Page 59 of Mafia Bride
Emilio took the shovel from me. “Make yourself useful.” He tossed it to Dami, who caught it as if digging was what he was meant to do. Then Emilio plucked the cigarette from my fingers and held it up by the filter.
“What happens when you finish this?”
“I smoke another?”
“No,stronzo.” He slapped me in the back of the head then wedged my cigarette between his lips. “You flick it. I watch you. Eh? I see you flick the filter. And who cares, right? But you see you’re at a murder scene or no? Your spit…” He took another drag. “…and now my spit’s all over it. You leave this lying around, it’s not just you that’s getting put away.”
“Okay,” I said as he handed it back by the filter.
“It’s not just your ass. It’s all of ours.”
“Sorry.”
“Listen.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “You got the brains for a real future, but you don’t have the experience to know all the shit that goes wrong. I need you to think of the worst that can happen. Just because we got the police in our pocket’s no excuse to be careless. This sets a fire…” He pointed to my cigarette. “…and you bring attention to a dead body. Best case? It don’t, but you leave evidence behind for somepuffi. Then it won’t matter how much I believe in you.” He pantomimed flicking my butt-shaped life into the trees. “You set yourself and all of us on fire.”
He was right in a thousand ways.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the lit smoke, looking Emilio in the eyes. They were shaped just like Violetta’s. Just like now, in my rearview mirror, wide and full of emotions I don’t have anymore.
This isn’t about protecting her the way I couldn’t protect Damiano or Emilio. It’s about something more important—and more impossible.
I will never be able to contain this woman.
I am going to lose her.
I am going to fail at protecting her.
My life will be meaningless.
Nothing to look forward to.
Nothing to fight for.
I’d fear emptying into a shell of a man, but I already am.
16
VIOLETTA
From the back of the Alfa I meet his eyes in the rearview. I’m numb, broken, and terrified from the short hairs of my arms standing on end, to the liquifying marrow in my bones. What just happened keeps rolling through my thoughts like slices of brain coming through an MRI. Every time I close my eyes, I see brain and blood explode in front of me.
Now that the adrenaline has worn off, everything hurts. Hurt is such a pitiful, terrible, tiny little word that sounds infantile next to its actual definition. My body is a three and a half on the Pain Assessment Tool. My knees and elbows are scraped with road rash and bleeding through the sleeves of this terrible dress. My hands and arms are torn up from broken glass, with more cuts and bruises on my legs. My head aches. Every bump in the road jostles everything and I feel like one of Zia’s sewing boxes—loose and jumbled.
Emotionally, though? I’m at an eleven.
I try to even my breaths and keep from totally losing my shit, again, but everything feels like it’s about to splinter apart and break. What the fuck happened? How is this my life? Two weeks ago I was studying for a final exam with my best friend and planning a trip to Greece and today I nearly died on a very expensive street.
This can’t be my life. I don’t give a shit where I was born or what’s expected of me, this can’t be my destiny.
“You’re safe,” Santino says, stopping for a light. “You can stop quivering.”
It’s not a command or an insult, but tender permission.
I ran away. We almost died. He killed at least one person, probably two, and I realize his voice is steady and he’s not trembling at all.
I still have splattered brain matter on my leg and instead of removing it, I’m noting how different it looks from medical specimens in a lab, and how much the same. What’s going on with my husband is bad enough, what’s happening with me is a whole new level ofwhat-the-fuckery.
He lights up another cigarette. The smell stings my nostrils and the nicotine goes right to my blood.
