Unforgivable Ties

Chapter 32

Stephanie

I t was the weekend, but I still wasn’t free of working for Cesare. It was exhausting sometimes; spending all week at school, studying, then going to work after the school day and on the weekends.

I didn’t have a say in my schedule, either. It was almost always at nighttime, when the mafiosos were up to god knows what and were more likely to get hurt.

I grumbled to myself as I sat my backpack down. Hopefully I’d have time for a nap.

“Stephanie,” Cesare said, bursting into the medical bay.

Or not.

“Good, you’re here. I need help with something,” he said, adjusting his glasses that had gone askew on his nose.

Cesare looked oddly frazzled. It was unsettling, because the older man was always calm and collected, no matter how dire the situation we were dealing with was.

“Is there a patient in the recovery room that needs help?” I asked.

“No,” Cesare replied, shaking his head with noticeable frustration. His usually immaculate grey hair was messed up, a few strands falling into his eyes. “It’s not that. Follow me.”

The confusion had me raising an eyebrow. If it wasn’t a medical emergency, what could possibly have Cesare so unsettled?

I trailed behind him, and he walked into a room he had explicitly told me not to enter. I stopped at the doorway, heeding the directions that he had previously given me.

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to come back here,” I said nervously, not even daring to look inside to see what was in the room.

“Disregard that,” he said, not hiding the annoyance in his voice.

My heart pounded as I walked through the door. What could possibly be so special about this room that I wasn’t allowed to know about it?

It was a morgue.

My heartbeat lessened—it wasn’t surprising, given that Cesare couldn’t save every mafioso that came through here. I shivered from the cold as I looked around the room, taking everything in.

A dead man laid on the table, his body already cut open for an autopsy that had been left unfinished. His sightless eyes stared at the ceiling, the life once residing in them extinguished.

“Put on scrubs,” Cesare instructed me, hovering back over the man. “They’re in the back cabinet.”

I nodded, walking over to the cabinet. Vincenzo would have killed me for doing it, but I just stood behind a screen as I changed into them. After months of working with Cesare, it was very apparent he had no physical interest in me, and saw me just as a student.

When I emerged from behind the screen, Cesare was working meticulously over the body. There was no sound but the ghoulish hum of the overhead lights and the chrome clink of Cesare’s tools as he carefully navigated through the open cavity before him. He did not look up at me until I moved to his side.

“We had twelve bodies come in today,” he said, clicking his tongue with irritation. “I can’t have you just attending to the men anymore. I need your help with this.”

I looked at the steel doors on the wall that housed the deceased. Twelve bodies. I swallowed hard, imagining the cadavers waiting in the cold silence behind them; their life stories abruptly ended and now subject to our impartial examination.

“Um, Cesare,” I said, not wanting to question a licensed medical doctor. “Aren’t bodies ok to autopsy for two to three days? Why prioritize this over helping the hurt men?”

“Autopsy?” he said, snapping his head up to look at me. “Do you think we do autopsies here?”

An uneasy feeling settled in the pit of my stomach as I met Cesare’s gaze. His eyes were hard and cold, revealing a reality much grimmer than I had imagined.

“Surely, you don’t mean...” I breathed, looking down into the man’s cut open body. Half of the organs were missing; removed with surgical precision.

Cesare’s lips tightened into a thin line. “We are here to harvest, not autopsy,” he said curtly, returning his attention to the cadaver on the table. “And time is of the essence.”

The room seemed to spin, and the overhead lights glared harshly against my disoriented eyes. The metallic odor of blood, the cold sterility of the morgue, everything intensified at that moment. It wasn’t just the realization that I’d stepped into a world far more grotesque than I had imagined; it was also discovering that I was a cog in a macabre machine, part of something so ethically complex and morally defiant.

“Harvest?” I whispered, my voice barely audible. My mind, a usually quick and efficient machine, stumbled over the word. Harvest was a term for crops, for wheat and fruit and corn. Not for people.

“They’re already dead. They no longer serve a purpose to us.”

How could Cesare say that? The men were dead, but they had families, people who loved them. It was an insult to cut them open and sell everything that was left on the black market.

“N-no,” I said, steadying myself enough to stand up straight. “I won’t.”

“I don’t think you understand, Stephanie. You don’t have a choice,” Cesare’s voice carried a deadly calmness that sent chills down my spine. I saw no compassion in his eyes, only a cold practicality, a chilling resolve beneath his clinical demeanor. “The moment you entered into this world, you were bound to it.”

