Whistle's War

Chapter 1

One

Tasa checked the cell phone in her clenched hand for the hundredth time. Her excruciating audience with Alex in his upstairs office was over. Finally. Once again, her eldest brother had overreacted. Simply because he was the head of the family, he assumed he could rule over every single aspect of her life. The nerve of him, giving me an order like I’m a child.

Tasa fidgeted as she once again glanced out of the bay window of the Dacia Café, the center of her family’s world. She couldn’t wait for Nikki to pull up to the curb so she could get out of there before she stomped back up the stairs and wrung Alex’s neck. Leaning forward, she spotted the ubiquitous black Mercedes pulling up on the quiet 43rd Street. Quiet in comparison to Queens Boulevard, the bustling commercial center of Sunnyside, Queens.

From behind, she heard a scuffling sound. Her mother moved forward, giving her a quick last hug from behind. Twisting around in her seat, Tasa returned her embrace and lifted her left cheek for a quick peck. “See you later, Mama.”

A stern frown descended on her face as she gently chided her mother, “I’m not happy that you didn’t stick up for me once with Alex. He’s such a brute.”

Her mother caressed her hair. “Darling, you have to settle down. You’re too energetic, and you’ll be graduating in the spring. It’d be one thing if you wanted to pursue a career in opera, but we know that’s not your desire. What better way to move on to the next phase of your life but with a husband? Because with a husband, soon comes children.”

That last part was the crux of her mother’s never-ending argument.

Tasa rolled her eyes. “Always with the children.”

“Children give meaning to a woman’s life,” her mother crooned.

“Not every woman,” she grumbled under her breath, but the Mercedes was pulling up to the curb, and really, she had zero energy to continue this endless discussion. It’s not as if her mother ever budged an inch from her notions of femininity and womanhood, all of which circled around being a wife and mother. Rather, she cudgeled her only daughter with them. Sure, that had worked out fine for her mother. She’d married the love of her life. Growing up in a small village in the valley of the Carpathian Mountains, she’d been utterly fulfilled by her role, but that wasn’t Tasa. Not that anyone in her family seemed to care. She could’ve escaped those expectations with the opera. While she was a decent alto, she wasn’t any more interested in pursuing an intensive career in the opera than she was in shackling herself to a man at the age of twenty.

Hitching her Dolce & Gabbana handbag over her shoulder, Tasa slipped out of the café, leaving behind the clinking of porcelain coffee cups on small saucers, and took in a deep breath of brisk, cold winter air.

Yanking the Mercedes passenger door open, she slid onto the leather seat with a sigh of relief.

“Tasa, are you trying to get me in trouble?” griped Nikki, giving her a side-glance with a small scowl.

“Oh, hush, and just drive if you don’t want him catching you,” she replied. Her control freak of a brother believed a princess like her shouldn’t be seen in the front seat, beside her chauffeur-slash-bodyguard. There was a certain level of decorum to maintain. For Nikki’s sake, she usually took the back seat when she came home to visit, but she was holding on to her temper by the thinnest of threads as it was.

“Dragă mea—”

Oh, sweetheart. Nikki always resorted to his mother tongue when he was upset.

“Don’t dragă mea,” she snapped as she dragged the seat belt over her chest and clipped it in. She didn’t need his pity, the primary sentiment coming off his endearment. “Hit the accelerator already so we can get out of this godforsaken neighborhood. Then he won’t see you.”

He squeezed her knee briefly. His hand didn’t linger, but Tasa was well aware of Nikki’s feelings. It was only natural he should crush on her. After all, they spent so much time together, and she’d finally grown into her figure.

But he’d never cross the line. He might be family, but she was a princess. A princess was supposed to marry a prince. Gag. The thought of Cristo made her stomach turn. He was a good enough guy, if you were into the clean-cut bro type. Well, as close a version to that as a mafie prince could get. She’d known him since they were in diapers. Being only a few years older than her, they hung out in the same scene. The idea of kissing him was about as appealing as kissing her twin brother, Nicu. And Cristo was half in love with his little side piece, a cute girl named Una. There was no way she was marrying a guy who was already in love with another woman. She didn’t expect him to give up on Una, and Tasa wasn’t the sharing type. Of course, she couldn’t divulge any of this to Alex. If he found out, Cristo would be in trouble with his old man. More importantly, she was afraid of her own reaction if her brother responded the way she predicted. What, Tasa? You think men are loyal. You think Tata never cheated on Mama?

Grrr.

Seriously, the less she knew about the way mafie men lived their lives, the better. A second family was probably out there somewhere, with kids who sported the same deep-brown eyes as she and her beloved father. She shook her head. Again, not something she wanted to know. With three overbearing brothers, she didn’t need additional stepsiblings creeping out of the woodwork. She could barely breathe as it was, with the ones surrounding her.

