“I’m not going to ask again Mr. Derricks,” the burly dark-haired man said to me as I looked at him through one eye. He had beaten me enough that the blood and swelling had blinded me in my right eye. 

 “Look, Incredible Bulk, I don’t know who you think I am, but all I want is my sister back,” I said to him through gritted teeth. That comment offended him, evidenced by his right hook into my face. That one punch blackened my entire world. These mob types can be so stubborn, very hard to convince once they get their minds set on something. I should know because I’m one of them. Well, I used to be anyway, until they decided to kidnap my sister to keep me quiet. 

                                           ---------------------------------------------------

My name is Reginald Derricks. I was a made man under Vitoldo Buscardio, Papa Vito, a ruthless head-of-the-household type of man with no room for error. I had made the most extreme of errors though; I had been talking to the feds about the “family business”. Nothing I told them ever stuck though, high priced lawyers and corrupt judges made sure of that. Instead of just killing me when he found out, Papa Vito tried to learn who I was talking to by taking the only person I ever loved from me. I lost my mind when I came home to an overturned, but empty condo. I called Papa Vito to tell him what happened, frantic, hoping that he would have some information. 

 After a long silence on the other end, Vito finally said to me, “Reggie, this is what happens when you betray your family. I want you to hear something…” 

 I heard a heavy door open, with the hinges squealing like a door from a castle that you see on a movie set in medieval times. Heavy footsteps walked on a solid floor. Unmistakably, I heard my sister crying. 

 “It’s your brother, say something to him,” Papa Vito’s harsh voice came somewhat muted through the phone. 

 “Reggie? Reggie! I’m so scared Reggie...Help me, please,” the rest of her words had broken down into sobs and hysterics I couldn’t understand. She wasn't the hysterical type, so I could only imagine what Vito's men had done to her. 

 “I swear to God, Vito, if you hurt one hair on her head…”I started. 

 “You swear to God! Don’t make me laugh! You are nothing but an insignificant ant!” he raged through the phone, his voice deeper than I had ever heard it before. He said nothing for a few moments, letting his rage calm, “I am a reasonable man though, and I will not harm her if you do as I say,” my former boss and adopted father explained to me, his voice edging on rage again. I was boiling mad, but if I said anything more, my sister would die, probably by Vito’s hand right then and there. So I literally bit my tongue and listened. 

 “Good, now listen carefully, because I will only say this once,” Vito continued, very satisfied with my silence, “You will tell all of us who you have been talking to at tomorrow’s meeting. Then we will decide what to do from there. Oh, and if you’re thinking about not showing and attempting some sort of daring rescue, don’t try it. I will be in constant contact with my people here. If you don’t show, she will die. If you show, you both live, kapiche?” 

The call ended with that last statement. It was a good thing too, because I was starting to make my tongue bleed, I was biting it so hard. There was no way that I would risk my sister’s safety, so I decided I would go to the meeting and see what the family would do. 

As I lay in bed, though, I had the feeling it would be my last night to stare at my ceiling in shame of what I became. My life was simple at one time. My mom, my sister, and I lived in a tiny apartment in the middle of the city. My mom became very ill, an advanced cancer that she didn’t catch until it was way too late. When she died, my sister and I were thrown unceremoniously into an orphanage that Papa Vito had donated a considerable sum of money to. I was fifteen at the time; my sister was barely in her teens. 

 We were the new guys there, and as such we were subject to a lot of pranks at the hands of those that had been there a while. Everything from our clothes disappearing and ending up on the telephone line, to getting cold showers because someone would flush the toilet happened to us. That was until I learned to stand up for what was mine. I didn’t have much, just the clothes I was wearing and my sister, Amelia. She really hated it when someone would call her that, her face squishing up in disgust every time she heard it. She preferred people to call her Mel or Amy. We stuck close to each other, not leaving much room for other people, and that was fine. We were a team, and stood up for each other. I was more physical, but Amelia could stare anybody down if they were mean to her big brother.

