Divorcing Her Mafia Family
Epilogue

Monday morning Dimi watched on the security cam Miklos walked into his offices and headed to the office space he’d set up for the girls. They were using it until the building they’d purchased was ready. Magda and Darya were both working on their parts of the project. Sienna was working on lecture she was going to deliver the following week and they were all quiet and engrossed in their tasks.

Dimi was missing Miklos. His support following her emotional meeting with her father on Saturday had made them even closer. She had lost her cool with Vasili and asked him how he could have expected her to love as he did, with a man who didn’t desire her the way her mother had not wanted him. He didn’t like her mother had spilled secrets and then got angry at her, gaslighting as a mafia boss would but she had held fast. Eventually he argued he just knew deep down, as a father did, Miklos was the right man for her and he couldn’t explain any other reason than it had been gut and parental instinct. She’d demanded he apologized and then he had surprised her by falling to his knees in front of her chair, begging her forgiveness and promising to do better for her. Seeing her dad act so vulnerable had made her heart ache. When he’d left she had cried in Miklos arms for hours.

She had been watching the cameras because it was unlike him to be late to the offices and he’d been reserved after exiting his home office. He had left the house ahead of her with only a quick k**s to the lips and was gone. He was definitely distracted.

He knocked on the open door, “am I interrupting?”

“No, not at all. We’re just plugging away.”

He gave a nod. “Do you think you could take a break for a bit?”

“Is something wrong?”

“Yes, maybe? I’m hoping not.” He gave confusing answers to her question.

“The mighty Miklos head of the Lykiaos Laskaris family sure is succinct,” Darya mocked him.

“Keep it up, Pappas,” he pointed at her. “My best friend has been pissed off at me since Friday night when I allowed you to take my motorcycle home. I will give him the address of the new office building and your new condo.”

“Your Ducati was a sweet ride, and I will thank you for not giving him my address. I will bow down to your leadership oh mighty mafia lord.”

He looked to Dimi, “I can’t imagine for the life of me how it is you two get along so well.”

She giggled as she took his arm and pulled him out of the office before, they got into another heated argument.

He tucked her hand into his elbow and escorted her out of the building and into a waiting car.

“Where are we going?”

“Warehouse,” he answered cryptically.

“Miklos, it’s been two days and already I have to go to a warehouse?”

“This is a bit of a unique situation.” He looked quite uncomfortable.

“What is going on?”

“I had called in a favor with a family, an Italian one, in New York.”

“Jesus, why?” she made wide eyes at him.

“At the bequest of our fathers actually,” he shrugged in his suit jacket and then frowned as she slid along the bench of the SUV. He leaned sideways and secured her seatbelt. “You need to wear this in the cars. Occasionally we have to drive faster. When you drive your car, you wear it. In this car you wear it.”

“I know. I forgot. You’re changing topics like it’s a stall tactic. You seem nervous and it’s freaking me out.” She reached for his hand and held it between hers, her brown eyes searching his. “What is going on?”

“Your father and Giorgio felt strongly the man who fingered you to the FBI in the first place needed to be dealt with.”

“Oh f**k,” she closed her eyes. “You sent the Italians after Bryce?”

“I have a good friend in New York. In fact, I stayed at his mansion when I was hiding from Wren back in January.”

“You asked your friend to do what exactly?”

“Your father wanted him to understand he messed with the wrong woman and while we were remiss in our responses back then, we wanted him to understand future situations would not be as easily dealt with as you had.”

“What happened?”

“The guys were supposed to just talk with him. Pick him up. Take him to a warehouse. Mess with his equipment and rough him up a little bit but make him know any further attempts to communicate with you or implicate you in criminal activity would result in the loss of his life.”

“Did they kill him?”

“Not quite.”

“He’s only partly dead?”

“No, instead of roughing him up they,” he scratched his head, “they brought him here.”

“Here? Bryce Purcell is in our holding unit?” Dimi closed her eyes and swallowed the lump in her throat.

“Dimitra, I’m sorry. Your father had given me instruction even before I left for Puerto Vallarta. I gave explicit instructions but then I left and told my friend to call my father with any updates. He called Giorgio who had Vasili with him.”

“F**k.” She rubbed her forehead.

“Things got confused because your father had wanted our men to deal with it. I had your voice in the back of my head telling me he is connected and the first place they will look is us, so I wanted the distance. I didn’t appropriately explain myself to your father before I left and now, Bryce Purcell is in our holding unit delivered by way of a very small crate they shoved him in, in an airplane cargo hold. Nobody has told him who we are or why he is here.”

She blinked, “they put him in a crate?”

“A dog crate. My friend Sergio took offense at Bryce’s big mouth apparently and told him if he wanted to continue barking like a dog, he would treat him like one.”

