Page 72 of Mafia Bride
“Look at you all,” I say. “Fucking detectives. Any one of you coulda told them but none of you’s wonderingwhowas told, eh? You think Arturo and Benny drove up and grabbed her on their own? To what? Get one over on Franco? Huh?”
“Maybe?” Carmine said.
“No!” I bark in Carmine’s face. “They’re too fucking stupid.” I jab my finger to his temple, and he cringes but doesn’t move. “You think this is Franco Tabona, Carmine?”
“Yeah, who else?”
“He’s a hundred fucking years old. One foot in the grave, too sadistic to hand down succession. He lets them kill each other for position. Now say it, Carmine.Who? Enzo? Lucio? Maybe Nicolino?”
“All of them?” He winces as he says it, and I’m about to slap some sense into him when Gennaro’s voice comes from behind me.
“A free agent.”
“Ah,” I tap Carmine’s cheek and turn. “Right.”
“None of the Tabona guys are gonna risk a war while Franco’s alive,” Gennaro continues. “But they’re so weak at the top, a free agent could hire a few hard-up guys for one job, so long as they don’t really know who the job hits.”
“Because no one’s gonna hit Santino’s wife,” Vito adds as if he’s finally seeing the light. “And no one’s really seen her but a few of us so…” He indicates me as if I’m the one who hired guys to pull my wife into a car and he’s just throwing ideas out there.
I lean on the desk and cross my arms, knowing damn well why Franco hadn’t set a line of succession. Men raised in America were too stupid to do the job. They were raised to be butchers, not surgeons.
“So?” I say. “So I did it?”
“Nah, nah.” Gennaro waves the idea away.
“I’m just saying she coulda been bait?” Vito’s looking from Gennaro to Carmine, getting less confident with each glance.
Choosing speed over power, I don’t wind up to punch Vito’s face. A quick jab puts him on his knees, hands covering a bloody nose.
“Ah, I’m sorry!” I push him over and step on his throat, leaning enough to hurt him. I don’t want to kill him.
No, I do want to kill him, but the man controls the emotions, the emotions do not control the man.
“I’m saying this one time,” I say to him for the sake of everyone in the room. “She is my wife. I protect her. You protect her. If anything happens to her, I will kill everybody between me and the devil himself.Capito?”
Vito tries to nod, but my foot’s in the way. He’s turning red because thinking about her getting hurt while he’s under my shoe has unleashed my white-hot rage—the insatiable demon who never leaves my side. The need to bring revenge to whoever tried to take her is one of the purest things I’ve ever felt, and I know from experience that I cannot act on what I cannot control.
“You are here to listen from now on,” I say to Vito. “You will be silent. You will not speak a word in my presence until I release you. Do you understand?”
His chin’s pointing up, and the blood’s dripping into his ear as he gurgles, trying to nod against the toe of my shoe.
“Not a word, Vito. I will gut you and bury you so deep you won’t need to walk to the road to hell.”
He gurgles. I haven’t broken his nose, but the blood’s going back into his throat. I will destroy whoever set Violetta up, but it wasn’t Vito.
I take my foot away and wipe the blood from my sole on his shirt, indicating to Gennaro that he can help Vito up. He and Carmine do the job.
“I’m sor—” Vito starts, but Gennaro slaps him.
“Stai zitto, already,” Carmine says, tossing Vito a hankie. “No words, eh?”
Good, they got it.
“So?” I say, walking around my desk. “Youstronziwould have hit the laundry.”
“We was just talking,” Carmine says.
“About bringing this town to chaos and war? Splitting it in two so…what? We make everyone take sides. The shop owners, the schoolkids, the fucking hipsters moving in from the college? And then in the chaos? What? We’re spread thin.”
