Page 4 of Venom Sweeter than Honey
My mother grips my arm to stop me before I can walk away, expression revealing that there’s a little determination left in her. “I don’t like you working with those people, Sal. They don’t have your best interests at heart. Your father wouldn’t approve of it either. He wanted you to get out of the business, not dive headfirst into it.”
Despite how it looks, the scowl on my face isn’t directed at my mother. It’s at our morbid fucking circumstances. “He would want me to take care of you.”
Her frown deepens into a scowl of her own. “Not like this, he wouldn’t.”
“What choice do I have? A minimum wage job? Five dollars an hour isn’t gonna keep a roof over our head.”
She doesn’t have an answer to that. Her throat struggles against another ball of guilt. “I can get a job too?—”
“Oh, great, so we both work for minimum wage. Ma, you and I both know that our combined ten dollars an hourbefore taxisn’t going to pay our bills either.”
My mother’s never had a job. Never had to get one. She and my dad met in middle school, and by the time they were in high school, she was pregnant. She dropped out to have me, and because my dad was the heir to a kingdom of organized crime, she wanted for nothing.
Now, we have exceedingly few options. About six months ago, I went looking for a job at the local bars, but, still being underage at the time, they all turned me away. One night, out of sheer desperation, I followed a man into the parking lot after the gold Rolex on his wrist and bulging wallet in his pocket winked at me. When I pulled a gun on him, he’d only grinned and chuckled before offering me a job.
His crew is based in Miami, but their main entry point for the smuggling they do is at an abandoned marina just a few miles north of us.
My mother’s voice cracks as she looks up at me with pleading eyes.
“I can’t risk losing you, too.”
“You won’t. I’m careful. They’re careful. We have each other’s backs.”
Even as I speak the words, they feel weak and too close an insult to my father’s death. His words still echo in my mind.
“Don’t follow in my footsteps because they’ll only ever lead you to an early grave.”
My mother gives a rueful shake of her head, eyes swelling with fat tears demanding to be shed.
“You know how many times I heard your father say those very words?”
My throat struggles against the emotion clawing its way up my throat. Defeated, I turn away to face the momentarily docile Atlantic Ocean a few stories beneath us. The soothing murmuration of its lullaby is a mocking antithesis to the storm raging inside me.
Her whispered words at my back carry the weight of an anchor on my chest, sinking me into cold, dark, suffocating depths.
“I won’t survive it a second time, Sal. And you know it.”
Restrained panic and desperation—like that of a caged animal—burn through me.
“Give me an alternative.”
After several moments of silence, I finally turn to lay a hand on her shoulder, squeezing lightly.
Hesitating.
Trying to find words that won’t come.
Something deep inside my soul—that soft voice in the back of my mind, whose whispered words are somehow always louder than all the rest—tells me to stay.
Stay with her.
Don’t go.
It’s at war with the panic inside of me. The desperation to escape, to be free, to be liberated of the fucking misery that has bled into every waking and slumbering moment of our lives since my dad was murdered.
So I leave.
LEVI
