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Metanoia
Metanoia
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Metanoia

“Is Thomas already tired?” my brother asked, appearing in front of me with a glass of wine.

“He is full of work,” I made another cigarette puff. Thomas will obviously be busy with business, dealing with the consequences of Jensen turning a blind eye to his bar for a long time and trusting the unknown.

“You may not have fully understood this,” his courtesy evaporated on the spot. He came closer forcing me to look into his eyes, “but this is my wedding, not another deal of stealing cars.”

“You know I am not interested in something that doesn’t benefit me,” I replied measuredly, feeling family feelings and meeting, after the long-awaited separation, evaporated from thin air. We became work partners again.

“You didn’t even give her a chance to show herself,” he said calmly, but I detected echoes of concern and injustice in his words.

I exhaled the smoke from a cigarette in his face, showing my dislike for this dialogue, “She’s afraid to raise her head and tell me her name, what can we talk about?”

I didn’t like people like her. She seemed miserable to me.

“Your own mother is afraid of you, how can you expect confidence from a person who just met you?”

My face was still unshakable; in such situations, it seemed easier to gouge out my eyes with my high heels than to show emotions. Those words would hurt me if I had a mother.

“I don’t give up on words I said that evening, “I remembered every insult and threat thrown at this woman.

Conversations about Inessa and his pleas to forgive her never ended well. Like this time, so Jensen decided to change the subject:

“I want you to answer one question as honestly as possible,” he said seriously, thrusting his palms into his trouser pockets, “Thomas told me about the Empire.”

For Jensen, this night was more than just important, and like his infatuation, he wanted the rest of us to respect his wedding. Even though most of me thought his behavior tended toward childishness and sensitivity, I realized that the crush that had acted like an intoxicating gas had penetrated to his heart, like a puppeteer pulling his strings.

“Did you come to London because of my wedding or because of the casino?” stubbing out my cigarette on the stone fountain, I raised my blue eyes to his face, “Of course, Alana Wollstonecraft doesn’t think about anything other than how to steal expensive cars, kill some bad guy and make a lot of money.”

“Don’t make me angry, Jensen,” I warned in a cold tone, so that his face turned neutral in an instant, “You’re right, I have a deal here, but this appointment was made before you met your sweetheart. London is still my motherland. I came to this wedding, despite my dislike for Inessa and your fiancée. And remember, I had to take on a lot more work, including money laundering, while you were apparently handling the logistics of the fucking beer.”

“Since when you’re caring about family?” he exhaled heavily, dropping his head down. Jensen had cut his workload in three, putting all the responsibility on me.

“I don’t judge you for the wedding or your feelings for this woman, but remember that you have responsibilities to fulfil. I hope Lynette won’t interfere with your work, otherwise you’ll have to make a choice,” my voice sounded firm, not tolerating objections, my brother just nodded at all I said, looking straight into my eyes. Putting the car keys in his palm, I mentioned that it was my present for his wedding, and returned to the guests, “Happy wedding.”


The night was long, but I could not sleep at all. I opened my laptop and tried to work again, answering to all email I got and planning my deals on tomorrow. Jensen was right, I needed to visit an even related to car I was going to steal and, in addition, a meeting with insurance agency about The Empire. After working on the computer for several hours, I noticed that the time was approaching dawn, but I still did not feel like sleeping. The quick knock of the buttons while typing was already beginning to squeeze the head unpleasantly, bringing pain. Deciding to take a break, I quietly opened the door and went downstairs to the kitchen. Finding a coffee machine, I quickly made myself a bitter espresso.

“A long night,” a voice I heard a rough voice behind me, which made me turn sharply.

“Thinking about work,” I replied, walking closer to the bar, where Thomas was already sitting, arms folded, “want some coffee?” I asked, surprising my interlocutor a little. Perhaps at nights I was less aggressive than during the day.

“No, I’ve drunken already three cups,” Thomas answered modestly, “I’m trying to find who set Empire in fire.”

“How is the situation around?” I asked, biting my lip. I had to think about work while Jensen was having fun with his wife in bed.

