Page 87 of Mafia Bride
Powerful, beautiful, and exhausted.
“You knew my father,” I say. “You were friends. This isn’t a picture of three guys who don’t know each other. The rest I filled in, but that’s all I know for sure.”
“Is it?” His voice is a threat, but it also betrays worry.
Santino removes the picture of him and my father from his pocket and places it between us. My spit’s dried, but it’s unmistakable on the glossy surface.
“Armando brought this. Gia’s been crying because she wanted to tell me you did this to it, but she stole the keys, and she was afraid.”
“Another frightened woman.” It’s not funny, but I laugh to myself because the pieces are clicking. “Nice work, big man.”
I jab a sausage with the edge of my spoon.
“Why did you spit on it?” he asks, ignoring my last comment. “Because we were friends?”
“Of course that’s all you have to admit to. I knew you’d look at the picture and say, ‘E, allora?This is me and Emilio at a wedding. We lived in the samecomune, eh?’” His smile disarms me the way my imitation of his accent apparently disarms him. “And you wouldn’t say another word. You’ll just give me that cold, hard look to put me in my place and walk away. But…” I lean forward and put my hands on my knees. “If I spit on it, you’ll know in your heart that Iknow, because that’s too easy. It lets you off the hook. I want you to know what Ithink.” Sliding off the stool, I put the spoons in the empty bowls and pick one up in each hand. “I want to tell you what I believe.”
“What, then,Forzetta?”
“You let me think my zio sold me, when it was my father who did it.” I put the bowls by the sink so I don’t have to look at him. “My father gave me to you as a guarantee on a debt. I don’t know what. But he paid you back, in full. You didn’t want to be paid back. You wanted to collect. Why? Maybe to show your strength to someone else? Or to prove a point? But in the end, when he wouldn’t give me to you, you shot him and my mother—the two people who would object, and when my family brought us here to hide me, you followed us so you wouldn’t look like a fucking fool.”
“Your mouth,” he says from right behind me. He’d moved so quickly and quietly, I didn’t even know he was there until he spoke.
“You’re as stuck as I am,” I say into the dirty dishes, now all too aware of him by the energy radiating from his body.
“And this is what you believe?”
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
He’s so close I can barely turn, and he doesn’t budge when I face him.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
He takes my chin and looks deeply into my eyes. I can only look away for a moment before he draws me back. I set my jaw tight. If I don’t have control over my eyes, I can at least control the mouth he keeps mentioning.
“You are so much like him,” he says, his thumb stroking the cleft in my chin. The rest of my body goes numb so that the nerve endings under his touch can send a signal up to my brain and down to my core at the same time. “He was fierce, and loyal, and he surrendered nothing until he absolutely had to.” He lowers his hand and steps back. “You meant everything to him.”
“Thenwhy?”
He takes another step back, and when that distance grows, so does my panic that it’s not all my father’s fault, but my husband’s. I’d been too comfortable forgiving him.
“Why, Santino? Did you make him?”
“No.”
Santino making another man give up his daughter just to dominate him.
It could be.
It could also be that my father didn’t surrender me. It was possible my parents died to protect me, and Santino shot them for their defiance.
“Did you threaten him?” I say to shut out the tangle of thoughts before everything unravels. “Or my mother? Rosetta?” My voice rises with every word. “What didyou do?” I scream, because I can’t let myself believe Santino killed my father, and my need to wall off my husband from the worst of my fears is scarier than the possibility itself.
Santino takes me by the biceps, bending to eye level.
“I did what he asked me to.”
