The Don Regretted It Five Years After I Left

My father fled when I was seven.

He'd been a fringe associate of the Moretti family, someone they kept around for odd jobs.

Then he lost big at a card table, and what he'd lost wasn't his own money. He'd skimmed it from one of the family's smuggling operations.

So he cleaned out our apartment, and the man who'd sworn he'd protect our family forever abandoned my mother and me and fled.

The family showed up the next morning to collect. The guy leading them patted me on the head. “She's gonna be a real beauty when she grows up.”

They moved us from a decent apartment to a rental at the far end of South Side. Overnight, my mother went from a lady of means to a poor woman struggling to survive in the slums.

That night, she held both my hands. “Mia. Girls like us, pretty isn't a gift. Remember that.”

That neighborhood was one the police and the priests both stayed out of.

You didn't have to do anything. Just lean out a window and the catcalls started below.

The worst was a night someone tried to pry our door open at three in the morning.

My mother pulled me into the bathtub, clamped her hand over my mouth, and held a rusty kitchen knife in the other, both of us absolutely silent.

That was the night I understood: nobody was coming to save us. Everything depended on what you could hold onto yourself.

I started working at a dockside tavern called Madonna Rose when I was sixteen, and that was also where I met Dante for the first time.

The day he walked in, every woman in the room turned to look. Tall, well-dressed, the kind of man who commands a room. All of them found reasons to drift toward his table.

I walked past with my tray and didn't look at him once.

He stopped me with one hand. “What's your name?”

“Sir, you don't need to know my name to place your order. Please don't interrupt my work.”

That night after my shift, two men in black suits were standing at the mouth of the alley, a car idling behind them.

I went to find my boss. He pulled me behind the bar, face tight.

“That's the Moretti heir's men. Six months ago, he cleared out three old families at a port in Sicily; he was not yet of age. You shouldn't have messed with him.”

That night, those two bodyguards “walked me home,” one in front and one behind.

The next day, different men. The day after, different again.

A week of that and I'd had enough. I threw my apron down in front of Dante.

“What exactly do you want?”

“I want to be with you. Say yes, and I'll make you the most protected woman on the West Coast. Whatever you need, I'll give it to you. Every resource the Moretti family has, it's yours.”

“I don't need any of that. Men like you, I keep my own life in my own hands. I don't take what I can't pay back. And I can't pay this back. I won't.”

Three months later, my mother spiked a fever in the middle of the night. Nearly forty degrees. Her face had gone gray.

We were on the sixth floor with no elevator. I got her on my back and started carrying her down, but made it only to the third floor before my legs gave out.

I called for help in the stairwell. Nobody came.

Her breathing was getting shallow, and I was starting to panic.

That was when Dante appeared.

He didn't say anything. He just lifted her off my back, carried her down the stairs, and got her into his car.

My mother spent seven hours in the ICU. Dante arranged the best doctors in the hospital and sat with me the entire time.

When the doctors finally said she was stable, everything I'd been holding in started to let go.

That's when I noticed myself: thin pajamas, one slipper missing, completely coming apart at the seams.

And Dante appeared from somewhere with a pair of new slippers. He crouched down and put them on my feet, right there in the hospital corridor. People walking by stopped to stare at this untouchable heir to the Moretti family, kneeling on a linoleum floor for a girl from nowhere.

I found out later that while I'd been falling apart, he'd quietly handled everything. Hospital admission, the things she'd need, a specialist on the phone about her follow-up care.

He'd even figured out I wouldn't take his money, so he'd gotten me into an emergency assistance program to cover the surgery.

He never mentioned any of it.

When I asked him about it later, he just said: “It needed to be done. I want you to trust me a little more, but I'm not going to push. Just know that if you're ever in trouble, I'm there.”

That was the first time I wavered, because he was different from every man I'd ever met.

The day my mother officially woke up, he drove me home and sat back in the driver's seat, turning to look at me.

“Mia. I've never worked this hard for anyone in my life. You're the first. You'll be the last. So, will you give me a chance?”

I said yes.

But the family's position never really moved.

Dante's mother met me once. She slid a seven-figure check across the table without bothering to pretend it was anything other than what it was.

“This is enough for you and your mother to live comfortably for the rest of your lives. All you have to do is leave Dante.”

I said no. She studied me for a long moment, the way you look at something you can't get rid of, then stood up and left me with one line: “You'll regret this.”

When Dante found out, he got down on his knees in front of me and held my hands.

“Two more years, Mia. When I'm officially Don, every single person in this family will call you their Donna.”

I believed him.

But we were too young. Too naïve.

Because his family had already chosen someone else for him.