Page 13 of Mafia Queen
I can get through this. Santino’s spirit is here with me. He gives me strength. Even in death, he is my courage. My vision.
Father Alfonso clears his throat before asking, “Do you, Violetta Antonia Moretti, take this man to be your husband?”
I open my eyes. Damiano stands over me expectantly, his one eye narrowed. He can’t see my face through the veil. I lean into him, and he takes me by the upper arms.
“Say it,” he says, jugular pulsing.
“I do—” My hand juts straight for his throat on his blind side, seeking the pumping vein with the Virgin’s shard. “Not.”
I’m grabbed, and there’s a shuffle I can’t keep track of, but I wave my fist with the sharp porcelain jutting from between my fingers, looking for a body to cut. When I find resistance in a dark suit, I slash left and right, up and down, screaming, “Non lo voglio!” Blood splashes on my veil, dotting it with black. I scream as he drops to one knee with one hand over his throat.
This is exactly as it should be. It is correct. His blood is payment for a debt, and every drop reweights the scales of justice.
I am righteousness and law. I am power and fire.
Slashing at the top of his head—at any bit of flesh I can find—I am no longer who I was.
The gunshots come from deep in my lungs as a primal death scream, and I fall on him, punching down with the plaster edge jutting from my fist as he bleeds and bleeds.
The cracks of gunfire are my soul shattering. They’re the blood jets opening under my thrusts. His wrists, his forehead, his choking mouth.
Thepop-pop-popis my rage clicking into my ecstasy with every cut, and the gunpowder is the smell of that union.
I am in a dream state when I’m pulled off him, screaming curses, flailing to cut him open again and again, until I wake enough to really see the man below me, and it’s not Damiano.
It’s the boy with the meatball eyes, widened to darkening headlights.
A voice I know and love reaches through the rush in my ears, and something I’ve lost and not had a moment to grieve for is found.
“Forzetta!”
6
VIOLETTA
St. Augustine said that to sing in worship is to pray twice, and Father Alfonso DeLuca takes that to heart, canting every singsong word of the ceremony as the boy twitches in an ever-growing pool of blood.
“Have you come freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?” The priest does not stop a sacrament. Not even matrimony, with the groom sputtering and bleeding at his feet, and my husband—who I swore was dead—in front of me.
“How?” I ask, though that’s just curiosity peeking out from behind tentative relief and joyful disbelief.
“Where did he go?”
He can only mean the man who kidnapped me and tried to force me to marry him. I point at the man on the floor making the burbling sound. We both know that’s not him, but I point anyway.
Santino shouts to someone outside the tunnel of my attention.Find him. Someone shouts back.We don’t know. AndWhere? And they swear they checked everywhere from the front door to the sacristy to the basement. All the while, I watch the boy’s bleeding slow with the beating of his heart.
I should feel something about this body. I don’t. I only feel relief that my husband is here, but I’m too deep in shock to move toward him.
Santino takes a corner of the veil and pulls it off. Even with the lace grid gone, he’s still blurred when he gasps at the condition of my left eye.
“Damiano did this.” His words are flat and emotionless, as if he’s speaking through a cinder block wall he’s erected for my protection. “He’s going to have more than a bandage on his eye when I’m done with him.”
“I’ll be fine,” I say, pushing his hand off the bruise and pointing at the man I cut open.
But him? That’s what my pointing finger asks. He will not be fine, and he’s not who should be there.
“Will you honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?” Father Alfonso goes on, rocking back and forth, blind or indifferent to everything around him. The vows are a chanting backdrop to what I’ve done here.