We gained a reputation in the home, and with reputations, come enemies. One day, Amelia was just walking along, minding her own business, when Luke, a kid with some serious issues, grabbed her and drug her to the backside of the orphanage, behind a tool shed. I’m not going to say what happened back there, but it was depraved and landed Amelia in the hospital for a month. Luke spent two weeks in Juvenile Detention, as soon as he was out, I waited for him as his new state financed home. Not even three grown cops could pull me off of him, it took a tazer to stun me long enough to cuff me. I think he was on life support for a week or two. That one action cost me, as I was put in a Juvenile Detention Center, my sentence for the next three years, then I would be transferred to an adult prison. Papa Vito came and visited me in the teenage prison. I knew who he was; I had seen him around the orphanage a few times, talking to the administrators about how his money was being spent. Everyone seemed to like him, and if he suggested that a problem needed to be attended to, that problem was dealt with by the following week. 

 It was strange, seeing this very rich and influential man coming to see me when I was in the most trouble. I thought he would distance himself from anything that could tarnish his name. As he sat down across from me at the blue table where visitors could come see their families, I had no idea that this visit was going to be his invitation into his family. He said to me, “Reggie, I need a man like you. I need a man that will stand up for his family in a time of depravity and uncouth behavior. I can give you and your sister something that you haven’t had in a long time: a father.” 

 “Can you protect Amelia?” I asked of him, my thoughts immediately going to my sister, making sure that she was going to be safe. 

 “Of course, that’s what fathers do,” the reply came from the man sitting across the table from me, his tone convincing me that he was telling the absolute truth.

 I leaned back from the man and said in the most direct tone I could muster, “I’m in Papa Vito.” 

 The delinquent center released me in a few days, which was really surprising considering what I was in there for. I looked out at the sidewalk that lay between the center and the road, taking a breath of freedom-laden air. Towards the road, standing next to a black limousine stood Amelia, her red hair curled up and a huge smile on her face. Next to her stood Papa Vito, his tall suited form a stark contrast from my little sister’s petite figure, her brightly colored dress as different from Vito’s black and white suit as night and day. I hugged my sister as we entered Vito’s limo, a leather seated monstrosity that I had never seen before. As we pulled up to Vito’s home, I compared it in my mind to the huge manor homes in the Civil War South, very large and elegant, with a porch on the first and second floor that wrapped all the way around it. 

 This was more than I could have ever dreamed of when I thought about a permanent family for me and my sister. A beautiful home, a huge family with so many aunts, uncles, and cousins that they filled the thirty-room house full when they all came over for family gatherings, the whole thing was almost too much. I was incredibly happy, and more importantly, Amelia was too. I played with my cousins, helped Mama Buscardio in the kitchen with her exquisite Italian dinners, and helped Papa Vito fix the old Ford truck he had. For a while, that bliss of ignorance and happiness was all I knew and all I cared to know. I never really knew what Papa Vito did, until one night Papa Vito told us that he would be in the basement working and not to come down there for any reason. 

I followed his instruction for an hour or so, but when Uncle Berto, our “family doctor” arrived and immediately hurried down the stairs without so much as a word to Mama, my curiosity was piqued. What didn’t help matters is that Uncle Berto left the door open a crack, just enough to where I could see the single yellowed bulb hanging in the stairwell. I tried to ignore it and just walk away, but like the proverbial cat, my curiosity got the better of me. I slowly made my way down the flight of stairs that creaked and moaned under my weight. When I met the bottom of the stairs, I was faced with three large doors made of riveted iron with iron circles for handles, like castle doors. 

This was the strangest thing I had ever seen, I didn’t have a single clue what these doors were doing in Papa Vito’s home but something told me that bad things happened behind them. I was afraid of what would happen should I be caught down here, but again my curiosity overpowered my better judgment and I put my ear against each door in turn. There were no sounds coming from behind the doors on either side of me, so I pressed my head against the last door in the center, hoping to hear something. I certainly did hear something, and it sounded like muffled angry words and screams. I should have pulled away, but I couldn’t. It was like watching a train wreck, hearing what seemed like a heated argument interrupted only by screams of pain. My fear finally overrode my curiosity and I pulled away from the door, hitting the heavy handle and knocking it against the door. 

