Page 23 of Mafia King
“Do you speak?” Lucia asks, suddenly at my elbow.
I jump from surprise. “Sorry, what?”
“Italian.”
“Forgot after years of disuse.” I shake my head with a guilty smile. “You know how it goes.”
She points toward the little girl. “You laughed atFare troppi atti nella in commedia.”
Right. I’m not supposed to understand that. “I was thinking of something else.”
“I bet you were.” Lucia’s mother winks at me.
Standing in that kitchen, the fullness in my heart pushes it into complicated shapes. This is not my family, yet this is my family. I don’t know these women, yet they’re my people.
Once the floor is cleaned, I pick up a job seeding peppers.
“I can’t believe Re Santino’s cock will stay tamed,” someone murmurs in Italian loudly enough for me to hear it.
I’m sure they don’t intend for me to understand, so I keep my eyes down. Everything runs very still. Slowly, I turn to see who spoke and find Lucia’s mother with her head lowered, talking to another woman with dyed black hair who’s trying not to laugh.
“Santino is a whoremaker,” Black Dye replies, looking at me as she fills a pot with water. I pretend to smile and go back to the peppers. “That poor girl. Does she know everyone else knows?”
I work to keep my face even and nonplussed, but inside, everything feels as if it’s dying.
They think I’m a whore? Of course they do. Elettra got shaken into butter and told in no uncertain terms that an attraction to a whoremaker turns a girl into a whore.
My face is hot, my heart races, and I need to get out of the kitchen before everything inside my rib cage explodes. I don’t know if I need to cry or scream, but whatever I do, I won’t do it in this kitchen.
“I-I’ll be right back,” I say to no one and walk numbly in search of a bathroom where I can get behind a closed door.
The house is tight with people. By the time I find a bathroom, my brain is churning mush and all I want to do is vomit.
Everyone knows. Everyone knows. Everyone knows.
Lucia didn’t want to know about my wedding; she wanted it confirmed I was stolen and forced. Everyone knows, and I’m definitely going to vomit.
The bathroom door flies open, and I almost fall into the guy leaving it. I jump back and find myself staring up at the scarred mouth of Damiano Orolio. He carries himself like a typical Secondo Vasto gangster. He doesn’t look like the kind of guy Santino would have around. Too brazen, too cocky, too built like a locomotive.
He looks me up and down in a way no man has dared since I stepped foot into the world as Santino DiLustro’s wife.
“Excuse me,” I finally manage.
He pushes past me with a look of supreme entitlement. I slip inside the bathroom, lock the door, and slide to the floor with my back to the cabinets, trying to still the internal churn.
I am a queen.
I am a queen.
What do queens do when they’ve encased themselves in a stony majesty and still get stabbed in the back?
I kneel at the porcelain altar to hurl, but I do it like royalty.
“Ciao, Damiano!” A man on the other side of the door sounds as though he’s hit the wine hard and it’s hitting him back. “I’m fuckin’ starving.”
“You drink too much.” It must be Damiano who answers.
The rest is muddled in murmurs. They’ve moved down the hall. Since my stomach seems to have settled on its own, I put my ear up to the door.
