Page 89 of Mafia Bride
Not that we are anything alike or that we understand each other. He took me from one cage and put me in this one that he constructed around himself.
Maybe.
He doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t either.
Maybe.
Whatever’s happened in my life, there’s only one person who knows and understands what it is, and that’s not me.
So I go downstairs, through the dark house and outside, where Santino comes up for air on the side of the pool and catches sight of me when he shakes the water out of his hair.
“It’s good to see you,” he says, and for once, I believe him.
It’s good to see him too, but I don’t owe him a kind word. Or maybe my resistance is just the fake American playacting I’ve been doing my whole life.
“What are you looking at?” he asks as if he doesn’t know.
An American captor under an American moon, I want to tell him.
Instead, I’m honest.
“You.”
His features are dark in the moonlight, so the predatory grin that crawls across his face is stripped of the pleasing costume. Teeth glow white and perfect—sharp in the front to bite me to pieces, framed by points to break my skin, and flat near the jaw’s source of power so my body can be ripped apart.
He pushes back from the wall and does a somersault underwater. His abs glow in the pool’s light as he pushes off. He must know he’s as beautiful as any sleek cat at the top of the food chain. He must know he can use this to lure me, shock me with a venomous bite so he can luxuriate in eating me, discarding the bones, and leaving the rest in a dollhouse built into the side of a hill.
I’m terrified of these visions. When he gets out of the pool, dripping and shining, my blood quickens to run away, go back to my three-walled room, but I can’t. Like a gazelle abandoned in the high grass, I sit still, waiting for the culmination I was born for.
“I don’t want to hear any more lies,” I say.
“What don’t you believe?”
That I know myself.
That my life before you was the one I was meant to live.
That you give a shit about me.
He almost looks boyish in the light, shadows erasing the lines and scars and ferocity sitting in his cheeks. His hair is tussled, his teeth gleam. He smells of soap and chlorine. I want to press my nose against his neck and breathe it all in.
“I’m sorry, my little violet.” He cups my cheek and strokes me with his thumb. I find myself leaning into it, lapping up all the attention he’s willing to give.
Where’sForzetta, in this moment?
When did she become the little violet, turning her face toward a monster’s palm to tempt her lips into kissing it?
Before I can, he takes his hand away from my cheek to crouch in front of me.
“This hurts you more than being dragged into a car,” he says.
Looking at the space between my feet, I nod.
“Why?”
He’s being more than nice. He’s showing compassion and I want to hate him for it, but I just don’t have the strength. I have no one else to talk to.
“I thought I was different.”
