Page 16 of Mafia Queen
“She just likes the stone.”
“I’m sorry, Santi. About that and something else.” My hands don’t know what to do with each other, lying in my lap like helpless fish pulled from the water. “Dr. Farina was there. He gave me at least one shot. He didn’t tell me what was in it, but I was unconscious for a few hours, and if there was something else… I don’t know, but…whether it was just one thing or more, it’s not safe for…” I stop because I can’t say baby yet—not to him and not while the situation is so delicate—and I can’t say any of the other words to define this thing that’s still so small and means so much to me.
Tears burn my left eye and fall painlessly from my right.
“It’s going to be okay.” He kisses the top of my head.
Am I talking to myself in his voice? I feel him. I know he’s here. But my heart refuses to believe it. It’s locked against relief.
“I don’t have the right to worry about the baby,” I whisper. “Not after what I just did.” I hear myself dancing around painful words, and I’m angry at myself for playing mind games with my own conscience. “To that kid.”
“Ah,” he says in realization. I expect him to excuse it. Tell me it wasn’t my fault. Tell me I had to. Offer forgiveness I won’t take for myself. But he doesn’t.
He just says, “It changes a person.”
Santino puts his arm around me and kisses my head. He doesn’t say more, doesn’t tell me it’ll be all right or to hush. He just gives me something to lean on until I’m strong enough to fight again.
He holds me close as the car heads down a familiar road. I recognize the green house to the left and the copse of oaks.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“I’m taking you home.”
Home? I don’t have a home. I was taken from my parents’ house, then to my aunt and uncle’s in America, which I was forced from.
None of those places are home to me. Home is with Santino.
But when the car makes the last turn and stops at a familiar gate that guards a modern house filled with gold-painted furniture, I freeze.
There’s a pool behind it, and that’s where I watched him die. I can’t sleep in a bedroom overlooking it. It’s a murder weapon.
“No,” I say.
“No?”
I get out of the car and walk to the gate, the gravel crunching under my feet.
This house. It has too much inside it. Bad memories. Bad decisions. Not just him dying in the pool. But me crying in the corner. Gia beaming over my wedding gown. The look on Santino’s face when I put a gun to his head.
I hear his footsteps on the loose rocks behind me, and when he puts his hands on my shoulders, I relax, but not enough.
“I can’t go here,” I admit.
“I thought you’d prefer it.”
I turn to face him. “Prefer it to what?”
He nods slightly and brings me back to the car, and I follow, trusting I’ll never have to spend another night in that house.
* * *
Secondo Vasto is a triangle.Two sides are tucked into the mountain range, and the river—with its single bridge—is the hypotenuse. The shape of the horizon has always oriented me, even now, heading up the foothills to a fortress I’ve only ever seen from below.
We stop at a set of cast-iron gates at the highest buildable point of the mountain. Stone guardhouses stand on opposite ends of the gate, each flat on top and big enough for two men and their guns. One is built into the sheer rock face. The other is attached to a wall that drops off the steep end of the earth. The day Santino took me to Loretta’s home, this was the house he pointed toward on top of the hill. The one he said his men watched from.
The gates open, and we take a driveway that cuts through a pristine lawn. On the dropside is the back of a white house with a cupola atop the roof—like a watchtower over the world—standing against an expansive view of Secondo Vasto. Five smaller buildings are built into the rock-wall side.
“Welcome toTorre Cavallo,” Santino says. “Your grandfather built this for his American mistress.”
