin coding a program to access the local FBI database.