The Devil Wears Red | Mafia Romance |

01| Fix His Shit

Bentley POV:

It was eleven years since her parents left her.

She was only seven, the night her parents decided they were done with Bentley. She remembers that night like it was a projector playing the contents on repeat in her head. It was just days after new years, the cold January night filled with leftover snow from the night before, along with record breaking wind. Everyone was still on the high of a new year, creating their resolutions and goals.

But that night, Richard and Evelyn Russo were busy fighting. What were they fighting over, who knows. Bentley did as she had always done when her parents put her in that situation, she hid in her room playing music off her hello kitty music box. The pink plastic did a horrible job of muffling the noise, but the nirvana album did a great job of distracting her. She built a gift of being able to have selective hearing, practically being forced to learn how to do it.

Apparently, her father was more of a Metallica fan, because he broke her music box before throwing random pieces of clothes into a small backpack, and then throwing her in the car. The dinky 1998 Toyota Corolla was barely held together.

Bentley remembers screaming her lungs off in fear, begging her father not to drive. She could smell the opaque scent of beer of his mouth and clothes and, even at the age of seven, she was well aware of the fact that her father was not capable of being behind the wheel. She kept kicking and screaming, telling him she didn't want to die.

She had seen the commercials and awarenesses showing the results of drunk driving, and she feared that would happen to her.

Her father on the other hand couldn't care one bit, slapping her to shut her up. He threw her inside the car, before driving away.

The car was freezing, after sitting outside for days in the negative degrees, and it didn't help that the heater stopped working last summer. She shivered in the back seat, the sound that her clacking teeth made were louder than the cars swerving around them. It wasn't until he stopped at a random corner of a highway, far enough into the woods, but still close that she might find her way out, that he left her.

All she could remember were the last words he told her; "find a way to survive or die," and then he was gone.

The words penetrate her to this day, even though she try's to pretend she's over it. They still hurt, but not like before. Before it felt like a stab wound—which those hurts (she would know). But now, it's like a paper cut, a stubbed toe. A tear would shed, but nothing sustainable.

She'd like to remember her parents as just a paper cut—as an inconvenience, similar to how they viewed her.

"Don't tell me your fucking daydreaming while we are under attack," the words were so loud, so opaque, filtering her ears like the finest silk. It snapped Bentley out of her thoughts so easily.

She looked over to see a disappointed Giorgio coddling his gun closely to him as he continued to shoot. The sound of gunfire sends her into this tunnel of memories, of a dark past that craves to never be forgotten—no matter the efforts.

"My bad," she mutters in response, putting her gun up to aim. Her arm felt numb from being so still for a while that it took her a minute to get used to the feeling of shooting, missing the first few shots. With every powerful blow, was a ricochet to her shoulder, cocking it back slightly.

She should be used to this, she tells herself. She has shot a gun probably ten thousand times since she was eight. This was nothing new to her, in fact it was so common that she would have dreams about not holding the gun properly—waking her in a cold sweat. Her nightmares were horrible, but she found it funny that the ones she remembered, always involved her job; her lifestyle.