Nicu was her other half in many ways, but he was far from perfect. And he got to live a normal life because he was a male and he was Alex’s good little soldier boy. Luca, her middle brother, might be the black sheep, but he had all the liberties he could possibly want. Pressing her lips together, she focused her gaze outside the window at the passing brick townhouses. Her eyes began to burn. Luca. She sighed, as she often did when she thought of him. Such a tortured soul, with everything so bottled up inside.

That one, she was going to miss.

“What’s wrong, babe?” Nikki asked. “What happened in there?”

She let out a weary sigh.

“What do you think happened?”

She’d gotten her marching orders.

“Be a good little girl and fall in line like everyone else. The Lupu family are a bunch of empty-headed dunces, all walking to the tune of their pied piper, Alexandru Lupu,” she grumbled.

The Lupul, or the Wolf, as people called him, was the puppet master, pulling the strings of the mafia family from America to Paris, Milan, Bucharest, and beyond.

Blood was blood.

Duty was duty.

Orders were orders.

Blah, blah, blah. She felt like gagging after the number of times she’d heard that litany throughout her life.

“Sorry, babe. When he gets an idea into his head, he won’t let it go.”

“You can say that again,” she conceded as she swiped at a rogue tear. “I’m impressed you even went that far.” It was unusual for Nikki to say anything against Alex. Suggesting stubbornness, while completely accurate, was borderline betrayal in a secret society where loyalty was the be-all and end-all. Another reason Nikki had never so much as tried to kiss her. It wasn’t even the idea that he might be murdered for such an infraction. He’d simply never cross that line. Lupu allegiance was implacable.

He may not have been born a Lupu, but she knew there was some sort of ancient, secret blood ceremony that made him as good as blood. Fucking her would be the equivalent of incest, regardless of what the tenting in his pants told her. Considering she wasn’t in love with Nikki any more than she was with Cristo, she didn’t push it.

That, and she didn’t want to get Nikki killed.

“He catches me at one club and comes down like a dictator,” she grumbled.

“Babe … it was the kind of club. And the fact that you escaped from me. You could’ve gotten killed … or worse. What were you thinking?”

Nikki was talking about the sex club she’s gone to with her best friend, Nina. So sue them; they were curious little virgins. Unfortunately, Alex had found the selfie Nina posted, sitting at the iconic bar. A selfie that included part of Tasa’s shoulder, which bared her Lupu tat of a wolf. In the darkness and the strobe lights, Nina hadn’t noticed and posted the pic. A pic Alex happened to view on her Instagram feed.

Oh, boy, did all hell break loose that night. And so began the lockdown. Other than attending her classes at Juilliard, she could go to the apartment she shared with Nina and home in Sunnyside. That was it. Now, she couldn’t even shake Nikki off her tale.

But if everything went according to plan, things would be irrevocably changed in a few short days. She wasn’t a Lupu for nothing, and as her tata had always said, “You have to fight for what you want in this life.”

Damn straight.

He wasn’t the only relentless person in her family. For instance, it took her for-ev-er to get any action between the sheets, but she’d managed in the end. It had taken seducing one of her vocal instructors to finally learn her way around the male body.

At the end of the day, she’d kept her virginity intact, something she was coming to regret. Her verdict, after her little adventure, was that sex was way overrated.

Which is why she’d ended up in Tribeca at the infamous sex club NSFW with Nina. Her curiosity had been piqued by the idea of something beyond vanilla. She’d already done every vanilla thing on her non-intercourse sex bucket list during her brief affair and had walked away with little enthusiasm. A few hours at the sex club, on the other hand, and she’d seen things that made her toes curl.

Nikki dropped her off at the lobby of the high-rise on 68th Street overlooking the Hudson and went to park the car in the underground parking. Entering the apartment she shared with Nina, she dropped her keys in the little crystal-cut bowl on the small Louis XVI wooden table in the vestibule. Part of the deal of getting the apartment near Juilliard, instead of commuting from Queens every day, was to have Nina come live with her and to have her mother decorate their apartment. Of course, she’d decorated it like a Prussian aristocrat from the mid-nineteenth century. Hence the old-people’s furniture scattered around their apartment like at an auction house instead of posters of Degas dancers or Callas like in the Juilliard student dorms.

The apartment’s best feature was the wall of windows overlooking an unimpeded view of the Hudson and the Jersey coast beyond. Throwing her coat over another atrociously overwrought sofa, Tasa kicked off her high heels and threw herself down beside Nina.

“How was it?” asked Nina without bothering with a greeting. A little furrow dug between her dark, fine winged brows.

“Jellie, are you?”

“Over Alex? Hardly,” she scoffed. “I’d never be jealous of you.”

“Mm-hmm,” replied Tasa noncommittally, tossing waves of her long brown hair over her shoulder. Nina was head-over-heels in love with Alex, although she felt the need to deny it in deference to their friendship. They’d been best friends since the day Nina tottered across the broken sidewalk from her house to Tasa as a toddler. While Tasa had the ability to get Nina out of her shell and Nina was her number-one partner in crime, her friend was really a gentle soul inside.

