Heirs of La Mafia

I Prologue

Twenty-five years flew by if you had fun, and Bianey and her fratelli, Silvan, Matteo, and Livio, certainly had. A tremendous amount had happened, but fortunately not as dramatically as the years between Bianey’s sixteenth birthday and the spring of her twenty-fourth year. Only new business partners or buyers of their products who tried to swindle them, but that was part of the mafia; after all, they were dealing with criminal activities, and with that came the risks.

Several marriages had been contracted. Joshi and Enzo, although for Joshi that wasn’t strictly needed. Bianey’s cousin Reth had married Valentina when she became pregnant following a bad case of the flu, and Kingston, the new heir to the Agire family, was born in California. Bianey’s cousin April was married to Francois, the Californian champagne farmer, and had also had a son and a daughter, Mathieu and Delphine; and her other cousin June was married to Virgil and blessed with a daughter, Hope, and a son, Judd. For Virgil, it had taken a very long time before June finally gave in and said yes. “I said it!” Bianey had cheered when the two announced their relationship.

Sean had sensed it correctly when he met Fabiola in Brussels. Another thing they had Piemonte to thank for. They were blessed with three children. Two girls, Myke and Maryam, and a boy, Mylan. Triplets; not very practical to let their names start with the same letter, nice though, but they had started their middle names with different letters to avoid confusion.

Not long after their marriage, Fabiola had received a letter from her father, via a notary. A confession and a plea for forgiveness that he was never there for her and her mother.

If you receive this letter, I am dead. My mistakes have caught up with me. I made a deal with the wrong people and couldn’t stick to it. I managed to avoid it for years, but now it is over. I wish I could do it over, I am sorry that I couldn’t be the father you needed, but know that I have never forgotten you. Tell the Riccis that I am sorry.

’Till we meet again, Cara.

Dad.

With those last words, she burst into tears. Fortunately, Sean was with her and she had huddled close to him. Her father still remembered that they had watched that movie together once. She was actually still too young for it, but she had sat on her mother’s lap, half-dozing. It had also surprised her that he knew she was in contact with the Riccis. He had indeed never forgotten her.

Sean and Fabiola immediately went to the Riccis with the letter, so they could let it go a little. Ciro would have liked to put an end to him himself, but this sufficed too.

So everyone was married or living together and had had children, except for Sophia and Git and Devane and Yuki. Neither couple was married and they had any children. They were happy together just the way they were and didn’t need a piece of paper to confirm that. The four of them adored the children of their friends and family and regularly offered to babysit them.

A big surprise for Bianey herself was that she was so fond of the children they had adopted from their Dutch friends that the need arose to experience it herself with her fratelli, and her heart was big enough for another child.

Lenthe and the twins Dez and Paz were sweet children. They felt like their own very quickly, and her fratelli were, if possible, even crazier than she was about their tesori. Lenthe was sweet and sometimes a little too serious and caring towards her active brothers. Not surprising, as she had unknowingly gone through a great deal in the first two years of her life.

After they were adopted by the Ricci’s, their grandfather slowly started to get a little healthier, and they were able to stay with them in Spain occasionally again. Until five years later, Grandpa Dion’s health deteriorated and he passed away. It had a major impact on the children. In consultation with her parents and her fratelli, they had asked Grandma Roos—as Rozemarijn was called by the children—to come and live with them so that she could be more involved with her grandchildren. After she had discussed this with her friends Marcel, Julio, Ton, Peter, and Franka, and had handed matters completely over to them, she had packed her belongings and moved into an apartment in the large house that they had converted into two bedrooms for her. The children still kept in touch with their pseudo-uncles and aunt, and they had kept the Spanish and Dutch languages ​​alive. Rozemarijn had been able to enjoy this for a number of years until she left to be with her dear Dion.

Grandma Kate and Grandpa Dominique had also left this earth a few years later. It had plunged the entire family into deep mourning when two loved ones died in such quick succession. It took a while for them to pull themselves together, but there was so much to be grateful for, especially because they had been allowed to keep them with them for so long.

Two years after she had adopted the three children, Bianey had a surprise for her fratelli. Things had been quiet for quite some time, apart from minor incidents, but they had handled that together with the soldati, which gave Bianey the courage to try to get pregnant. She had enjoyed the two little boys so much when they were not even a year old and her fratelli had proven themselves to be true fathers; she was aware that she was in a privileged position, taking care of three children with the four of them. But they were suddenly there; it was not as if she started with one at a time. And in the beginning, when they came to stay, they had had few toys or playpens and the like, but that meant they spent a lot of time with them.

