Cerita Pendek Independence Mafia & Novel Bullying

I’d been through seven foster homes. Before each one sent me away, they stopped answering my questions, stopped looking at me, and let the house grow silent. I couldn’t stand that kind of silence. So I became someone who talked too much. When my biological mother finally brought me into the powerful Moretti family at seventeen, I tried even harder to make people like me. Within one day, I knew the guards’ birthdays, the school nurse’s favorite podcast, and where my classmates kept their emergency medication. My stepsister Bianca called it manipulation. My stepbrother Luca called it an addiction to attention. To cure me, he ordered my entire school and family not to speak to me for seventy-two hours. My calls were blocked. My messages were quarantined. Even my mother promised not to answer. Then I had an accident. Bianca secretly switched the trail marker on my backpack, sending me down an abandoned path by mistake. I fell forty-five feet into a flooded smuggling tunnel, my leg shattered beneath a slab of concrete. I called everyone I knew. Ninety-nine times. No one answered. Before I closed my eyes, I sent one last voice message. “I’m sorry. I know I talk too much. But don’t worry. I won’t bother you anymore.”

I caught my fiancé, Nico Falcone, in bed with my own cousin, Bianca Rossi. Right before our wedding. When I confronted him, he just called the whole thing off and ran me out of New York. I didn’t see him again for five years. Then came the charity gala for the New York Families. There he was. Nico. He pulled me aside, saying he felt bad for the state I was in. He offered to make me his mistress. I told him to go to hell. He got ugly. The whole room was laughing. Whispering how an outcast like me had no business showing my face in New York. I clenched my fists, the sound of their mockery ringing in my ears. Just then, the entire ballroom went dead silent. Every head bowed in respect. Don Lucas, the most feared man in New York, was walking slowly toward us. He stopped right in front of me. With the whole room watching, he dropped to one knee. He took my hand—the one Nico had squeezed red—and kissed it. His voice was dangerously low. “Who hurt my future wife?”

I went to surprise my fiancé, Dante Rossi, in my wheelchair. But just as I reached his door, my phone rang. The caller was me, ten years in the future. "Don't go in. He's in there with another woman." "No way." She read back the text I had just typed and deleted. "If I could still dance, would you come home earlier?" My hand jerked. I hadn't sent those words to anyone. I lost my legs saving him, and I would never dance ballet again. The day of my amputation, Dante, a Boston mafia Don, knelt beside my hospital bed in tears and begged me to marry him. He swore that whenever I was in pain, he would be right there with me. He loves me. How could he change? But the woman on the phone started to cry. "Last night, I fell in the bathroom. When I called him, all he said was, 'Erin, how much longer are you going to make me feel guilty about your legs?'" I gripped the armrest. "And then what?" "I apologized. I begged him not to be mad." I stared at the empty fabric hanging where my legs used to be. I'm the one who fell. I'm the one who got hurt. So why am I the one saying sorry? Just then, Dante texted me, "Still busy. Be good and don't wait up." Through the glass wall of the shooting range, I watched him put his phone away. Then he leaned down and kissed the woman in his arms. She turned her head, and I forgot how to breathe. How can it be her?