Page 29 of Mafia Bride
“We?” I scoff. There’s a sweating glass of water in front of me and I want nothing more than to throw it in his face right now. He doesn’t talk to me, not really, from the moment he kidnaps me—trades me, whatever—and this is the conversation he decides to kick us off with? “You mean you? Where you’re from? I’m from here. And that is not how we do things. You can go to jail for this.”
Santino sighs in frustration. He’s letting me know he’s being patient with me. The king does not like to explain himself. Or this situation. Or anything in general.
“You have an Italian passport. Every minute you breathe in the United States, you are under the jurisdiction of the Italian Embassy.” He digs in his pocket and extracts his phone. “Would you like to call them?” He puts the phone between us. “I know the number. I have a friend there.” A heavy pause sits between us. “He knows all about you.”
My husband is cruel. That’s what he is. Intensely cruel and calculating and cold. Just cold.
The precise weight of his revelation crushes me. I was born in Italy and my immigration status is perfectly fine until it isn’t. The list of reasons I can get deported is long, and I’m a resident because of my clean status with the Italian side.
Santino’s saying he can end that. He’s got his punishing fingers hooked where he can hurt me most.
One of the steps in my plan for freedom is shot out of the sky like a goose in the fall. I’m trapped with no legal protection. No one to call to help.
And he still hasn’t given me my phone back. That was confiscated as soon as I got to the house and God knows if it’ll ever be returned.
Overwhelming loneliness fills me up, every inch. I’m alone, no one knows where I am because surely the king wouldn’t advertise the location of his compound, and there’s no legal recourse.
Digging my nails into my palms might make nice little flowers of pain to distract me, but not enough to keep me from crying. By the first hitching blubber, I can’t even feel them. Tears fall like the droplets on the water glass.
“Don’t. No.” Santino’s demeanor changes in a flash. He flicks a handkerchief from inside his jacket and passes it to me. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” I try to swallow down the grief and sadness, but they feel much too large to contain. My throat’s full of sticky gunk, and I can’t get control of my breath.
“Cry. No. Don’t cry. Please.”
His cruelty is shed for something that sounds a lot like sympathy, and for some reason, that’s what finally unlocks the remainder of the tears I’d been holding back. They come pouring like monsoons and every inch of resolve I’d carried is swept away in it.
“Celia!” He rings a stupid gold bell that rests on the table. I hadn’t noticed it. Of course he’s the kind of guy who would ring a bell for a servant. How much longer until I received my own bell? Tears fall harder, faster. “Bring the wine and a box of tissues.Subito.”
A dim outline of a person enters and exits the room on demand. My sadness and grief have fully exploded, and I’m only barely hanging on.
“Violetta. Listen.” Santino’s voice drops to an unthreatening purr. “You’re only upset because you didn’t know. This bargain was made long ago, but you’re only just finding out. This is new and scary, no? If you had known—”
“I’d be grateful you stole me?” I hiccup, furious, tears still running down my face.
“You aren’t taken from your life. I’ll let you finish school.”
“Letme?”
“If you behave. And maybe, if you want...” Santino reaches out and touches my arm, and the gentleness of it shocks me as much as my reaction to it. I hate it and I am grateful for it all at the same time. “A job?”
I jerk my arm away and the tears flow faster, harder. If I’m a good girl, he’ll let me go work in a shop somewhere. If I behave, he’ll let me go to class. I’m not just a slave, not just house decor, I’m his pet, too.
How could this possibly be my life? After every tragedy I had to endure as a young girl, this is how I end up?
My heart cracks open.
“Santo Dio! Violetta!”
He doesn’t just get frustrated, he yells. His yell is a big man’s yell, one that fills up the crevices of the room and blankets me whole. His yell is that of a man accustomed to power and obedience and cruelty. Who has seen things. Who has done things.
And I have just angered that man.
My eyes dry up immediately. No more snot. No more tears. No more heaving. The aching pity, one that I despised so much yesterday afternoon, is gone.
In its wake leaves a very terrifying new creature.
Wrath. Loathing. Fear.