“Everything is calm. You have nothing to worry about, Alana” my deputy nodded.

Sighing heavily, I studied Thomas’s face: his disheveled hair and heavy eyelids, which now and then wanted to close his grey eyes, indicated that the man needed rest, but his hyper-responsibility never allowed him to leave a case unfinished ─ he would not rest until the culprit was found.

“Tomorrow I’ll go to the restaurant,” I said in a cold tone, wanting to focus the deputy’s attention on my words, “I don’t like the games like this,” without saying the last word, I was interrupted by a sound indicating that the coffee is ready.

“I’ll be ready by eight,” he replied, nodding. I calculated that I had less than five hours to sleep, but the cup of espresso in my hand meant that I wouldn’t fall asleep for the next hour. On the plane I never managed to sleep a wink; before that, in Amalfi, I had slept another two hours a night, drowning out my urges with coffee and cigarettes. Sleep was a luxury I could not afford.

Having poured myself a small cup of a bitter drink, I turned around and headed upstairs, having previously warned Thomas about the necessary rest and a possible change of bodyguards for that night. However, the guy resisted, saying that the responsibility for my life lied only with him. Passing the rooms on the first floor, I noticed one door ajar. Behind it stood a new acquaintance, Dante De Rosso, whose name I remembered distinctly. His torso was naked and at night, in the moonlight, he was talking quietly and engrossedly on the phone, completely oblivious to me. Dante’s broad shoulders, powerful arms, pecs, and mountain-like biceps gave the impression of a sturdy man, but as I turned away, I noticed deep scars of various sizes on his back, which made me hold my breath. The skin, studded with long cuts and large burns, gave me genuine consternation and revulsion-the unevenness at his shoulder blades and lower back, the red and purple hues at the massive scars. Frowning, I clutched the cup harder in my hands, turning on my heels and heading back to the kitchen. I was completely uncomfortable with this state of affairs ─ an unknown man with an unknown background and a lot of unusual scars all over his back has been in close contact with my brother for months and has access to his bar’s accounting department. The deputy met me in the same place with a surprised expression on his face, apparently intimidated by my brooding.

“Thomas,” he was adjusting his weapon on his belt, “I need all information about Dante De Rosso.”

Oasis

“The Empire” is a loud and dignified name for an appropriate establishment located in one of London’s most expensive areas. During the day, as the sunlight streamed into the restaurant through the panoramic windows on the first floor, and classical music spread softly through the walls, drowning out conversations about business or new purchases, I found myself thinking that the place, with its ceiling frescoes, sculptures, marble walls and gilded, colourful furniture made by Italian craftsmen at my father’s personal request, was transformed at night, behind massive doors, into a place of lust and money. I saw people’s faces change as they touched the notes of their winnings, as they inhaled their scent, as they kissed and shook the bundle in front of everyone. The stuffiness of the closed and dark windowless room, the clouds of cigar smoke on the ceiling, the ashes on the blood red gambling table – these people were different from the visitors who came in during the day, these were real lunatics with the urge to inflict pain and intimidation; here they became slaves to their own desires and vices, martyrs of their own world of immorality and misery, an endless escape from the meaninglessness of existence to the inner destruction of colossal loss.

My father had to make a name for himself from scratch when his once influential Neapolitan family was reduced in an instant to a handful of ashes, worthless. It was the restaurant that became an oasis for people like him – immigrants forced to leave their homeland to escape the police and endless persecution, heartbroken, clad in cold-blooded masculine faces, desperate to recapture their childhood. Here they were young men, arguing loudly, hurling insults (some even with chairs and money), drinking, freeing their minds from the cage of everyday dullness in which they were strict dictators, eliminating their enemies, punishing their subordinates and beating their wives. Their true selves were revealed, where in a world full of death, all they cared about was how to make money out of it. If the blood on their hands were imprinted on the surface of the furniture they touched, my restaurant would become the epitome of an infected soldier’s wound on the battlefield.

