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I hope you never read these journals, at least not without me there to hold your hand, to explain.
But I’m sick and it’s not looking great, and you're way too young to understand. Your sister will protect you, keep you safe, but there is so much you need to know. Things that Lola can only scrape the surface of when she explains everything one day. Even she doesn’t know the secrets that lie in these boxes.
One day, you will have to take matters into your own hands. I just know it.
One day, they will come for you.
One day, you’ll need to rule.
You’ve been a secret for so long. Your entire life, your true nature has been hidden. I promise I did it to protect you. If you hold that against me, I’ll understand, but I beg you to see it from my side.
You are the sole heir to the Russo family. Your father was an only child, and you are his only child. There will be battles and arguments for who will move that family forward, who will rule.
But eventually, just like your father wanted, you will rise.
I know it in my bones. I know one day you’ll wake up, sense your fate, and know where you belong.
In order to do it, you’ll need to find the proof, Lilah. Someone who hates your family did it. Someone with more power than just a capo.
Prove you're the gorgeous ruler your father knew you would be, and it will all be yours.
Five
-Lilah-
On Tuesday, I am both relieved and miserable with the fact that I do not have a request for a private room with Mr. Romano. Instead, I dance on stage in thirty-minute cycles for the full eight-hour shift.
Either Marco kept his word or Dante refused to see me again after I turned him down.
Either way, it’s for the best, I tell myself.
“Carmella!” Candy, the dancer who took on the role of mom for everyone, calls later that afternoon as I’m getting back into my street clothes. “You doing anything fun tonight?”
Candy is the one who gave me my name—Carmella, as in Soprano—because I’m blonde, Italian, and small. A cliché, for sure, but one I can tolerate because Carmella took no shit in that show, and I’m done taking shit.
I laugh at her question, pulling a pair of sweats over my ass and throwing my ridiculously high-heeled shoes in my bag. “I wish. I’m going home and passing out.”
“A hot thing like you?” Gina, another dancer, asks. “You don’t have a man at home?”
“Men are trouble,” I say, thinking of the journals my mother left behind sitting at my apartment, waiting for me to reread them for the millionth time. Journals detailing just how much trouble men can be.
“I hear that,” another dancer says, though I’m not sure who because the five or six other girls in the room all start laughing and agreeing. The back room is where we all change, eat, and get ready for stage time. It always smells like a cacophony of perfumes, hair spray, and sweat, but the women who work here are all golden. All of them are open and kind and willing to help.
Never in my life have I been surrounded by such genuine women. Women who aren’t looking at this potential friendship as a stepping stone or bragging rights, but because somehow, we’re all on the same path in life. We’re all on even footing.
Sometimes, when I’m delicately weaving in stories through conversation to get information, I feel guilty about it, about the deception. Because these women are good. Good women who mean well and have opened their arms wide to me.
It’s a contrast to the socialite friends I’ve had my whole life, the friends who, when I moved out of my fancy apartment and sold off my expensive things to keep my head above water, all abandoned me.
I don’t have time to mull over that depressing thought before there’s a distraction.
The bright side of this place is there is always a distraction.
“Where the fuck have you been, chica?” Fancy, a Latina dancer who calls everyone chica, shouts. Every head moves to her as we try to decide if she’s talking to one of us or someone else, but her eyes are on the entrance to the break room where Sammi is walking in, a shit-eating grin on her face and a very pretty necklace around her neck.
She saunters in, tossing a bag to the bench, and sits, crossing her legs.
I should leave. I’m dead tired, so drained that I can barely focus on just why I should stay. I am terribly behind on sleep; late nights and way too much on my mind keep me awake even when I’m not working a night shift.
