Page 9 of Dishonored

One didn’t choose this life—they were either born to it, or it chose them. There was no in between, she had found. And one could either make due with what they were given from the life, or they could struggle and drown trying to get out.

Because there was no out.

Aria made small chat with the guard as she went through the visitation process at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. The security checks and paperwork were nothing new now that she had been doing it for a little over a year. Her once, and sometimes twice, weekly visits making her well-known to the guards shortened the time for her whereas it might take someone else far longer to get through the process.

“Enjoy your visit, Aria,” the guard said with a smile.

She sat down in the hard, plastic chair he directed her to and nodded back at the man. “Grazie.”

The guard went back to his post at the entrance door. She was grateful that, yet again, he had opted to seat her at the very far end of the block. A good fifteen chairs with their own private window made of Plexiglas and a telephone separated her, and the guard.

It gave her the illusion of privacy.

A camera was still at her back, though.

That couldn’t be helped.

Soon, the man she had come to check in with—as she did every week—came into view as he was shuffled through the metal doors on the other side of the visitation block. Jac De Rose could pull off any look including drab prison gray. His wide smile, and bright green eyes greeted her as he sat down opposite to her on the other side of the Plexiglas window.

Gesturing with his still-cuffed hands to the phone on the wall, Aria picked it up so she could speak to her father. “Papy.”

Daddy.

Jac’s smile softened. “How’s my girl?”

Aria tucked the strands of her copper-brown curls behind her ears, and said, “Pretty good, all things considered.”

“Things like what?”

Merda.

She still wasn’t very good at this whole visiting thing. She was constantly told by those around her to make sure she did everything she could not to upset her father during her visits. Any business talk—mafia, always—needed to be good, or great things. Certainly not something that would warrant him making a call or two so that he could rage at someone else.

No one wanted the boss upset.

Everyone answered to him.

“Nothing,” Aria said with a smile she hoped was enough to distract her father.

Beauty had always served her well even when it came to the man who gave her life. Jac appreciated a pretty face, and the reprieve it could provide in hard times. Aria had learned her beauty was enough to get her just about anything she wanted should she use it the right way. Or … most of the time.

Her father often told her that with her large, expressive green eyes, heart-shaped face, and delicate lips set atop the rest of her dainty features, she looked a great deal like her long-dead mother. That the only thing she had taken from him was her brown hair with the copper tint, and those unruly curls that she had to hope and pray every single time she tried to do anything with them.

Aria had seen enough pictures of Carina De Rose to know that was true, but not actual memories given her mother had died when she was a baby after an unfortunate run-in with a rival Camorra clan. Jac killed every single one of them for what they had taken from him—he never remarried after that, either.

“Nothing at all?” her father pressed.

He was reaching for something, and clearly, giving her the opportunity to come out and tell him whatever it was before he was willing to admit he already knew. This wasn’t an unusual game her father liked to play, and to be fair, she was pretty damned good at it, too.

After all, she was his daughter.

Manipulation was her forte.

She racked her brain to come up with whatever it was Jac wanted to know—she kept drawing a blank, though. A lot was going on in different areas for their clan. Business was good, but that wasn’t anything new.

Her father’s amused chuckle echoed in her ear through the phone before his voice said, “I heard you’re having some problems on the streets—you know he fills me in when he can, although he didn’t have much to tell me this time being he’s away. The Accardo family, or so I hear. They have quite a large organization, and not one that tends to intrude on smaller families.”

Oh, that.