She couldn’t help it and she giggled. “Bryce, skinny, scrawny wimpy Bryce got shoved into a dog crate?”

Miklos shook his head, “he was not what I was expecting.”

“Really?”

“His voice from the phone did not match the body. You also gave a description of him being a beast.” He made a reference to the morning he learned of the man.

“You don’t need to be built like Miklos Laskaris to be a beast in bed.” She rolled her eyes. “He went for nearly two hours straight of railing this poor girl, choking her out until she passed out, bringing her back and then doing it all over again. She loved it by the way. Said she’d marry him if he weren’t such an a*****e.”

“He is absolutely an a*****e. Three minutes just watching him through the glass, and I wanted to beat him to death with a computer mouse.”

“I frequently considered using the arm of his tortoise-shell glasses and jabbing it into his jugular and watching him bleed out. It was a good fantasy.”

“Did you get off to it?” Miklos frowned at her.

“At him dying? No. I’m sick but not that sick.”

“You’re not sick. I told you before, we’re exceptional, my love.”

“This isn’t good, Miklos, we can’t just kidnap every enemy we make and torture them.”

“He deliberately fingered you.”

“I set him up!” she argued.

“Because he stole your work.”

“After I humiliated him in front of hundreds of people.”

“Define humiliate?”

“He’d asked me out a couple of times and I said I wasn’t interested.”

“You could have said you were married.”

“I could have said I was the Pope, and it would have been equally truthful,” she retorted smartly and watched him agree begrudgingly with a nod. “We went to a party to celebrate midterms being finished and he thought I would be impressed with a grand gesture,” she grimaced, “instead of the note he passed me in the library or sending me a latte to my room. The cup with the latte he had ordered special and looked like a Starbucks cup where the little boxes are on the side but instead of listing the drink it said, will you go out with me, yes or no. “

“Now I see why he pays to get laid.”

“Right?” she threw her hands in the air. “Anyway, in front of hundreds of people he stood on a balcony overlooking the lower floor and had gotten dressed up in a tuxedo and had a bunch of flowers and a megaphone. He had a megaphone, Miklos. Here I was eighteen, my first year of university and this weirdo singled me out in front of what felt like the entire school and recited Last Sonnet by Keats and then asked me to be his girl.”

“No,” he put his hand over his mouth in horror. “He did not. What did you do?”

“Funny story,” she scratched her temple, “one day before that in the library Sienna came across this book about rejecting lovers in the Victorian era and there was this poem which basically mocked tall skinny people. It was literally called To a Tall Thin Person. I’d had a half pint of vodka and I stood there surrounded by all these people who were stunned silent at what had just happened and so I recited it.”

She watched as he immediately pulled his phone out to replace the poem via the internet. She shook her head in embarrassment.

He recited the second verse aloud, “When first your tall gaunt form I saw, With face like any mourner, I thought you were the shadow Of some person round the corner.” He chuckled with glee, “this is cruel! You recited this to him?”

“Yes, and he got the nickname Lampy for it.”

Miklos was roaring with laughter. “Dimitra! You are terrible. No wonder he stole your project.”

“He stole my project and now makes six figures off it.” She grumbled, “didn’t even bother to try to hide it. Bastard.”

“Well, your father has him in holding. He wants you to discuss with Bryce the ramifications of f*****g with a Lykiaos. Your father feels this is four years in the making and the fact he does choking s*x games with girls he names Dimi makes me inclined to agree with your father. This guy doesn’t take you seriously and he’s f*****g with you. You need to put him in his place as you did Ben.”

She shook her head and looked out the window, “I can’t.”

“You can’t or you won’t.”

“Miklos,” she whispered quietly, “I’ll kill him. I have purposefully not been alone with him a single time since the day he stole my program out of fear I’ll kill him. I had to present a back-up project I was working on for fun as my school assignment. I still got a decent grade, but he stole my work, made it his and,” she took a breath, “made it appear I was the one who stole his idea. I was young and naïve and never thought anyone would do such a thing in a school as prestigious as ours. The girls caught me with a gun. I was going to shoot him. They took my gun, and I found a knife. For months I plotted his demise. They told me to wait and just get him back. So, I did. He was still using my program at his job working for the feds. He’d gotten hired to do testing of their security systems. I was able to backdoor into my program, and then I got into the FBI mainframe. I found a list of names which I didn’t pay much attention to and saved it to a file on his personal computer. I was purposefully sloppy, and he was caught within minutes. I pulled everything out, including the list because they knew it had been at the very least seen by him. They showed up guns blazing. The girls and I watched from an apartment rooftop across the street. We raced home to avoid getting caught in the sweep but then he fingered me. They are the only people in the world to whom he admitted he stole my program. He told them the only person he knew smart enough to do such things and blame him was me. They came for me within two hours of his arrest.” She sighed, “then I really wanted him dead.”