The Empire also became my oasis. As a child, I had little idea that one day I would run what I thought would be a powerful restaurant, but as time went on, and my interests shifted more and more towards my father’s business, my desires collided with the reality that no matter how much I proved my worth by going to the lair of the worst criminals, no matter how much I proved my effectiveness as a leader by organising magnificent car thefts, I was still a woman. By inheriting The Empire, I permanently cemented my name in the mouths of the disgruntled men who still insisted that I had made a grave mistake in preferring the cold weapons to the warm bed of my husband, as well as the women who clearly condemned my desire to bring my death closer. But I knew that I had begun to end the mindless reign of cruel men who equated their daughters with a bargaining chip – it took me to become as cold as the ice their wives applied to their bruised faces.

In defiance of the law, my father, Robert Wollstonecraft, set up a restaurant where he ran unofficial games (often poker). It was a kind of protest against the legal system that had banned him from his home country for many years. In the beginning there were only three gambling rooms, discreetly located on the first and second floors, opening their doors only late at night; his father used to boast that half the British government sat at the gambling tables, confirming his theory about the relativism of justice that had caught up with him as a child. In the short time I have been running the restaurant, I have added two more rooms in the basement.

The sharp nose of my black heels was stained with ash, which lay in small piles on the hard pavement – neither the icy wind that blasted my cheeks and tangled my hair, nor the morning rain had carried away the remains of the fire. Thomas told me of two completely burnt out gambling halls that would take at least a month and a half to rebuild – forty-five days that promised constant losses and an endless stream of nightly customers to the remaining three rooms.

“He was not joking this time,” I said, standing on a burnt desk. Attempts to identify the culprit always ended in incredible failure, it seemed he was slipping through my fingers. His method of operation was too crude, perhaps even sloppy and revealing, though I was confused by the marked difference between the two arsons – a toilet cubicle (as a warning) and two poker rooms (as punishment). Whoever he was, he knew exactly how to bypass the restaurant’s security system and exactly where the entrances to the hidden rooms were.

“How much did we lose?” Jensen asked, frowning and shoving his hands into his pockets. I was surprised by his encouragement to spend the first morning of his married life in the company of a restaurant he hated – the sudden decision to join me on an early trip into central London, though motivated by guilt over yesterday’s dialogue, was still the starting point for his return to the routine of work, which meant the extra responsibility and stress of working overtime was off my shoulders. Jensen was not only the owner of the Shoreditch bar, passionate about business development and keeping the inflated customer numbers in check, but he was also responsible for the digital security of my entire estate – from The Empire to the entire province of Salerno.

“Millions,” I replied, pulling from the pocket of my straight black trousers a silver cigarette case with a hand-engraved W after my surname (it was a gift from an old Neapolitan man who had a fierce desire for a Mercedes-Benz W198 in his wealthy garage, which is why he turned to me). The heavy nicotine pierced my lungs with a sharp pain, immediately hitting my head and relaxing me; blinking slowly, I exhaled the acrid smoke into the sky, where it mixed with the frosty morning air. There was a terrible rumble on the street that pressed against my temples, passers-by hurried, stumbled and ran red lights – they all had ordinary lives filled with routine: work, university, home, family, children, they had stress and worry, joy and momentary happiness – all the things I was deprived of. Growing up in an illegal world, my life from childhood was fraught with the risk of death – blackmailing and threatening my father was best dealt with by kidnapping his children – except that these people had no idea that a passing bus could be booby-trapped and an SUV stopped at a traffic light could be packed with thugs rolling down their tinted windows and shooting at anything that moved; most likely their lives had meaning, their existence was not aimless – or so they thought.

I took another deep puff of cigarette smoke, lowered my eyes and tried to shake the traces of ash from my patent shoes. I really didn’t care about the money that would be spent on renovating the two gaming rooms – last month’s (not very profitable) casino turnover reached a billion pounds, of which only a fraction went into the players’ pockets as winnings, the rest belonged to the casino itself; truth be told, most of the turnover was reckless betting by angry men, so I have to give them credit – only people like them could win hundreds of thousands and lose tens of millions, making me richer. Except that the time it would take to rebuild the rooms was very different from what I could afford – the reduced playing space meant fewer potential customers and therefore less profit; disgruntled players were the worst people I had ever worked with (not even Antonio’s lavish compliments annoyed me that much), because if they were disappointed, my reputation would suffer and they would not want to come back.

