Promises and Pomegranates by Sav R. Miller

I didn’t officially meet him until our last day in Boston. I’d been standing
outside, watching my breath appear and disappear in the chilly November air,
trying to mask the disappointment on my face for when the nurse brought my
mother out.
Rafael stepped outside, dressed in another dark suit, and pulled a cigar
from his breast pocket, lighting up as he leaned against a concrete wall with a
NO SMOKING sign hanging on it. He’d glanced at me, nodding as if he
understood some unspoken request.
“Just you and your mom, kid?”
I swallowed, nodding, aware that I wasn’t supposed to be talking to
strangers. But an obviously rich stranger, hanging around in a hospital? How
bad could he be?
He sucked on the end of his cigar—Cohiba Behike, a brand I would
eventually come to know by heart—and dipped his chin. “What’s your
name?”
My eyes narrowed.
He chuckled at my expression, laughing as if we were sharing an inside
joke.
A few moments later, he was joined by a leggy brunette, wrapped in a
deep purple fur coat, cradling a baby to her chest. They made their way to a
blacked-out Cadillac waiting in the emergency lane, but not before he clipped
me on the shoulder, dropping a card to the ground bearing the Ricci Inc.
Insignia.
It was a simple crest, a lion wearing a crown made of skulls, but
nevertheless, it engraved itself on my brain that day, as if it was always
meant to be there.
But it was the woman I couldn’t stop staring at, and when her dark,
captivating gaze met mine just before she climbed inside her vehicle, I was a
goner.
After my mother died, and my biological father rejected me again, I
sought out the Riccis, unaware of how their presence would alter the course
of my fate forever.
It’d started innocent, with me running tickets for one of the illegal
gambling operations Rafe ran from the back of a deli in Roxbury. But when
he started training me to fight, to defend, I knew things were turning.
And when I carried out my first hit, I did so in the dead of night, in a dirty
alleyway while the man who’d been accused of ratting on Rafe’s father