“Then let’s kill him,” Miklos said.

“I can’t kill him. Do you know how hard I’ve worked to get out from the darkness of murder and mayhem. I don’t want to kill anyone ever again.”

“Can I kill him?”

“No.” she growled.

“Your father will be disappointed. I think he really wants you to slice this guy’s throat.”

“Not going to happen.”

“What do you want to do with him?”

“Nothing!” she yelled suddenly. “I don’t want any part of this. I told you he was untouchable because of the connection with me and the FBI. Now if anything happens, I’m the first person they finger.”

“Well, I could help ease your mind. Sergio had a guy who owed him a lot of money. He told the guy to go and kidnap this man, bring him his laptops, and destroy everything else in the house and then bring the guy to his office to wait for Sergio’s guys to come collect him?”

Dimi looked up, “you have his laptops?”

“We do. Sergio executed the guy who owed him all the money. Neither he nor Bryce ever need to be found again but they shipped us Bryce and his equipment to deal with. The dead guy I believe was used as a footing in a new building.”

She rolled her eyes, “nobody can pin this to us?”

“Nope.”

She gave a sinister smile which gave Miklos chills and he smiled broadly at the sensation. She knew he loved when she was being a Lykiaos.

“My little wife, what are you going to do?”

“I’m taking what is mine.”

The car pulled up to the warehouse and she didn’t even wait for one of the guys to open the door for her. She was marching with purpose into the warehouse. She could hear her father’s laughter and followed it. She shoved the door open and pointed a finger at her father, “you should not have done this.”

Bryce looked up at her from his chair where he was zip tied. “Dimi? Holy s**t. You’re here. Can you get me out of here?”

She held her hand up to him without even looking at him, “Pops, too far. I told my husband he was untouchable because the Feds have us connected. You can’t just kidnap and murder a man because they are giant walking knob heads.”

Vasili rolled his eyes, “he is not a giant anything. Granted he is tall but he’s so skinny. Did he really want to be your lover?”

Miklos commented as he strolled casually into a room, “he hires women from clubs, insists he be allowed to call them Dimi and he f***s them unconscious. He chokes girls until they are unconscious.”

Vasili turned purple and looked at Dimitra who shoved Miklos’ shoulder furiously. “He chokes women he calls Dimitra?”

“No, he calls them Dimi,” Miklos corrected. “I really hate when they shorten your name.” He walked to Bryce and slapped him in the back of the head and forced him to look at Dimitra, “that woman, right there, is my wife. Mine. You do not get to have fantasies about f*****g her and choking her out, you sick f**k.”

“I’m sorry!” he screamed.

“Shut up Bryce,” Dimi said rolling her eyes. “Where are his glasses?”

“They got broken,” Giorgio said with a smirk.

“He needs them, so someone fix them.” She spoke smartly.

“He’s going to die.” Vasili said with a grimace. “What does he need glasses for?”

“The world thinks he’s dead right?” She looked to the three men in the room and when Bryce gasped behind her, she shrugged, “the guy who kidnapped you was executed and has disappeared. We’ll fix it so your DNA in a large quantity of b***d is found in his office where he took you. He and your body are now gone. Bryce, you are now my bitch.”

“What?”

“I want my program back.”

“I can’t – “

“I know you can’t just give it back, stupid. How the hell you got a full MIT ride, yet Sienna couldn’t, blows my mind.” She looked to Miklos, “Bryce Purcell is now employed by Lykiaos.”

“No f*****g way!” Miklos growled angrily. “He wants to f**k you!”

“So does half your security team. They have since I was a teenager. Get over it. I’m ruthless and sexy.” She winked at him. “The only way I get my program back is if he never gets to use it again. The world thinks he’s dead.” She gave a dark smile to Bryce, “don’t worry, all your food, lodging and anything you could ever need will be provided for you. You are going to have to take another flight though.”

“Where will you send him?”

“Greece,” she shrugged, “Uncle Constantine was complaining to Miklos yesterday on the phone how his internet keeps going down. Bryce is moving to Greece to live under his watch as the island IT guy. I’m sure he’s been lonely without Tariq around.”

“I don’t want to go to Greece. It’s too hot there. I’ll sweat to death.” Bryce begged, “I’m not made for extreme temperatures.”

“You have three options Bryce,” Dimitra looked at him furiously as she walked towards the table with all the torture equipment spread out. She picked up her favorite toy and clicked the handles together, “I can snip all your fingers off and let you walk out of here with the promise we will watch every single thing you do for the rest of your life, and you’ll never be able to touch a keyboard again,” she wiggled her fingers. “And when I say watch you, we will be so far up your a*s, your proctologist will be jealous. If you want option one, I haven’t cut a finger in a while. I’m a bit excited for it.”

