Page 326 of Mario
There is nothing theatrical in the way he says it. No pleasure or disgust or anger. No emotion at all.
I should be horrified, but then I remember the way the man told me he would shoot my baby. And I remember how the woman lured me into a trap.
My horror is a lot more complicated now.
I grip the blanket. “But whowerethey? What was all this about?”
“Victoria,” he says. “I know you have some thoughts about me and about my family. I'm not sure exactly how much you haveput together, but you're an incredibly intelligent woman, so I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here.”
“I think there is the business everyone can see,” I say carefully. “And then there is the business everyone is smart enough not to ask about.”
His eyes stay on mine.
“Yes.”
“And the people who tried to take me today belong to the second kind.”
“They work for men who do.”
I look down at my hands wrapped around my knees. “And so do you.”
“No,cara. I don’t work for anyone.”
My breath catches.
The correction is small, but it changes everything.
I look up at him slowly. “No one?”
“No one.”
“I thought…” I stop, because saying it out loud makes me feel naive. “I thought there was someone above you. In Naples, maybe.”
“There was,” he says. “My father.”
The past tense has a lot more meaning now.
“And now?”
His face does not change.
“Now there is me.”
So not just mafia, which is something I had already figured out, butthe don.
I’m carrying the baby of an actual mafia don.
“Victoria?”
Lost in thought, I look over at him.
“So many things suddenly make so much sense,” I say. “I'm apparently not as intelligent as you give me credit for.”
He smiles softly. “You are far more intelligent than you give yourself credit for. Sometimes when the mind is faced with situations out of the ordinary, it tries to make them fit inside ordinary rules.”
I let out a weak breath. “There is nothing ordinary about you.”
“No,” he says. “But you were not wrong to look for rules. You were, however, wrong to believe strangers would give them to you more honestly than I would.”