It was a nightmare. The metallic clinking of Cesare’s scalpel against the steel tray echoed in my ears. These were the sounds of the true existence of this warehouse, a noise that would echo through my dreams.

“You said it was temporary,” I said, my voice shaking. “Only until you found someone new.”

“It was never temporary. In fact, you should consider yourself lucky,” he said, acting like I had won the lottery instead of discovering a morgue full of bodies about to be harvested for organs. “Vincenzo should have killed you after what you saw. Instead, he brought you here. You get to live, and you’ll be making more money than doctors do when you graduate.”

“Vincenzo won’t make me stay,” I said, my voice wavering at the mention of the man who’d brought me into this world, the man I’d trusted implicitly.

“That man is so soft for you,” he muttered. “He’s killed two people already. I can only hope no one here looks at you the wrong way, or I’ll have another body on my hands.”

His words hung in the air, turning the room even colder. There was no way Vincenzo had killed someone over me...right? I remembered the look in his eyes when David touched me and when he had found the ski lodge employee on top of me. It was a murderous look indeed, but I had always dismissed it as possessiveness. It wasn’t until this moment that I realized that there could be a much darker interpretation.

“But his loyalty to the mafia is stronger,” Cesare continued. “Yes, he will make you stay. Or, the alternative.”

His implication hung heavy in the air. The alternative was, of course, death.

I swallowed hard, my clammy hands balled into tight fists at my sides. It wasn’t fair, none of it was. But fairness rarely factored into survival. The thought made me feel nauseous, but I had to face it straight on—just like everything else in this twisted world that Vincenzo had inadvertently drawn me into.

I didn’t care if I died.

“I can’t do this,” I said, hot tears running down my cheeks.

I sprinted out of the morgue and down the hallway. Somehow, I remembered to grab my backpack before running out of the building.

I was sure one of the mafioso’s guarding the building was going to shoot me on the way out. But, as I ran away from the warehouse and towards the subway station, no bullets pierced my body.

The streets of the city were slick, rain pelting down from the dark sky above. The road the warehouse was on was near abandoned, with no streetlights to cut through the dark abyss. My heart pounded in my chest as I sprinted through the desolate, endless path of asphalt, the echo of my damp shoes slapping against the pavement the only sound in the deadened silence.

Finally, I reached the subway station, heaving and out of breath. I knew there was a lot of darkness about Vincenzo that he hid from me, but I didn’t think it would be this bad. The man was selling organs on the black market.

And he would pick it over me.

A sob wracked my body, and the homeless man sleeping on the bench raised his head to look at me.

“Sorry,” I mumbled to him, apologizing for disturbing his sleep.

There was no way I could ever look at Vincenzo again. I pulled my phone out and called Jessica, praying she would pick up.

“Hey,” she said.

I tried to talk, but a sob wracked my body before I could say anything.

“What’s wrong?”

Jessica’s voice was laced with concern, and it struck a painful chord in my chest, causing another wave of uncontrolled sobs. I could hear her calling my name frantically through the line, but my words were lost in the torrent of tears and broken sobs.

“Jess,” I choked out through the tears. “Can I stay at your house tonight?”

“Of course. Where are you?”

“Headed home,” I said, wiping the snot off my nose with my sleeve. “I need to pack my suitcases.”

“Something happened with you and Vincenzo?” she said softly.

I took a deep, shuddering breath before replying, “Yeah, something happened.”

I would have to figure out a lie between now and when I saw her. Even though I was never going back, I still wouldn’t tell anyone about what was going on at that warehouse, because I might get in trouble for being affiliated with it.

Or was it because I didn’t want Vincenzo to get arrested?

The thoughts plagued my mind on the ride home all the way until I reached the penthouse. I grabbed my suitcases and frantically unzipped them, throwing clothes and essential belongings inside with little thought. My hands shook as I scrambled around our shared room, the space suddenly feeling cold and alien.

A bitter taste filled my mouth, and I swallowed back another round of sobs. Vincenzo’s coat lay draped over the chair, his scent still clinging to it. For a moment, I let myself breathe it in, then with a swift movement, I threw the coat aside.

I stuffed the last pair of shoes into a suitcase, forcing it shut, and glanced around the room one last time. A strange sense of of hurt washed over me. This place, once comforting and familiar, was now no longer my home. It was an empty echo of Vincenzo and I’s past.

With one last look cast over my shoulder, I walked out of the bedroom and towards the elevator. As the doors shut behind me, I said goodbye to the place that had felt most like home.