Page 8 of Mafia Bride
“You know how moms get about their daughters.” I don’t actually know, because my parents died when I was very young. Still, I think back to the argument between my aunt and uncle early this morning, and it’s enough to elicit empathy. “Family cares, even if they do it rough.”
I close the door. Elettra sits on the blue toilet so I can tend to her arm. She’s still as shaken as I am, though more, given what happened. What about this man caused my aunt to go ballistic? He’s scary as hell, sure. But that didn’t justify calling Elettra a whore waiting to happen.
Is that why Zio lost his shit this morning?
And what does that say about Santino? Is he the kind of man who only likes fallen women? Does he ruin all the girls foolish enough to flirt with him? Does he use them and then abandon them?
I try not to dwell on it too much, instead keeping focus on carefully bandaging my cousin’s arm and pretending it’s part of my final, but I can’t stop twisting back to it. So many arguments in our home today, violence from my aunt, all over this mysterious, dark man.
The king, about to receive hospitality from a man he’d made kneel and weep.
What would such a man do to me?
Would he make me kneel and weep too?
“Violetta?” Elettra says. My hands have frozen a Band-Aid inches from her wound. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I place the adhesive strip. “Just…thinking.”
“About?”
About a man so mighty he’s called a king.
About a man whose power I felt so strongly, twice, that the memory of it lives deep in my body.
About the fear of him taking away my defenses, opening me the way heat spreads the slashes at the top of a loaf of bread, crusting my insides against my outside.
About me liking it.
Wanting it.
Fearing it.
I like sweet blonde boys who demand nothing and don’t care if I stop calling them.
I don’t want a dark-eyed king.
Except the one.
Which I can’t, because he’s terrifying.
I can’t hold the contradictions in my head, and shake them away.
“What’s going on out there?” I ask.
“I have no idea,” Elettra whispers. She watches me smooth down the bandage. “My brother was weird this morning, too. He said Daddy would never deal a daughter to the capos.”
Ah, this was about the part of my community I never had to think about. My uncle was in construction, so he dealt with it, paying what he had to pay and staying in the good graces of the criminals in charge. We observed the law ofomertàlike a religion.
The law ofomertàis simple. You don’t speak of who runs Secondo Vasto. You don’t say or even think the words. You don’t dream of them or what they do.
You certainly don’t judge it, because the mob makes the world go around, and in the same way you don’t think of gravity or the forces that keep the planet in orbit, you don’t spend time thinking about the corruption or crime. You just pretend you’re more American than anything else, because the lie ofomertàis about so much more than the mafia.
“So,” I started, trying to find the best phrasing for the question. “He’s afraid Uncle Angelo’s going to give them one of you guys?”
Sometimes, at the church on the Secondo Vasto our town is named for, it’s whispered that a daughter is dealt to a capo for a debt. The weddings are quick and surprising, and the daughter in question denies it’s anything less than love.
I don’t actually believe it, and I don’t have to worry about it. My father’s dead, and only a father can offer a daughter as payment for a debt. Rosetta and I were worth nothing to the Z’s when they took us in and loved us like the children they’d never have.
