Page 64 of Mafia Bride
“Let my wife call her zia,” he says.
What is going on here?
“Okay,” Loretta says, motioning me inside. I don’t go. I don’t take orders from her.
Santino puts his hand on my shoulder and I look over to him.
“Are you coming in?” I ask him, even though I know he’s not.
“I’ll be back.”
“When?”
“You’re safe here.”
Turning away from his intensity, I look up the driveway, and between the trees, where the high fence is visible. Behind me, same thing. Dense trees and if you look closely in the pores of the foliage, a fence with barbed wire on top. One entrance with a driveway, and on the other side…a steep hill.
Loretta’s also protected, but by whom? Santino? And if so, why?
“Look,” he said, pointing up the hill, where another house overlooked the town from a higher vantage point. “That’s Antonio Cavallo’s house.”
“Antonio Cavallo’s dead twenty years already.”
“But his family isn’t, and I run that family here. So…” He takes one of my hands in two of his, and I let him. “You’re watched. Day and night.”
“You’re watching me?” I ask, pulling my hand away to point up the hill.
“My men are.”
“So I can’t run, right? That’s why?”
He scoffs with a little laugh.
“Loretta won’t stop you from running.”
Every time I think I get a handle on the man I was forced to marry, I’m met with new surprises. Who is this woman? For him to place me, his wife, with her, she must be trustworthy. Or at least safe enough, since we’ll never be safe again, so sayeth the king.
Judging from her initial reaction, the embrace when they met, and the way she’s looking at him right now, she’s clearly someone who’s used to touching him the way she wants. A black snake of jealousy slithers up my spine and I don’t know why.
I don’t have any real reason to be jealous, right?
I don’t have the reason or the right, nor would any such feelings come from a place of self-respect, because he’s a kidnapper, murderer, and overall scumbag who doesn’t deserve to make me jealous.
It must be a weakness I opened up when I failed to get away, then saw a man shot. It’s just fake intensity during a too-intense experience.
Stuffing the jealousy down deep, I take everything that happened today and jam it along with it. I’m going to act cold and heartless. It’s a total fake act, but it’s the best I can do. I cannot examine anything too closely right now or I’ll unravel.
“You’re going to kill whoever sent those guys?” I ask as if I don’t care one way or the other.
He doesn’t answer with words, but he does something so shocking, it’s over before I can stop it.
He kisses the top of my head. Just like that, he anoints me, and I let him.
When he walks back to the car, he pulls a part of me with him, and I don’t know which part. It’s not the part that loves, and the part that desires has no string.
Maybe it’s the part that will always be from Napoli. Or the part that can understand Italian but not speak it. It’s the part that—on my first plane ride—looked out the window at takeoff with my nose and hands pressed to the glass, wondering if somehow my dead parents would be at our destination, or if I was being taken from the possibility of their return.
He nods at me before getting in the car, and suddenly, I’m a five-year-old who doesn’t understand the permanence of death.
