Bound to the Mafia (Bound to the Bad Boy Book 2) Read online

  Weirdly enough, that thought sends a slight pang of sadness through my heart, which is just ridiculous. I don’t know him. He doesn’t know me. I don’t even know his name.

  “I’m Bruno, by the way,” he says, almost like he can read my mind. He holds out his hand for me to shake and I reluctantly take it, feeling his warm, calloused palm against mine. I hope to god my hands aren’t clammy.

  “I’m Serena,” I reply, unable to suppress a smile.

  “Well, Serena, I’m going to do everything within my power to make sure this house is perfect for you. Hopefully that will make the move a little less painful,” Bruno says, without a single note of sarcasm. He’s earnest, one-hundred-percent.

  “Thank you,” I answer quietly, feeling very small and silly all of a sudden. Changing the subject, I ask, “So, what is this back porch monstrosity going to look like when it’s finished?”

  Without missing a beat, Bruno launches into an in-depth explanation of the dimensions, materials, and projected design for the back of the house, using terms I can’t even begin to understand as he rapidly paints me a picture I can only half-imagine. Either way, I’m impressed. I expected that he was just kind of a grunt worker following orders since he looks to be about my age and I don’t know any guys my age who could even build a birdhouse, much less a house for a person to live in. But he seems to genuinely understand the process of craftsmanship, and even though I can’t quite follow what he’s saying, I can tell that he feels passionate about what he’s doing. Passion. I don’t know any guys my age who show the least amount of enthusiasm for anything, much less a job.

  But everything about him tells me Bruno is different. He’s not the kind of guy I’m used to, the kind of dude who sits next to me in chemistry class and tries to throw tiny paper balls down my cleavage and brags about last weekend’s keg stand like it’s the most impressive feat any human being has ever attempted. Bruno is something else entirely, and I am intrigued.

  “Wow, you really know your stuff,” I comment, shaking my head in awe.

  Bruno shrugs. “It’s my job to know it. Plus, now that I know this house belongs to a beautiful girl like you, I’m gonna work extra hard at it.”

  I open my mouth to respond, but no sound comes out. It’s not even that suave of a pickup line, and yet I’m literally speechless. I look down at the ground, my heart racing.

  “Come with me,” Bruno says suddenly, reaching out to take my hand. I glance back up, startled at this intrusion, and meet his vivid green eyes. He’s smiling at me brilliantly and I realize there’s not a cell in my body that can refuse him. It’s stupid, but it’s true. He’s got me hooked, and even though I don’t know a thing about him, I will follow him anywhere.

  “Where are we going?” I ask as he pulls me along.

  He looks back over his shoulder. “Shh. Just be cool. You finished off that water so fast, I’m just gonna get you something better to drink. It’s a balmy summer evening.”

  I have to laugh a little at the ridiculous wording. What a weirdo. He leads me to the back of one of the utility vans, glances around surreptitiously for a moment, and then slides the side door open, gesturing for me to follow him inside.

  “You know, I think this definitely feels like the start of some cautionary tale I read as a child. Something about not getting into a van with a stranger,” I remark, lifting an eyebrow.

  Bruno chuckles. “Okay, I can see how this might be weird. But I swear, I’m not about to kidnap you or anything. Although judging from the house your dad is building, it looks like I could probably get a pretty sweet ransom for you.”

  “Yeah, that definitely makes me more likely to climb into this van with you,” I joke, crossing my arms over my chest stubbornly.

  Bruno shrugs, still grinning. “Fine, fine. You can hang out there. I’m just going to mix a couple of drinks. Something to cool off with. Better than water.”

  He starts digging around in a couple of coolers, taking out different bottles of what looks to be liquor and mixers, concocting a drink he pours into two red Solo cups, handing one off to me.

  “So now I’ve gone from following a stranger back to his van to now accepting a strange drink from the back of the stranger’s van. Great. My mother would lose her shit,” I say, rolling my eyes. “I don’t drink, by the way. Not usually. I’m only sixteen.”

