Page 62 of Mafia Bride
I don’t like when the monster looks like a man. And I don’t like how often he puts on human features, especially lately. It makes it harder to hate him.
The roads turn empty and sparse. I have no idea where the house is and none of this looks familiar. This doesn’t even look like the way we came earlier this morning. Could he be driving me out to the middle of nowhere? Am I now this disposable?
We could be going anywhere. Maybe someplace remote enough to shoot me and bury the body.
“Where’s the house?” I ask, squeezing my thighs to force the fear out of my voice.
“Mmm?” Santino glances up at me in the mirror as he takes another tight turn.
My stomach turns. What if he runs us straight off the road?
“Your house. Where is it?”
“Not here.”
He glances at the road once, takes another tight turn, and looks back up at me. His eyes, I notice, are incredibly expressive. He may keep everything close to the vest, except when he doesn’t, but his eyes are alive. On fire. Devious. Angry. Compassionate. They are like the secret window to his royal soul. And those eyes tell me, in this moment, I have nothing to fear.
He wouldn’t kill me if he stopped someone else from doing so. Would he? He’s threatened a lot of things. Never death.
I’m valuable to him.
With my aunt and uncle, I felt intense love and belonging. Cluttered kitchens, singing, dancing, stories—all of it was our place, our home. But desired? Protected? Possessed body and soul?
“Thank you.” The words feel awkward directed at him, but I ran, and they need to be said.
“For?” He cocks an eyebrow at me in the mirror. It makes him feel more human. How does this devil who just destroyed someone look so much like a hero right now?
“For...saving me.” The words stick in my throat. “For coming for me.”
“You’re my wife,” he says with conviction. “You are Violetta DiLustro. I will protect you with my life.”
And he pretty much just did. A trace of warmth runs through me.
I have to remember who I am. I have to remember, like my zia told me from the day I arrived at their house, I am Emilio Moretti’s daughter. An honorable man who ran his store with integrity, even when he could have made more money cheating, he did it all above board.
That’s what my life is supposed to be.
Not this.
I’m in danger. I know that now. That’s horrible, terrifying. But with someone like Santino to protect me, maybe I can ride it out. I’ll never be able to run again, so maybe I need to embrace this life in any way I can. At least until I have a plan to get out of here that doesn’t rely on me running into a car full of goons.
“Where are we going?” I ask. “Someplace safe?”
“Forzetta,” he says with a tender laugh. “There’s no such thing as safe anymore.”
17
VIOLETTA
Just outside the city proper, where the boundary of my world slopes upward, he drives up into the hills. Over the guardrails on the right, the town stretches below, innocuous and sweet, the older, sleepier arm to a newer college town that bustles and hums. I can see the center square that was designed like an Italian piazza to comfort the immigrants who moved in. The spires of the three Catholic churches built during three eras in the town’s history to accommodate the growth of the population and the intensity of the class divisions shoot upward. I can pick out the public elementary school, and the two parochial; the baseball field they all share, a soccer field financed by all the churches with an extra tray at mass, and yes—theCamorristi Society—because even criminals have children who want to play soccer, even if they call itcalcio.
Santino cuts a right, and it feels like I’m being driven off a cliff, but I don’t gasp or panic, because somewhere in the depths of my lizard brain, I trust him.
My instincts are correct. The driveway slopes down, to a house built into the side of the hill. The entrance is hidden behind huge, fruiting trees, and from the front, I can’t discern much more than the front door, and a separate garage.
He pulls up next to a white BMW. The vanity plate is a combination of letters and numbers I don’t understand, like it’s some inside joke in Italian. I’m an outsider everywhere I go. Never fully fit in with the Americans. Never fully fit in with the Italians. A sudden longing for my sister blooms in my veins, intense and sharp.
I always fit in with Rosetta. Every time.
