Page 9 of Mafia King
He puts the rings in his pocket. “I took her to the other side to get things for the wedding. Lace and almond confetti. Please sit.”
I can’t even believe what a different world she lived in with him.
“So she knew?” I decide to go for his jugular without thinking too long about it. “Or did you just rape her outright?”
“Shut your mouth.” He bolts to standing as if ejected from his seat.
“You did,” I say with one finger up in his face.
“Never. And don’t you ever even say it again.”
“Then you killed her, and took me to get your debt paid.”
“You do not know!” He leaves the sentence without specifics, as if to say it’s not that I’m missing any particular knowledge, but that I—Violetta Moretti—just don’t know.
“Youdo not know, Santino.” My voice hits the ceiling and bounces back twice as strong.“You do not talk. You do not explain. I don’t want to hear it.” I jut my arms forward and push him. He barely moves, as if he knows I’m lying. Ineedto hear it. “You can justify yourself to God.”
“I will.” He takes my wrists in a tight grip. “I will be judged by God and sent to hell by Him. Not by you.”
“Fuck you.”
I try to knee him in the balls, fail, twist, and wind up on my back on the floor with him straddling me at the hips and pinning my wrists above my head. His chest heaves. His eyes are feral. I can hear his pulse roar in his veins.
I am an animal under him, freeing my left wrist for a moment, but he catches it and stops trying to restrain me while his attention is on my clenched fist. He lets my right arm go and reaches into his pocket to retrieve my rings.
“You took these off.”
I say nothing. I have nothing new to add.
“Open.” He shakes my wrist, but I don’t obey. “Violetta.” My name is a warning.
“You stole my sister from me.” The words come out in a spitty, hissy mess. Angry, hot tears well up in my eyes. “You stole my family from me. You stole my life. And you had the audacity to act like your hands were clean this whole time. Fuck. You.”
I spit in his face with the same strength I used to spit on the picture of him and my father, leaving a stringy K from his eyebrow to his upper lip.
He looks as if he’s going to send me to meet my sister.
Instead, he growls one word through clenched teeth. The line of spit moves with his lips. “Open.”
My defiance is used up, and I open my left hand so he can jam the rings onto the fourth finger.
“The only way these rings come off is if someone cuts off the finger. Do you understand?” He leans down so close to me that, if I wanted to, I could lick my spit off his face.
“I’ll keep Rosetta’s ring to remember her.”
With a jerk, he stands over me—one foot on either side of my chest like a highway viaduct over a barren field of rage—slips a handkerchief out of his pocket, and wipes his face.
“You were not the only one on this planet to experience grief.”
Lying on the dining room floor with throbbing wrists and heavy breaths, I stare at the flat white ceiling with the unlit, dripping-crystal chandelier in the center. Sunlight creeps in through from the south, where the glass patio doors face onto the pool.
“But it’s mine,” I say. “She was my sister, and it’s my grief.”
“It’s mine too.”
This truth colors him like a dye that seeps from the inside out. His grief is mine, but it’s not just for Rosetta. It’s for the father he never knew and the mother who abandoned him, for his own disappointments and brokenness.
“I am sorry for your loss, Violetta. I am truly sorry.” He reaches down to help me up.