“Bad news,” he sighed heavily and touched his hair. I bit the inside of my cheek, trying to hide the anger inside me. I took a deep breath of cigarette smoke and raised my head to the sky. It was bright and clean, which was more than I could say for my head, I slept for several hours, drank a few cups of espresso.

I buried my fingers in my long dark hair. My gentle glance in his direction was enough to let me know that Jensen was indeed involved in the problem, even if this abrupt plunge might have felt like a bucket of ice water being poured over his head. My brother’s stern face with its brooding blue eyes did nothing to break his relaxed mood, judging by his slumped shoulders, the unbuttoned top buttons of his white shirt (he’d left his jacket in the car, still pretending that the wind blowing all around his body was no colder than the flames of a fire), his legs spread wide. I took a puff from my almost new cigarette, suppressed a gust of anger and threw it to the floor, stomping on it with my right foot – such bad news is made worse by the lack of sleep: the cup of espresso only intensified the intrusive thoughts of Dante De Rosso’s scars, leaving me with a measly three hours of restless sleep, which felt like torture in the form of a stabbing headache in my temples and dry eyes the next morning.

Frowning, I turned to Thomas, “Did the arsonist leave a trail?”

He shook his head thoughtfully, “Nothing yet.”

I cursed and kicked a charred piece of wood with my heel. I had to close my eyes and breathe heavily to dampen the outburst of anger that had become a veil before my eyes.

“We’re looking, Alana,” Thomas assured me, still standing a few metres from the main entrance to the restaurant. He didn’t take his eyes off the smoky black streaks on the stone walls outside, constantly shifting from foot to foot. The Empire was one of the last businesses my deputy handled, as I preferred to handle the restaurant myself, long and painstakingly; it wasn’t my first big business, as before the casino I’d successfully handled car theft and managed to get my place in Salerno, but it was the Empire that was the forbidden fruit I’d been fighting for most of my adult life; I’d been fighting to inherit it to prove that gender had no effect on brain size. Jensen pursed his lips and lowered his head.

“I’m going to burn that bastard alive,” I replied rudely.

“You don’t even know who did it,” the brother sighed deeply, rubbing his eyelids with his fingers, “this man is clearly not going to give us a quiet life.”

His words amused me. A life full of death, suffering and pain, the heartbreaking cries of mothers who have lost their sons in a bloody shoot-out, the tears of stolen children, bags of dirty money, cannot be peaceful a priori. I have often wondered if I would find peace after death, because long reflection has always led me to the necessity and inevitability of eternal sleep. The possibility of finding peace was illusory and utopian in my mind, which is why it seemed so attractive. In fact, the morbidity of birth and death frightened me with its meaninglessness; an existence of suffering ceased to be felt as such and was transformed into a routine, a beginning and an end to the cycle called life, an aimless wandering through my own mind in an attempt to find meaning and value. In recent years I have stopped believing in rest – I can’t remember if I ever felt it. Fighting all my life for recognition, forcing my name down the throat of every disgruntled person, I have lost the meaning of my existence. Each day, filled with confrontation with the conservative entrenchments of the mob, so exhausted me that there was no better desire than to turn into a transparent haze that vanished into thin air in the blink of an eye. Faced with powerful and dangerous people who continued to impose their will, they lost their meaning in my eyes; they no longer seemed like unquestionable authorities, and the traditions they had so carefully guarded no longer made sense. But it was as if I was on their side, continuing to prove my worth in this world, until I realised that I could not convince everyone, and so I would continue my pointless struggle until I disappeared completely.

“The quiet life is a myth,” I told Jensen, looking over my shoulder at his face. For my brother, my words had a completely different meaning. He was now responsible not only for himself, but also for his wife, who didn’t even know that from today her life was in constant danger, and Jensen, who didn’t want to tell Lynette about the business, was doing everything he could to keep her out of it.

