NEEDY PARENTS
It was actually rather comforting to see my parents alive and breathing. Three years of practically no contact had caused me to imagine some pretty fucked up things about their well being. In my head, they were dead in a ditch somewhere off a highway with their teeth cut out, fingertips burned off, with my mother's breast implants ripped from her to erase all possibilities of identifying them. All things except for the scar that my mother had on her back from a terrifying assassination attempt when I was ten; I knew that scar like the back of my hand. Alas, they were not dead and unrecognizable but rather very well put together.
My mother still looked plastic and fake but she held a grace that I haven't met many who had. She was the typical kind of model beauty; there was obviously something very alluringly attractive about her but somehow you knew most of the beauty she held had come from a scalpel. Her dyed blonde hair was chopped into layers, her hazel eyes were now a deep forest green, her full lips looked a little too full, her naturally tanned skin was even tanner than the last time I saw her, and her boobs were still very much there.
Father was a little fuller in the face but he looked better than my mother. His greying hair was dyed dark black and gelled into a style that I think he was a little too old for, his hazel eyes were still hazel but they looked sadder than I remember, he had also gotten a tan on his already dark skin, and he was wearing a forest green suit to bring out my mother's eyes. She was smart enough to trick someone into complimenting her.
Adonis and Harvey search them as I slip my coat jacket off. It takes five minutes for Adonis and Harvey to discover two measly guns and my parents shoot hot glares at my bodyguards but they sit down in silence. The guns are sat onto the table.
My parents smile at me as I relax into my seat. The restaurant is unusually empty tonight and I come to the conclusion that this was my parent's doing. Mikayla and Adrian Deacon were wanted felons, they couldn't risk being caught by the American authorities.
"Mother, Father, hello."
"Hello, Francesca." My father says kindly.
"Chessy, it's marvelous to see you."
Using my nickname? This was going to be a serious conversation. My mother only used my nickname when she knew that she needed to soften the blow of what she was about to say. I called the waiter and he rushes over in seconds. "The strongest bottle of alcohol that you have."
"Right away, madam."
"Should you be drinking?" Father asks as I play with the napkin underneath the table; crumpling and smoothing it out over and over again.
"I am twenty-four years old, I drink occasionally."
"Maybe we should order something first." Mother tries to ease me into the awaiting conversation.
While my parents scan over the menu I watch them through narrowed eyes. I didn't know what this sudden meeting was about but I had a very intense feeling that I wasn't going to like it. They seemed nervous, a slight shake in my father's hands, and my mother's eyes danced around the room.
"So, how's business?"
"Business is perfectly fine." I reply to my mother curtly.
My parents nod at my answer before Father speaks, "JJ giving you a hard time? I can get him in order if you'd like."
My mind flashes to JJ Reeves and how his misogynistic sexist attitude had made my life a living hell when I first became leader of the Northern Dragons gang. I had to cut off a few of his toes before he realized that I was just as cruel and ruthless as any other leader. "I'm a big girl, Father, I don't need my daddy to come put my men in their place. I do that myself. I have everything under control."
"Good, good." Father nods before twirling a knife between his fingers.
"With your busy schedule I don't suppose you've met someone?"
"I meet plenty of people everyday, Mother."
"No," she chuckles but it doesn't sound true, "that's not what I mean. I mean have you met a significant other?"
"More significant than the girl I was just fucking an hour ago?" I say with a wry smirk.
Their shocked and mortified faces at what I just said makes me want to smile. Shocking them was always something I loved doing. I can see my mother trying to figure out how to approach this topic calmly but my father seems absolutely furious.
"What looks interesting on the menu?" I question.
"Francesca Deacon!" My father whisper yells and I shoot him a glare. "How dare you speak like that in front of your mother?"
"It's Grey, not Deacon, and I'm terribly sorry that you have to find out that your twenty-four year old daughter has sex and is not in a committed relationship."
Father seems to have steam coming from his ears as he sucks in a breath. "It's not you having sex that we mind, it's you having sex with a..."
"A woman?" I suggest as the waiter sets down a glass of alcohol. I take a sip and almost choke on how intense it tastes; it burns and tingles down my throat. "Vodka?"
"Spirytus, neat." The waiter replies.
I smile, "I haven't had vodka thus strong since Moscow...Katrina Koslov, she was almost as lively as the vodka."
Before Father can react, mother sets her hand over his and squeezes. "Have you decided what to eat, Chessy?"
I scanned the menu and came onto something. "Oh, look there's something that says, why'd you ask me to dinner smothered in this is bullshit and I have better things to do sauce. Mmm, and it's topped with you call me out of the blue after three years of zero contact, so what the fuck do you want?"
"Is it vegan?" Mother asks and I give her a deadpanned face before she sighs. "I suppose there's no reason to continue dancing around the subject."
"No, there's not." I respond.
"We were wondering if you were getting married any time soon?"
"I run a major part of the American Mafia's organization and you're asking if I have wedding plans."
"You need a husband." Father insists.
"I think you're forgetting a main part about why I don't have a husband." I lean forward. "I am a raging homosexual."
"Francesca -"
"Francesca me all you want Father, I am not marrying a man and I have no plans to get married any time in the near future. So what is this really about? I know you didn't pop up after three years to ask me about my relationship status."
"We heard some concerning things in England." Mother replies softly.
"Like what?"
"People are making alliances." Father mutters. "They are gathering for something very big and you need to secure your leadership role."
"If you're not married and you're killed, everything you've built will go to the Fraisers'. You need to have an heir."
"The Fraisers?" I scoffed. "They have their own gang shit they need to take care of. Didn't you hear about the accident?"
