Page 7 of Mafia King
Me, doing anything he suggests, is self-harm. Disobedience is a reflex, not a choice, but it’s a choice I would make even if I thought about it.
When I started my most recent semester at college, I had no idea I would end up married to the most powerful mobster in Secondo Vasto, living in his dollhouse, helplessly and carelessly ripped apart in body and mind. In a beachside bedroom on the shore of the Amalfi coast, I finally let myself believe my husband had chosen me. That when he took me from my family, it was as much for love as honor; as much about what he was owed for my father’s debts as what he would have wanted anyway. A desire no less intense for being poorly expressed and cruelly implemented.
I gave him my body and my pleasure. I let him rule over me, and I let myself love being ruled by him, opening the fingers that had clenched around my own desires—relaxing into an unturned palm to show him the shards of ancient clay, fired in my false freedoms, broken in my protective fist, and I said, Take it. Take it all.
Like a man making a wish over his birthday candles, he blew the shards and dust away, leaving me with nothing to hold. He took nothing for himself because he didn’t want what I had as much as he wanted me to offer it all to him.
I understand why he’d bring her here to marry her since she wasn’t quite eighteen.
Santino DiLustro had been engaged to my sister, Rosetta, long before I was ever in the picture. He didn’t want me. He didn’t desire me. He wanted my sister, my beautiful sister, who had been stolen from me once when he took her to a festering misery of a country, and again when he let her die ruined and alone—wearing the same ring he won’t let me take off.
I turn the stone toward my palm so I don’t have to see the way the sun hits it, and I eat my tasteless toast.
I am a woman of precious stone and solid honor, and when I pushed him away our first night back, screaming those three words—la tua bella la tua bella—his lack of violence or threats spoke volumes. He knows he fucked up.
Good.
He knows I hate him.
Even better.
I don’t know the thickness of the line I’m walking, or what I’ll do in the moment before he does something violent enough to push him to reach for a cigarette. And that danger has its own buzz of electricity. I’ll sayla tua bellaas long as it fucks him up, even if it fucks me up.
I want him to hurt. I want him to struggle.
I want him gone.
I can’t wish him dead. Death is too good for him. And all this wanting and wishing does nothing. I have neither money nor friends. I have no choice but to make him as miserable as I am.
“Violetta,” he says, and I realize the unchewed toast is putty in my mouth.
“La tua bella?” I say with a lilt that could mean, “yes, dear?” or “how can I help you?”
When the women gossiped that he was a whoremaker, they weren’t talking about Loretta. They were talking about Rosetta.
“Please don’t do this anymore,” he asks softly from the other side of a stone wall of silence.
Did he woo her, I wonder? I’mForzetta, but she wasla tua bella. Did he bring her flowers and trinkets to show he was thinking about her? When the debt came due, did he ask for her hand and think he was getting the better of the deal? How does he like the interest on the loan now that he’s stuck with me?
Did he steal me the way he did because he didn’t really want me?
Was she taken like I was, by surprise and against her will? Did she sleep in the same dollhouse room, overlooking the pool he slices into every day? Did she spend the first nights huddled in the same corner, wishing her life was over?
I remember she was excited to go to Italy, and I was jealous that she got to go. Did he meet her there? Did he steal her there? Did he drop on her like a surprise? Or did he afford Rosetta a loving kindness he’s never extended to me—cherishing one sister and abusing the other?
The more corporeal questions practically ask themselves.
Did they share the same room? Was she willing to open her heart and so much more to him as soon as he took her? Was he gentle with her? Or did he rough her up like he did with me? Did he stick those powerful thumbs up her ass and bring her to gasping orgasms?
Did we really ever share the same man?
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can’t stop hurting.
I thought I could change things. I thought I could carve my own path.
I was wrong.
I’m the same trapped, scared girl I was in the wedding chapel. How it is possible to go from so blissfully happy to terrified all over again?
