Guns Over Girls

The Mafia rules are 10 in all.

And I knew them all by heart. While kids my age were in school learning the letters of the alphabet and how to form words with them , I , at the age of six spent hours in the shooting range, shooting at haystacks shaped like people, getting beaten and punished brutally for missing the shots and memorizing the rules that I knew would bind me for life. Not that I didn’t study. I was homeschooled by a mafia tutor and I never got to see the life outside of the large walls that sealed me off from the world out there. I had no friends. My father made sure of it. I was being prepared to take over the mafia.

My Father, Alfonso Topaz is the most powerful mafia leader. His name alone sends chills down the spines of the other mafia leaders and normal citizens alike. He conducted different illegal businesses and even the police couldn’t do anything about it. His mafia wasn’t an underground one. Everyone single person knows who my father Is and how horribly terrifying he is.

I hated him. I never really accepted the fact that my mother was going to marry him. When I was 5, after my real father died, she told me she was getting married to a good man who would be a good husband to her and a good father to me. Even as young as I was then, I knew who Alfonso Topaz was and he was no good man. I remember her holding me with tears in her eyes and quivering lips as she said "We're going to live a happy life with your new father, he would love you like you are his own son". Her eyes didn’t hold that much of a conviction when she said that to me.

But we were never happy.

I was locked away from her the moment I turned six. She cried. I cried. She was trashed. Raped. Beaten. Molested right in front of me and each time I was made to watch. Each time I was made to watch my step-father rape her to his heart content, I was beaten up for crying. It was the first mafia rule "Never shed a tear". Soon, after going through immense torture and pain, I couldn’t cry anymore. I only watched my mother struggle to get away from him each time until he was finally done with her and cleans up. " Good boy" He would praise me then remind me of the 4th rule of the mafia "Treat them like the trash they are"

Day by day my mother was starting to become a shadow of her self. She wore tattered clothes , and tried to use the little makeup she could get to cover the bruises that marked her face like tattoos. Her lips became white and her skin ghostly pale. Still, she kept repeating the mantra "you will be happy"

And now I've turned 18, I have never been happy.

As I walk down the underground dungeons of my step-father, I can hear cries and wailings mostly from women. He built an underground dungeon with cages to keep his prisoners who were either men captured from another mafia or women who were sex slaves. In one of those cages was my mother, his legally married wife. As I walk past the cages , I try to shut my ear from the pleas of the people who were left to starve to death. I didn’t have enough food to go round, I am here for just one person .

I finally get to the cage that holds my mother and I dropped the plate of food heavily in front of her. She looks up from her crouching position and my heart clench like it always does even though I am mad at her.

" You never listen " I say

Her cage is dark and so I couldn’t make out her form or how battered she probably looks now. I also know she intends to remain in the dark so I wouldn’t have to see her. She stretched her hand and carried the dismantled plate of food.

" yummy! Did you make this?" she replies ignoring my question . It hurt me knowing I am the reason she is in there.