  “I’m seventeen,” Bruno says, casually taking a sip of the mystery drink. “But who cares? Nobody has to know but you and me, and I’m sure as hell not going to tell anybody.”

  “This better not have anything funky in it,” I warn, sniffing the drink hesitantly. It smells vaguely sweet, but I don’t know enough about alcohol to place any of the scents.

  “Funky? Merda, you really don’t trust me, do you?” he responds, sounding ever so slightly offended that I would suspect him at all.

  “Well, I don’t exactly know you. For all I know you could be a murderer or something.”

  “Yes, I’m a carpenter moonlighting as a murderer,” Bruno laughs. He takes another long sip of his drink. “I don’t have time for a double life, Miss Serena. What you see is what you get.”

  Narrowing my eyes at him suspiciously, I finally taste the drink. It’s actually rather delicious, and the liquor sends a warm wave right down through my body. Bruno grins.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  “I like to call it a bastard Americano,” he answers.

  I snort. “A what what? I thought an Americano was a kind of coffee drink.”

  “Not this one,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s supposed to have vermouth, but I don’t have that. It’s Campari and soda water. An Americano for the pretty Americana,” he adds, giving me a wink that makes me blush.

  “So, if you’ve been drinking this stuff all day, does that mean you’re drunkenly building my house?” I inquire, giving him a critical look. Bruno scoffs.

  “No, no. This is all for the end of the day. For me, at least. Some of the guys sip on beers throughout the day, but I like to keep a clear head while I’m handling heavy machinery, myself.”

  “Good, because if I fall through the floor because somebody was too drunk to properly assemble my back porch, there’ll be hell to pay,” I declare, trying not to sound too haughty.

  “If you fall, I’ll be there to catch you, mia passerotta,” Bruno says, and I catch onto the accent at last. It’s Italian. Of course it is. I feel like an idiot for taking this long to figure it out. My mom’s family has been in America long enough to have lost the accent decades ago, and my dad does his best to keep his accent under control, but most of his friends and colleagues sound a lot like Bruno does. After all, this is New York.

  “Passerotta?” I repeat, confused. My parents never spoke Italian with me growing up, so I unfortunately never learned it, even though everybody who hears my name assumes I speak it.

  “Sparrow. Little bird,” Bruno defines, waving his hand.

  “Never heard that one before.”

  “Good, then I’m the first,” Bruno says smoothly, downing the rest of his drink. “Your dad’s not a cop or anything, is he?” he asks, half-jokingly.

  I shake my head. “No, definitely not. But he would still be angry if he caught us doing… this. So we should probably get out of here.”

  “Get out of here?” Bruno repeats, setting down his cup and climbing out of the van to stand in front of me. He’s standing close. So close. I can feel the heat radiating off of his body, smell his masculine scent. He looks down at me with those green eyes and I almost feel my knees buckling.

  “Where would you want to go with a guy like me?” he asks softly. A shiver of something new, something dangerous, tingles down my spine.

  “Serena! Time to go, pumpkin!” I heard my dad’s voice carry from across the property and I freeze instantly. The last thing I need is for him to come around back and discover me standing here with one of the construction guys, drinking alcohol from a van.

  I swallow hard and look up into B
runo’s face. He doesn’t waver in the slightest, completely unafraid and unabashed. “Tomorrow night. S-six o’clock. The park around the corner from here,” I tell him quietly. “I’ll see you there. Okay?”

  Bruno smiles and lifts a hand to take the cup from me. He nods. “See you then, Serena.”

  I back away slowly, not wanting to leave. Then I force myself to turn and hurry back around to the front of the house to grab my stuff and head home with my dad. On the way home I dutifully answer my dad’s inane questions about my day, listen to him talk excitedly about plans for the house, and complain about extended deadlines the foreman keeps missing.

  And all I can think about is Bruno. Those green eyes.