The sound echoed up the stairs, and I heard the voices stop. I knew I had been discovered. I tried to move, run, anything to get away before they checked the source of the noise, but my feet were glued to the rock floor like someone had partially buried them in cement. The door creaked open towards the inside as Uncle Berto’s pudgy face peered out the door. His eyes were on fire, no doubt he was angry that I was the first thing he saw. He grabbed my arm, and with a force that was unlike the fat man to have, yanked me into the room and threw me against the wall. Brandishing a scalpel, he growled at me through gritted teeth, 

“You are going to be sorry you were spying you little brat.” Grabbing my wrist, he slammed my arm against the wall, his other arm rising to stab me with the scalpel. At the peak of his windup, another hand grabbed his wrist, stopping the motion. 

 “No Berto, the boy needs to see this,” I heard Papa Vito’s deep voice say as his face came into the light. Slowly, and with a big snarl on his face, Uncle Berto released my wrist. I was about as tall as both men at the time, but at that moment, I felt about as tall as a ten year old. Vito took my hand and lead me towards the single light source in the middle of the room. Under a hanging light bulb was a table. On that table was a man in very dark clothing, breathing rapidly. All of Uncle Berto’s surgical tools were on a metal platform on wheels, most of them covered in blood. Fear gripped me again, and Papa Vito had to essentially drag me towards the man on the table, although no sign of effort showed on his face as he did so. 

 What I saw there was worse than anything I had ever seen in the really gory horror movies I had watched. The man was strapped down, his shirt had been cut open and there were newly made stitches all over him, some still oozing blood. One of the man’s eyes had been cut out of his head and laid on the table next to him. The eyelid was stitched up; it looked like he was crying blood because of the red liquid seeping through the stitch work. 

 “This is what we do to people that hurt our family. You have to protect your family, that’s the most important thing, but you already know that. Now,” Papa Vito said as his hand left my arm, “You have to finish this.” He pressed a very large revolver into my hand. “Protect your family,” he stated coldly. His words rang through me as I cocked the hammer back, pressing the barrel against the dying man’s forehead, but at the last second I hesitated. He was the only thing I had that I could compare to a father, but he was telling me to do something that seemed wrong, and my brain tried to figure out why. That moment seemed to last forever, my finger slowly tugging the trigger. 

 Then, there was this feeling that entered the back of my brain, like an itch that I couldn’t scratch. In front of me was a man that had probably done bad things. He had probably hurt people, which is why he was here in the first place. Papa Vito was an honorable man, one that wouldn’t hurt people for no reason, so I had every reason to believe that he was going to continue being an evil, dishonorable man. I realized that he was still a man though, and wasn’t sure I could take his life. Maybe if he was standing and shooting at me, I could kill him, but I didn't know if I could here. The icy, bold voice of Papa Vito boomed into my ears, boring into my brain, “Do it Reggie, make your father proud, and make your family proud.” 

 Then it was over when the hammer finally released. The sound shattered my bubble of slowed down time and rattled my teeth it was so loud. I had killed the man that had hurt my family, and in doing so, my father. 

 “You did well Reggie. Tomorrow, we will talk about what you can do for this family. For now, I want you to go upstairs and clean yourself up. Uncle Berto and I will attend to the rest,” Vito said as he took the gun from me and lead me gently out the iron door. My feet moved on auto-pilot to the bathroom upstairs, my thoughts rationalizing my actions in overtime, telling me that I had done a mercy to the man downstairs, that I had ended a torture session that didn’t look like it was close to over. When I took a shower, I let the water clean me of more than just the blood splatter on my body, it cleaned me of the last pang of guilt I felt for what I just did, my feelings and the last of my innocence draining like so much soap.