Every time I looked at the Empire, I felt a sharp tingle in my heart: although the outside of the building showed traces of fire in the stone, I didn’t dare go inside; I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw, and I preferred to stay in the dark – the frescoes and bas-reliefs might have suffered, the Italian furniture certainly. My father’s legacy had been burnt, and all I had to do was replace the objects that would no longer contain a particle of him. There were no more bright signs of the gourmet kitchen that hid the gambling dens where London’s rich could try their luck. I was both pleased and puzzled by the fact that the restaurant was virtually undamaged (the fire from the gambling rooms had spread to the curtains and tablecloths among the guests, leaving traces of ash on the window), as the arsonist clearly knew where the hidden rooms were. The room itself was unusually large, occupying two floors, and under the guise of a gourmet kitchen in Baroque style, but hidden from view, the greatest poker games were held in five rooms: two on the first floor (which burned down), one on the ground floor and two more, the most massive, in the basement. In this way I was able to organise all five underground games, undetected not only by the guests but also by the police. In order to legalise the income from the casino, I combined it with other sources of income and distributed it according to ownership: some went to the restaurant’s accounts department under the headings of internal or visitor, another part went to Jensen’s Bar in the same way, the remaining money continued to exist in Salerno. Suddenly I remembered an email from the insurance agent I’d been looking at that night – as I’d unofficially assumed, they wouldn’t pay for the restaurant’s repairs unless I gave them financial compensation (a bribe) for keeping the details of the affected rooms secret. Trying to control my anger, I slowly clenched and unclenched the fist of my right hand, breathing heavily. It seems I need to remind the insurance company what ‘keeping secrets’ really means.

“I don’t think we should go back to Amalfi until things have calmed down,” Thomas said thoughtfully, coming closer. Jensen raised his eyebrows in surprise as I exhaled quietly, resisting the urge to yawn. It was getting harder and harder to work when you keep forgetting to sleep.

“I can run the restaurant, and you can go back to Salerno,” Jensen suggested, and at first I liked his idea, and ready to agree, I opened my mouth before thinking. I had a lot of business piled up in Italy, and would probably have more problems after Antonio, but my brother’s motives weren’t driven by selfless help, but by a desire to continue his modest life in London, rejecting the fact that he was involved in illegal business.

“No,” I said softly, forcing myself to keep my eyelids open, “I need your help in Amalfi,” Jensen had informed me a few weeks ago of the need to analyse the software that maintained the digital security of not only my personal accounts, but the finances of all the companies I owned, as he had noticed an attempted hack by an unknown party, “I have a meeting tonight, we return to Salerno tomorrow afternoon. No need to stay here for long,” I scowled at the ashes – — it would be better if other people took care of the repairs and restored all the rooms.

Despite the defiant displeasure in his eyes that stubbornly burned through my skin, the man nodded in agreement, hiding his hands in his trouser pockets. As much as he wanted to stay in this little idyll with his new-found wife, Jensen’s father’s honour would not allow him to break his promise.

“I’m not going alone, Alana,” his voice sounded harsh and hard, in contrast to his soft, heavenly gaze. I lowered my eyes thoughtfully.

It was to be expected – falling in love can act on the mind like a poison, slowly disarming. The trip to Salerno could be a long one, and the last thing Jensen wanted after the wedding was to leave his wife in another country for an indefinite period of time.

“Lynette isn’t a threat until she finds out about our business,” I warned slowly, blinking. Sooner or later the girl would find out about all the criminality that permeated our family, but inwardly I hoped she would escape before that moment came.

Jensen nodded again and exhales heavily.

“You have a responsibility, Jensen,” I reminded him, stepping closer and putting a hand on his shoulder, “you’re not just the husband now, you’re the bar owner and digital security manager. Get back to your duties.”

The man nodded, pursing his lips. I could understand his feelings now: Lynette had given him hope of a quiet life without guns and fights, where he was a simple bar owner and she a student. Now, after six months of blissful happiness, it’s hard for Jensen to come back to reality. He needs time to adjust.

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