  I’m going to see him tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow…

  T he alarm goes off and I sit up violently in bed, my heart racing as I search blindly in the dark to turn off the sound. It’s time to get up and go to work. It’s time to shake off my dreams, shake off those years of waiting, and get back to my life.

  Without Bruno.

  My chest aches as I drag myself out of bed and into the shower. I wish I could climb back into bed and resume my dream where it left off, go back in time to relive those first early days, when Bruno first appeared in my life like a mirage. We were just kids then, and so stupid. We had no idea that there was a big, scary world waiting to close its jaws around us. We thought the only thing that mattered was setting the next date, waiting for the day when we could sneak out to be together again. God, I wish I could go back in time and live those days over and over again. Things were so simple. Or at least we weren’t yet aware of how complicated they could get.

  It’s been two years since they took my Bruno away from me again, threw him behind metal bars, locking away my heart and soul. He’s in prison, and even though I’m free to walk around outside and go about my life, I’m imprisoned, too. Because none of my freedom means anything without being able to share it with the man I love.

  Everybody and everything conspires to keep us apart, and I don’t know how to break through the chains and get to him. Every second we’re apart, that bridge between us crumbles just a little bit more. I have his pictures everywhere and I stare at them every day. I refuse to forget a single detail of his face, even though I’m sure his time behind bars has changed his face, has changed his heart.

  I can only hope that one thing won’t change: his love for me.

  BRUNO

  T wo years.

  It’s been two years today since I was put into this hell-hole, sentenced to ten full years at Sterling Correctional Facility. Two years since I breathed fresh air as a free man.

  But my love for Serena, my one shining light, has only gotten stronger.

  I feel my muscles burning as I push the heavy weights up. With each passing moment, I feel the cold metal grip against the palms of my hands. I feel the tension of the weights from my thick forearms to bulging biceps, all the way down to my shoulders and pecs. A thin sheen of sweat covers my bare chest as it slowly falls while I push the weights up. I let air out of my lungs while I push up, my body working in perfect sync to make the rep happen.

  I reach the top of the rep, and I hold it there for a second, and I can feel every muscle that works to hold it up. Since coming to prison, I’ve had nothing but time, and in that time, I’ve devoted myself to working out. I never realized how inexperienced I really was before I had endless time to hone my body.

  Now, though, no muscle moves in my body without my knowing it. Each move is deliberate, measured. I’m not just holding a set of weights up. I know which muscles to tense and relax, exactly how to breathe. I even know how to feel my heart rate going up and down with my workout.

  The natural rhythms of my body have become my only friends in here. And I know them better than I ever have in my life.

  My arms slowly bend to lower the weights down, and I feel that sweet, familiar burn ripple through new places in my upper body as it comes down and I breathe in. I don’t let this position last as long, and it’s on to another rep immediately after.

  My body stopped aching and complaining during these exercises long ago. Exercise has become the one thing I can rely on in here. Without something to hang onto, despair swallows you in this bleak place. I’ve seen it happen to other men. Prison drains you. It breaks you. It flushes out your whole world and makes you see nothing but empty grayness.

  From the first day, I decided not to let that happen to me.

  I started working out in my cell. I did push-ups to keep the feeling of aching arms with me as much as I could bear it. When I couldn’t do any more, I did sit-ups. Every time the guards marched us out, I would hit the exercise equipment and do that until I couldn’t handle any more.

  My body became my focus. It never disappointed. Each day, I found new parts of me to refine and perfect. More muscles to work out, new parts within me to exercise. Every time I thought I’d perfected something, I’d find new ways to make the best use of it.

  When I was a boy, Uncle Carlo taught me how to fight. He knew more than you would guess from his humble look. He had served in the Special Forces, and he passed that training on to me, as much as he was willing and as long as he could hold my attention. I learned from him, and I could fight well. But now that I really know what the human body is capable of, I know what those lessons were for. I remember things he taught me that my body wasn’t capable of then.

