Page 78 of Mafia King
“I never said you were!”
“Then quit looking at me like that!”
Angrier than ever, my whole body hurls toward him but slips on a piece of tossed trash, and my world goes sideways. It happens in slow motion, the world turning, the cars honking, the heavy stench of burnt rubber on blacktop.
Santino yanks me back to the side of the road, panting. The driver of the car that almost hit me throws us several middle fingers before peeling back off into traffic.
I could have died, all because of this stupid, awful, horrible group of men who think they can just control the world with—
“And then you go jumping into the road!?” Santino’s angry Italian interrupts my own panic. “You could have been hurt! Get in the car!”
He pushes me back to the car, keeping his body firmly between the rest of the road and me. When I look at him, I see the horror in his eyes. So when he opens my door and pushes me inside, I let him.
I could have died. Again.
When he gets back in the car, I can see he’s exhausted, and it’s because of me. He dragged me into his life, and if you put a gun to my head, I’d bet he regrets it. Without me, he’d be muscling his way through his days according to the rules he grew up with. But here I am next to him, challenging him at every turn.
Santino earned this torture and more for what he did to me. Kidnapping me, imprisoning me, making me love him. I don’t have sympathy for what he’s done and I don’t excuse it. But I still love him, and that’s the absurdity I can’t figure out.
We have to be together for a reason. There has to be a higher cause. Some greater good I can make from what I’ve been through. But first, Gia has to be freed.
We’re about a mile from his house when I break the silence. “Can you pay Marco’s debt?”
He sighs with both impatience and resignation. “Paying the debt insults both men. It says they aren’t in charge of their own affairs.”
“Yeah, well, Marco isn’t or he wouldn’t be in this problem.”
“He’s not in a problem if he can pay it, and he can.”
“By selling his daughter.”
“These are traditions.”
“Change them.”
“Traditions are not laws.” He looks at me when he turns onto the street we live on. “A law is signed one day and changed the next. There’s no congress or parliament to change tradition by signing a piece of paper, because traditions… they are an agreement. No one writes it down. No one has to. The understanding is there.” He jabs his sternum. “The power I have—the power your father had—it is only given because it isagreed.”
My glands spit adrenaline into my bloodstream. I’m mainlining rage so hot I have to clamp my jaw shut and breathe, breathe, breathe. Only when he’s in the driveway can I speak sensibly.
“You’re saying if you use your power to fix the traditions that give it, you lose your ability to wield it.”
“Yes.”
“What’s power for, if you have to work so hard to keep it?”
He parks at the door and waves away Armando, who rushes up to help us out of the car. I’ve twisted around to face Santino, but he won’t look at me.
“You’re not happy,” he says.
“I guess not.”
It’s not hard to admit that, because how can happiness be the point in a marriage arranged by fiat and entered into by force?
“We are Catholic,” he says. “We don’t divorce.”
On his lips, the word divorce sounds like a foreign language. The jab of pain in my chest when my heart skips a beat is fleeting and replaced by a dead weight. Divorce is what people who married for love do when the thing that kept them together dies. The traditions that tie Santino and me are thriving.
“I know.”
