Page 17 of Mafia Bride
Santino pats me on the head like a dog and gets me in the back. Another guy gets in with me. The one with themantenuta.The door slams shut without Santino getting in. I watch him through the window as the car pulls away.
“Buckle in,” Mr. Mantenuta says.
A retort sticks in my throat like a wad of cotton. We’re down the block when he reaches over me and slams my buckle home.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he says.
I do something I’ve never done before. It comes from someplace so deep and primitive that it circumvents everything I’ve ever been taught by a shortened, evolutionary route.
I punch him in the mouth. His eyes widen, and the driver laughs so loudly I’m shocked out of the adrenaline rush that rewired my brain. Mr. Mantenuta puts his hand to his mouth. It comes back bloody from the inside, where he bit it.
Then he laughs too, and I know I’ll never beat these guys with adrenaline and rage.
I’m not sure what else I have.
5
VIOLETTA
On the drive, I try to memorize every detail so I can go home, get my family, and run away to the Bahamas or Malta. We can live on the beach and Zia and I can sell coconuts. I’ll forgive Zio for selling me and he’ll build little huts for us to rent. But I can barely see, barely identify what’s around me—because my heart is too busy pushing against my lungs to pay attention.
It’s both shorter and longer than I expected to be in the car. Mileage wise, we can’t have traveled terribly far. Still around the city. Not four states away, like I expect. But it’s also the longest drive I’ve ever endured, and then we stop at an iron gate at the edge of the city. It opens to a startingly modern white house with right angles and plate glass windows revealing stark, well-lit rooms. It’s shaped like a half-done Lego set. Very modern, very polished, very expensive.
Mr. Mantenuta reaches over and punches my seat belt open. He smiles at me with a fat lip, as if it’s neither his first nor his last. There’s no vengeance in it. No shame. No bruised male ego. Getting punched in the face is just part of the job.
A man the size of an antique armoire walks out the front door and escorts me out of the car. Fat Lip walks behind me. I’m trapped between mountains of testosterone, and when I stop to see what they’ll do, the guy behind me gently takes me by the shoulders and pushes me forward.
Running gets me nowhere. I can’t forget that. I need a plan. I need to think, but I can’t. Fear, anticipation, rage, and shame tangle like a ball of steel wool.
The men lead me into the house, which is all clean lines, brushed metal, white walls. The architecture’s one step warmer than an Apple Store, but the furniture’s one-hundred-percent Italianate, gold-painted, velvet-covered embarrassment, inlaid with more swirls than a custard shop.
The man of the house is nowhere to be found.
Fat Lip stays downstairs while The Armoire leads us upstairs on a teak staircase, down a length of hallway with an ornate half-circle card table pushed to the side and a plate glass window at the end, and finally stops outside a door. He unlocks it by pushing beepy numbers on a keypad with sausage fingers that dwarf the buttons.
“Name’s Armando,” he says, letting his hand slide off the tiny (but actually normal) doorknob without opening the door. I must look like a refugee or something because his expression goes soft. “Listen, it’s gonna be okay.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Yeah. True.” He holds up hands the size of dinner plates. “My ma was done the same as you. She was hanging laundry, minding her own business when they dragged her off. She laughs now but she wasn’t laughing then. It turned out okay.”
If I could reach his face, I’d punch it. He’s got a lot of nerve using his mother’s story to tell me I’m going to be fine. It’s like saying you were in a fender bender last year, so getting t-boned tomorrow’s going to be a cakewalk.
“Re Santino’s a good guy,” Armando the Armoire adds. “Once you get to know him.”
He’s trying to sell me a pile of shit by calling it a chocolate cake.
“I’m not going to get to know him.”
Armando’s not much of a poker player, and I can tell he’s got a lot to say. I’m just too scared to listen.
“Help me get out of here,” I whisper.
He shakes his head and swings the door open.
“You need anything, just knock on the door. Someone will come.”
I stand in the hall. The room has the same florid furniture as the rest of the house. Canopy bed, dresser that’s curved in the front. Wall of windows with no curtains open to the night sky, where the moon hangs over the horizon like a cold eye in the sky.
