Page 1 of Mafia Bride
Prologue
VIOLETTA
The first time I see Santino, I don’t know how old he is, but I am 12, and he is a man. Though I expect him to carry all the subtle and seductive dangers of men, his menace is controlled, with the direction and force of gravity.
He comes to my uncle’s house, where I’ve lived since I was a child, after my parents were shot in the streets of Naples.
He stands at the door. Sunlight behind him. Silhouette of a god. Perfect. Michelangelo’s David, saying my uncle’s name—Guglielmo—with an accent that sounds like the wind in the grape vines and the voice of a volcano consciously choosing not to erupt.
My Zia Madeline hustles me into the kitchen, but he’s already let himself in, and for the moment he’s in the doorframe, daylight is shut out. The shadows become the light, and I see him with eyes still tightly closed against the sun.
A girl cannot cry hard enough to summon a devil like him. All her pain won’t be enough to drive him out of hell.
I’m different.
When he lays eyes on me, Zia pulls me away, but a part of me stays where his attention pins me. He’s powerful enough to separate me from my ghost. So even though I’m behind a closed door with Zia, I’m also in the hallway with him, in that moment forever, when the darkness in his eyes recognized the darkness in mine.
1
VIOLETTA
“Incoming!”
The deep voice echoes off the library’s high ceiling just as a paper airplane whizzes over Scarlett’s shoulder and drops on my anatomy book. Scarlett yips in surprise, looking behind her at a group of backwards-cap-wearing, goatee-sporting frat boys in shirts with arm holes bigger than their IQs. One jogs toward us under the pretense of retrieving his projectile. The librarian abandons her desk and strides to them like a woman ready to single-handedly tear down the patriarchy.
“Hey,” Goatee greets me with a smile. His teeth must have cost his parents a fortune, but no amount of money can hide eyes dulled by entitlement. “You wanna keep that?” He juts his chin to the plane that is perched on my textbook. The name RANDY is scrawled on a wing over ten digits.
“You can keep it if you want,” his friend says with a wink.
Casually, I pass the plane back. Goatee takes the hint with the grace of a newborn Labrador and turns his attention to Scarlett. Before he can offer her his number, the librarian’s heels click over.
“Back to your seats,” she whispers sotto, shouting and hissing at the same time, which they must teach you in library school. “Or go.” Her arm juts to the side, one long red nail directed to the door. Between the heels and the nails, I suspect she has an exciting life outside the university library.
“This?” I wave my hand at the entirety of the library and the boorish douchebags swaggering out of it. “I won’t miss.”
“You don’t like being interrupted by a couple of keggerheads?” Scarlett sniffs. She’s never been the one to care about the frat boys, but give her a brooding loner, and she falls down swooning. “Maybe rethink your summer in Greece, then. I mean, fraternities are Greek. It’s probably in their blood.”
Our summer plans were always varied, but I hadn’t left the United States since I arrived from Italy as an orphaned five-year-old, so I could barely wait to get to my trip to Santorini and Malta.
“They’re European,” I reply, totally invested in my daydream of relaxing train rides from beach to pristine beach, where all the boys wear caps frontward and their facial hair commits fully to either a beard or skin. “Different.”
“Men are the same everywhere.” Scarlett flips her own page. “Be careful you’ll get…you know?”
“Sunburned?”
“Is that what you call it in Italian?”
A hardshushcomes from the librarian’s desk.
“This is my leap into adulthood.” I straighten myself up as tall as possible. “Not a leap into kissing my way across southern Europe.”
Mostly. Kind of. My hopes and fears were pretty similar.
“Well,” Scarlett whispers. “Summer can’t happen until we pass this trauma unit final.” She flips to chapter five.
An old familiar itch settles between my shoulder blades, one that chases me during every study session imagining myself faced with true bodily trauma, and knowing exactly what to do about it.
Prevent further injury, stabilize, transport if necessary. That’s it. Everything else feeds into those steps, and nothing else matters in an emergency.