“No!” he instinctively curled his fingers into a fist, but Miklos grabbed one of his hands and lay it flat against the chair.

Miklos spoke in the man’s ear, “I once watched her take every finger off a man and then she choked him to death on his own fingers while he bled out. It was so f*****g hot.” He looked up at his father and his father-in-law, “again, had you let us just do this naturally eventually I would have realized she is my perfect match. You did not need to force it.” The men all shared a low chuckle.

Dimi could see Miklos almost begging her to use them. He was weird. “Option two, my father, my father-in-law and my husband get to decide your fate and it would mean you die. They are very overprotective of me.”

“My little wife, please just choose option two for him. I would very much like to just beat him to death for choking a woman unconscious and pretending it was you.”

“I second this suggestion,” Vasili called out.

“Your third option is you get to continue to work on a computer, completely supervised, by me, in a foreign country on a compound where you can never escape. It’s actually an island and the only way on or off is ship or chopper. My uncle is my mother’s brother. He is very,” she looked to her family, “what’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Strange?”

“Bizarre?”

“Peculiar?”

Three men had three different words and Dimi shook her head, “Bryce, he’s a freak. My mother grew up in very devoutly religious family. Half of them are saints and the other half are sinners. He is a sinner. He walks around naked all day long. He and his wife have s*x everywhere and all the time. None of their staff are allowed to wear clothing and if you work for them, you sign a waiver to be f****d by them. If you move the wrong way, he could take it as an invite. I will make it clear you must give consent before any s****l encounters. Rape is not justifiable in any situation. Their existence is commune like. You will spend time in the garden doing harvesting and working the olive trees and also doing menial tasks around the island. Completely naked of course. You will reside on their island until the day you die or until the time, I see fit to let you move to a different location. Who knows? If you prove useful, I could replace you alternate work. However, you will be using my program to hack into our enemies. If you get caught, we will turn you over to them.”

“I’ll take option three, please, I’ll go to Greece.” Bryce was crying. “I don’t want to die, and I may as well be dead if I can’t use a computer.”

Vasili chuckled behind her, “you are my greatest accomplishment, agape mou.”

“I know. He can use my program to gain access to the files of our enemies. If he gets caught, we’ll turn him over to whoever catches him and tell them he was doing it on his own as he was only hired to deal with internet services on the island. All of your activity will be strictly monitored by me. I will be following your every movement Bryce.” She paused and grinned, “you should know, nobody on the island speaks a word of English.” She made a face, “one other thing,” she motioned for the guys coming into the room, “my uncle, like the men in this room,” she waved around not just to her father and Miklos but to the guards coming in, “are very protective of me and loyal to me. I am their princess. The reason my uncle lives on this island is because many of our enemies are taken there to be executed. He fancies himself a butcher of sorts. He has turned many a man into fishmeal. Should you so much as type a letter onto a keyboard I don’t like, he will take as much pleasure in executing you as he does in performing orgies on his dining room table.”

“Walked in on that once,” Vasili shook his head in horror, “it wouldn’t have been so horrible if he wasn’t your mother’s twin. They look eerily alike and there were far too many people using his body.”

Bryce’s eyes widened at the comment.

“Get him out of here.”

“Wait,” Miklos shook his head. “I know you are the new head of the family but my love, he f****d a woman and pretended it was my wife. Please?”

“Fine.” She waved at him and then dropped the cigar cutters down. “He doesn’t need to be conscious to fly on our private plane. Just don’t kill him.”

“One punch each.” Giorgio asked with a grin.

“Miklos isn’t going first,” Vasili grumbled, “he knocks them out too fast.”

Dimitra exited the room to the shrillness of Bryce screaming and the men bickering she couldn’t help the chuckle escaping her lips. As dark and twisted as their world was, it was their world. She had spared Bryce’s life and while it appeared terrible to be exiled to her uncle’s island, she knew it wasn’t the hell of prison or worse, death. He would live in sunshine, near the sea and with the happiest, if not oddest, people she had ever met.

She turned at the footsteps hurrying in her direction, and she smiled at Miklos. “Done so soon?”

“No. I just wanted to k**s you before you went back to the office. The boys will drive you. You were incredible in there. No violence on your end but I can’t wait to make him sleep for a day or so.”

“I know,” she wrapped her arms around his neck. “I’m proud of myself.”

“I am proud of you. I love you, my little wife,” he said as he lowered his head.

“I love you my old husband,” she whispered as his lips claimed hers.

In the middle of the parking area of their warehouse, Dimitra’s worlds were finally joined, and she was at peace.

The End