"Yes, but-" My parents looked at each other uneasily. "We haven't been completely honest with you."
I clench my jaw as anger and confusion settles through me. Of course there was something that they hadn't been honest with me about. How many things could these people lie to me about? It was honestly ridiculous. I prepare myself for anything that they are about to say.
"If you don't get married before your twenty-fifth birthday then the gang immediately goes to the Scar Blood gang."
"We made a deal with Scotty Fraiser when we realized that we had gotten into too much debt. We did what we had to do to survive-"
I slammed my hand onto the table. "You sold the gang!"
"It was either the gang or your life!"
"What's in the contract?" I growl out.
Mother starts pulling out files from her purse before she sets them in front of me. "Here."
The contract is thick but the important stuff is highlighted. I don't trust my parents enough to ignore the unhighlighted stuff so I read every page. I can't afford to be trusting anymore or expecting of them to be honest.
My parents make small unsure comments as I read. When I look up to them and ask for clarification over some things they answer with nervousness. I was famed for lashing out when I got pissed off; years of anger management had helped but there was a lot for me to be angry about.
When I finished and the overwhelming feeling to jump across the table and strangle the fuck out of the very people who brought me into this world became so intense I push up from the table. "You sold away my gang before I even had it!"
"Francesca, we are sorry." Father says.
I grab one of the food trays and slammed the thick plastic tray into the rows of wine glasses. The shattering noise was enough to calm me down in order to turn back to my parents and yell. "You're sorry? This was the one thing that you gave me that I actually had pride in! Now you've taken that away! This is my life! You've literally ruined my life again, I got rid of the Deacon name to make one of my own because everyone was too afraid to work with a Deacon."
With each word I found something new to break. "Stop, Francesca! Stop it!"
"Listen to us, Chessy, calm down." Mother tries to soothe me but I am angry and it takes everything in me to stop shattering things around me. I wasn't unhinged, part of the breaking stuff was to get it out of my system but it was to also scare my parents. I needed them to be terrified of me and what I was capable of doing. In the end, I was their leader before they were my parents and they needed to understand that.
"What else do you have to say?" I yell at Mother.
"We couldn't just sell the gang away, we told Scotty that if you didn't get married before your twenty-fifth birthday then we pass the gang to them. Their profits double and they succeed and we succeed. We didn't think you would excel at being Northern Dragons leader, we didn't think it would be a problem."
"You can just marry a man and you'll be fine." Father attempts to smooth over the situation.
Mother looked at me with pain in her eyes before she seemed to come up with a solution. I could see it in her eyes that an idea popped up in her head. "He didn't say that you couldn't marry a woman."
"Mikayla, don't encourage her sin!"
"Adrian you kill people for a living, we are not about to argue which sin is greater and which we should or shouldn't encourage." Mother snaps before looking back to me. "You have six months to get married. To a man or a woman."
I bite my lip as I stare at my mother in thought. She isn't wrong, if the contract doesn't exclude same sex marriage then it'll work. I can piss my dad off and keep my gang too. It was appealing and it seemed to be the only way out of this situation. Scar Blood's don't surrender easily and they don't negotiate on past agreements. There was no escaping the contract. It had been written and agreed on years ago.
Marriage? That's how I got out of the mess my parents made. I could do that. I didn't have to love whoever I married, I just had to show up with someone good enough and strong enough to ensure that I wasn't going to give my gang up.
In gangs, people got married all the time and most of the time they were either arranged or forced. By the time you're twenty-five, you're usually married to someone you didn't love but didn't hate. It didn't take time for people to get married. One day, someone could be very single and then the next day they are announcing their engagements and then a week later they were married. It wasn't out of the norm, I had been waiting for someone to ask me to absorb their little gang by offering me their son or daughter for marriage.
"I guess I have no other choice."
"No, you don't."
"Is there anything else, you've failed to tell me?" I ask my parents.
They glance at each other as if they're afraid of how I'm going to react. I know what it is, it's money. They wouldn't have come all the way here unless they needed money.
A part of me wants to look at them in disbelief. There was no way in hell even my scum parents would go through this much trouble of sneaking into America just to ask for fucking money. Another part of me, the part that had been disappointed by them again and again wasn't the least bit surprised. They were putting on a show, I should've seen through the niceties of my mother's facade. She had been the less severe parent but she always played up her understanding parent act whenever she needed something from me.
"We just need a little to get by for the next three months."
"Of fucking course."
I take out my wallet and slip a card out of the pocket before tossing it onto the table. Money was just money, I was too tired to argue with them, to threaten them, or to even give a fuck about how they were getting by all these years. My parents had had a lot of money when they left, it was probably my father's gamblings that had run their accounts dry. There was a lot of money on that card and it was under an alias so there was no way anyone could track them using that card.
"Don't come back asking for money." I finish off my drink before slamming the glass onto the table. It nearly shatters at the impact as I sucked in a breath. "If I see you again, I'll put a bullet in both of you. I still haven't forgotten what happened."
Adonis slips my jacket back onto my arms. I flip my hair over the collar before walking forward. "Thank you, Francesca."
Mother's voice is stronger now that she has the card full of thousands of dollars. Money has always been what has kept her strong and alive, more than my love. I want to squash the strength in her voice.
"This is not a favor, Mother." I seethe before an idea causes pleasure to rest over me. "Adonis, Harvey, teach my parents what being in my debt is like."
I can hear their yells of sudden pain and panic as I head for the door. The first blow went to my father, the next to my mother. I wonder if Harvey is hitting them hard enough, hitting them as hard as the man that nearly killed me five years ago. I can't help but wonder if this is enough punishment for their sins.