  When I’ve worked out so much that I can’t push any part of me any further, I go over old fights in my mind. With each day that I grow stronger, I think of things I did wrong. Things I could have done better. I remember my fights with Lorenzo, and I laugh at how easily I could have killed him if I’d known the things I know now, if I was able to do the things this machine of a body can do now. When I lift the weights, I see a scar on my forearm that I got from that last fight in the Abruzzi compound. It’s been a reminder of Serena, something that’s always in sight when she can’t be.

  After twelve reps, I let my spotter take the weights from me, and I take a breath before sitting up and swinging my leg over the bench. My spotter gives me a clap on the back, and I nod to him. When I stand up, I notice other men in the exercise yard glance at me. My gaze passes over them as they look away. Nobody holds eye contact for long. When I stand up and take a step away from the bench, it’s like a statement. My presence is bigger than theirs here, not just in the way I’m built, but how I carry myself.

  Nobody fucks with me.

  The other prisoners took notice when I started getting stronger. Every prison has a hierarchy, a pecking order of men who rule each other, gangs who keep to themselves. When I first showed up here, I knew I had to find my place in that pecking order, and it would happen sooner rather than later.

  The first time I got jumped, I made my place clear, and the punk who tried to pick a fight with me has the scars to prove it from when I drove him into the hard concrete.

  He wasn’t the last, either. But after a few months, people knew not to send mooks to pick fights with me unless they wanted them to come back with bruises and a few less teeth.

  Still, every now and then, some new kid sees my body’s stature and how the other guys tend to stay out of my way, and they decide to do something stupid.

  That’s the feeling I’m getting from the blonde new guy eyeing me across the exercise yard. He’s not a scrawny guy by any means, but he’s got the look in his eye of someone reckless. You learn to spot that look fast in prison. Some asshole with a chip on his shoulder can be a real problem if you don’t see him coming.

  I pretend like I haven’t noticed the guy eyeing me, though, and I carry on like I would any other day. I look to my spotter and jab a thumb to the bench, moving over to spot for him in turn. I might not get tangled up in prison politics, but I’m not an asshole.

  “I’m good,” the guy says. “Pushed something too far yesterday, don’t want to risk tearing anything.”

  “Smart,” I grunt, and we exchange a short nod bef
ore parting ways.

  I head to the bathrooms, making my way past the clusters of my fellow prisoners getting what they can out of our short rec time. I’ve come to learn the different gangs around and how to keep myself out of trouble that doesn’t come looking for me.

  There are Russians from Brighton Beach who keep to themselves for the most part, even more than the others. There are other Italians here from groups I don’t tangle with. And of course, the Cleaners are here too.

  Not directly, for the most part. A few of them have passed through in my time, but they’re good at keeping their kind out. Makes me wonder just how many palms are greased in the NYPD by Don Abruzzi. But they make their presence known in other ways. Word gets in from the outside, and prison politics do what they do naturally.

  And when I notice the blonde kid out of the corner of my eye following me, I have a feeling I’m about to see some of that in action.

  It’s a quiet walk to the bathrooms, which is never a good sign. Like the calm before the storm, except the calm means there’s no witnesses. And sometimes worse, no guards.

  But I step inside, do my business, and as I’m heading to the sink and wash my hands, I hear a series of slow footsteps entering the bathroom, coming to a stop near the door.

  He really wants to do this, doesn’t he? I frown. We prisoners would be better off having each other’s backs instead of watching them, but some kids learn the hard way.

  “You should think hard,” I say as I face the blonde guy standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, jaw set, “about whether you really want to lose some of those teeth on your first week in here.”

  The man’s face twists into a scowl, and he cracks his knuckles. “Tough talk for a marked man.”

  I raise an eyebrow at him. “Look, kid, you’re new. I’m giving you a chance most of these guys wouldn’t think twice about. Turn around and let me wash my fucking hands, and we’ll forget this happened.”

  With that, I step toward the sink to wash my hands, but I see his knee move out of the corner of my eye.