She wanted to give her fratelli that experience of a newborn baby too, and had surprised them on the celebration of their wedding anniversary—also the second anniversary of the day the three children had come to live with them—by asking if they would like it if they tried for a fourth child. They had misunderstood her. Her fratelli initially thought she meant she wanted to adopt. They could not imagine that Bianey had abandoned her conviction.

She got her part when she had made it clear that she wanted to try to get pregnant. The fratelli had taken turns spinning her around until she begged them to put her down, lest they want her to throw up.

It had taken a while, but there was their second daughter. Her name was a combination of her dads’: Simali Ricci was born. As soon as Silvan held her in his arms, he noticed that her hair was the color of cinnamon, and she still had a full head of curly hair in a rich cinnamon hue. Since then, their pet name for her was piccola cannella, the Italian translation for little cinnamon.

Dion had just managed to witness it, and the many grandparents were over the moon with the little girl for being able to experience that.

The four children grew up together and were very close. Lenthe was still incredibly protective; it had gotten even worse when Simali was born, and eventually, Livio took her to a therapist. The girl was too protective for a six-year-old, too afraid of loss, and the four of them agreed that they had to address this as soon as possible so that she could spend the rest of her childhood carefree.

As was customary in their famiglia, the children were playfully prepared for a life as leaders of the Mafia famiglia. In addition to the therapy, this had helped Lenthe to trust herself more, and enabled her brothers and sister to take care of themselves as well. They did teach them that they had to support each other and could trust one another in a healthy way. They grew up with Enzo and Joshi’s son, Hiroki—who had inherited both parents’ talent for protecting and hacking—preped as leaders in a relaxed manner so that they could still be children.

During holidays, they were regularly allowed to stay in America and Antwerp, where they learned other techniques from Yuki and Devane and from Brad, Ashley, and Sean, just as much as Bianey had at the time, together with their cousins ​​and Sean’s three children, with whom Simali got along particularly well because they were her age.

The four had just returned from America, where Yuki had taught them to be aware of their surroundings without being able to see anything, and where they had trained with Kingston, Hope, Judd, and Mathieu. Delphine was still a bit too young and wasn’t interested in it. She preferred horseback riding.

Thanks to Delphine and her father Francois, the four had also learned to ride horses. Their mother had also always ridden horses, but because their stable boy had suddenly ‘disappeared’, they had not acquired any more horses after the horses had died—which had devastated Bianey at the time. Simali was a real horse fanatic, and Rozemarijn had given all four of them a horse just before her death. In consultation, of course, because the old stable in the woods behind their barn had to be renovated first.

Enzo’s son could not come along this summer because he had been invited by his grandparents in Japan, and now they were teaching him what they had learned from Yuki in America.

Lenthe tried very hard to show that she had learned a great deal; she was secretly in love with Hiroki, who was four years younger. She felt that he didn’t look like a sixteen-year-old at all, nor did he act like one. He was tough, had inherited his mother’s black hair and his father’s olive-colored skin. His eyes were a light brown color, completely contrasting with the black hair. She thought he was handsome. He was already very muscular and tall, and also very smart, and would eventually take over his father’s role in the famiglia: protecting the Ricci’s.

It would hurt her deeply if he joined the army in two years, just like her brothers who had just turned eighteen. She understood. They wanted to do something outside the famiglia before they dedicated themselves to working in the Ricci famiglia. After passing all kinds of tests, they had been accepted into the Italian army and would become soldati after the summer. Their mom struggled with it; she was proud, but also found it scary. She considered the army dangerous. As if the mafia life was safe. After all, they regularly had shootouts in the middle of the night during transfers.

Their dads were proud and understood her fratelli’s motives: they wanted to live on the right side of the law instead of the unclear border their famiglia was currently walking.

Hiroki wouldn’t be able to enlist for another two years, but she already saw him so little because she was studying in Antwerp. Her mother had studied there too, and she felt the need to broaden her horizons. Plus, this way she could speak Dutch a bit more again; they spoke English regularly, Italian all day long, but Spanish was diminishing, only when she called her grandparents’ friends and associates in Spain—what they called soldati in the Italian mafia. They were getting older too, approaching sixty, and she tried to call them more and more often. She really wanted to honor her deceased biological father by continuing to speak Spanish, which she did mostly with Julio, one of her grandparents’ friends.