“He’s like a brother to me,” muttered Nina.

Double lie.

“Just because we joke that we must’ve been switched at birth in no way means there’s a shred of sibling-like feelings between the two of you,” Tasa fired back.

God knows both of them would’ve had easier childhoods if they’d been brought up by the other’s household. Nina’s mother was a badass who prodded Nina to take life by the balls, while Tasa’s mother continually bemoaned her daughter’s lack of ladylike manners. At least Tasa had Bunica, her grandmother, to serve as a buffer between her and her mother and Alex.

“It was disastrous. I swear the man thinks he’s my father, and he acts worse than a tyrant. Besides the boring lecture about my reputation, which I truly think he actually believed, he gave me an ultimatum. Either the opera or marriage … to Cristo.”

While this was no huge surprise, Nina’s eyes squeezed together in commiseration.

“No,” she breathed out. Nina’s loyalty was solidly behind Tasa, but she always believed the best in Alex, no matter how irrational he acted. Which was why Tasa had to keep every detail of her upcoming jailbreak from Nina. It hurt to lie, but realistically, the woman would crumble in under five minutes in Alex’s presence.

The theoretical scene played out in her mind. Alex would wrap his arm around Nina’s shoulder, bringing her in tight to his side to woo her into feeling safe with him. Nina, a softie to her core, would instantly melt against him. She’d look up at him, batting those absurdly long lashes of hers. He’d grace her with one of his beatific angel-slash-devilish smiles, and she’d turn into a puddle of goo. Game over. She’d gush like a bad oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Tasa clenched her fists. Pathetic. Her oldest brother got everything he wanted, anytime he wanted.

But not this time.

If she had any hope of escaping her predicament, she had to play it smart. And Tasa could pride herself on that much at least. She may not be respectful or obedient, but she was nothing if not conniving. She’d been fantasizing about this for years and plotting its execution for months.

“You always expect him to act decently,” she reprimanded Nina, laying her arm over the intricately carved, gilded wood curling up from the top of the couch. Her eyes drifted toward the windows, sunlight splashing through the panes and highlighting the jewel-like colors of the Persian rug across the floor. That was another thing about Romanians. Rugs everywhere. Almost every inch of their apartment was covered in intricate silk rugs.

“He’s a decent guy inside. Granted, you have to dig deep sometimes, but he disappoints me when he acts like this. I expect better from him.”

Tasa let out a little snort. “Good luck with that. He’s such a hypocrite. The bedroom in his apartment is a revolving door of women, but he expects me to remain chaste and turn my virginity and life over to my husband at his command. As if.”

“Well, there’s the other option.”

“Yes, be part of the bastion of high culture. What about giving me a chance to figure out what I want to do? I’m only twenty years old. You’d think I’d be given a few years to live. To travel the world and explore. Who knows, maybe I want to be a fashion designer.”

Nina tipped her head to the side, her lips pressed together to suppress a laugh. Nina wouldn’t dare laugh in her face. She was too polite and kind for that. “Do you?”

“No.” Tasa huffed. “What about an organic-apple farmer in Upstate New York? Does it matter? The point is that because he has the imagination of a flea, he’s only come up with two options, and I’m forced to follow one of those. It’s arbitrary and absurd and … and … insane! Like him!”

Another thing she’d never told Nina. That she’d changed her major to experimental dance. Her family would have conniptions if she turned away from a refined career singing opera to experimental performance art, or what they’d mockingly describe as twisting and flopping around like a dying fish on the floor.

“It’s because he was so young when he was thrust into his position as head of your family and of that business empire,” defended Nina. “It doesn’t help that your brothers immediately knew they wanted to follow in his footsteps.”

“It’s not like we don’t live in the twenty-first century,” she threw out.

“You know he doesn’t think that way. Your parents instilled in him the same idea every immigrant has. Come here and make something of yourself. You can’t just have a random job. No, you have to be a doctor, a lawyer, or something crazy impressive like alto for the Metropolitan Opera.”

Fiddling with the two tassels dangling from her silk blouse, Tasa muttered, “Whatever.”

Nina peered into her face, watching her with a concerned expression. “So, what are you going to do?”

“I have no idea. I have one more semester at Juilliard. That gives me a little more time of freedom.”

Liar.

Tasa knew exactly what she was going to do. She’d checked with the bursar’s office, and after three weeks of school, she could get fifty percent of her $30,000 tuition refunded to her bank account if she withdrew. And that was exactly what she was going to do. Then she’d disappear and make her way to the source of cutting-edge experimental dance, Madame Pierrette’s dance company in Montreal, Canada. Everyone who knew anything knew of the notoriously exclusive workshop she hosted every spring. A workshop Tasa got accepted into. It was close to a miracle and she wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity of a lifetime. Alex be damned.