But now they were sparring: Lenthe, Dez and Paz, Simali and Hiroki. It was hot, and beads of sweat ran down their faces. Lenthe wanted to become just as good as her mother. She beat everyone. The problem was that all five of them received the same training, and the boys had the advantage over the girls in terms of strength. And she was reminded of this again when Hiroki swung her onto her back. The air was squeezed out of her lungs, but she managed to pull him along with her. He was fast, too—luckily this time—because that allowed him to catch himself. She gasped in with a jolt of shock, and he looked at her with a grin. His golden-brown eyes looked with a mischievous boyish gaze into her innocent sea-blue. His gaze slid to her mouth, and it seemed as if his head bowed slightly toward her. Did he want to kiss her? He wanted to kiss her! Merda. Her eyes widened even more and her cheeks began to glow.

“Hey you lazybones, don’t stay lying there, give her a kiss, Hiro and help her up,” Paz called out teasingly.

“Hmm, maybe I should do that,” he mumbled. He was about to put his words into action when they heard Enzo clapping his hands.

“Come here, everyone. I just heard that your dads fired up the barbecue because they missed you. Grandpas and grandmas are coming too. You look a mess, so hurry up. Take a shower.”

Hiroki jumped up quickly now and held out his hand, which she quickly grabbed, and he pulled her to her feet. He really had his father’s build and now towered over her. “Maybe later, fiordaliso, little cornflower,” he said before pressing a kiss on her cheek.

This was the only kiss she had received, except for the one on her birthday.

The day came when the twins left for the army. Simali was devastated. Bianey was too, but she handled it better than her daughter. Little did she know it would take eight years before they came home. “Piccola Cannella, it’s not forever,” Dez comforted her. He had lifted her up. Despite being fourteen, she was slender and far from fully grown. Especially compared to the twins’ Dutch height, she was still a little girl and light as a feather.

“You’ll see us during the holidays if it’s allowed,” said Paz, wiping her messy hair from her tear-stained cheeks.

“You won’t miss us, you’re too busy with the horses, because you have to ride ours too, promise me that, that you’ll take care of ours, because they have to miss us too,” said Dez.

“Then don’t go,” cried Simali, “there are so many who are going to miss you.”

“We have to, Cannella, we have to, in our minds, set the balance right.”

“Doesn’t Mom already do that as much as possible?

“We know, but,” Paz and Dez sighed and looked at their parents for help.

“Come on, sweetie, your fratelli need this, and what they learn is going to help us later too.”

“Hmph. I think it’s nonsense,” she grumbled angrily.

Dez ran his fingers through her curls. He was glad she wasn’t sad anymore. He could handle anger.

“Come, give us one more hug. We’ll call as often as we can.” She wrapped her arms tightly around both of them, and Dez lowered her to the floor. Afterward, they said goodbye to their parents and the rest of the famiglia.

In the beginning, when they were still in training, they saw them regularly, but when they were deployed, in the same year Hiroki joined the army, things became much quieter. They knew the twins were carrying out secret missions, and they had come home once, but Simali was in America at the time.

Lenthe missed them terribly too, especially when Hiroki left as well and went on a mission. They knew they were on the same team. But that was all. They tried not to think about it, and Simali and Lenthe grew even closer than they already were. During their studies, they both began becoming increasingly involved in their family business during their holidays, and after graduating from school at twenty-one, they worked full-time with their dads and mom—Lenthe for six years now.

Simali often went out onto the streets with their dads to learn how Silvan handled transfers and brought in or sold business together with Matteo. Matteo trained the soldati together with Bianey and scheduled the rosters in consultation with Silvan, while Lenthe was her mother’s right hand in the illegal business, the payments, and the exotic dancers of the nightclub, with Livio overseeing the legal and illegal casinos as well; together they managed their diner, Da Ricci. And, of course, the joint trade in Californian champagne that they still conducted with their American family was thriving and continued to expand and all other trades they could get. In the rare moments Bianey had with her mother, they still made jewelry from the gold to launder their black money. At the same time, they taught her daughters the trade as well.

The grandparents traveled frequently with their great-uncle Noah and great-aunt Mae. They remained involved and returned regularly whenever Bianey, her fratelli and their children wanted to go on vacation. For they maintained the tradition that had been introduced years ago, ensuring that life did not revolve solely around work, especially since they wanted to enjoy their children.

The twenty-five years had flown by.