Page 24 of Mafia Queen
“Do you need the crown?” I ask. “To kill them, do you need it?”
“If I have it, Secondo Vasto will follow my lead. Some of Damiano’s men—not all of them, but enough—will abandon him. And when I beat him into the earth, his strongest will follow me instead of trying to take his place. I won’t have to kill them.”
This is the trajectory of my life if he wins this war—from this moment to the point where it disappears over the horizon. My eventual, inescapable intimacy with death. My embrace of the unacceptable. I am already a murderer, and if I continue down this road, I will become harder and harder. I will die brittle and heavy with the bitter taste of borrowed power on my tongue.
“What if we didn’t get the crown?” I say.
He looks at me as if I didn’t hear a word he just said. But I did. I heard all of it.
“What if we just…did a different thing? Made a different choice? What if we didn’t assume it was inevitable? What then?” I lean into him. The bathwater swooshes around me and splashes to the floor. “What if you and I just drove away? As far as we could go…just went. And what if we stopped somewhere and had this baby and a couple more and just…lived?”
“And then?”
How can he not get this? It’s so perfect.
“The war Damiano’s bringing to Secondo Vasto is only a war if he has an enemy. What if we opt out? We leave the crown at the lawyer’s. He can steal it or find some other way to get it. We don’t have to care. Let him have it. We’ll be ten hundred million miles away. We can never think of the stupid crown, Gia, the Orolios, or any of it ever again except when we tell stories about how it brought us together. We can play with our grandkids in an old house, and one day, we’ll die from something old people die of.” I lay my hands on his face the way he’s done to me so many times. His eyelashes are wet from the bath steam, gathered into black blades. “Imagine it. We can be normal.”
My body floods with elation. The unglamorous possibility of the ordinary mixed with the frightening probability of his volatility is a powerful drug.
“Me?” he says, taking my wrists and putting my hands against his bruised chest. “Withme?”
I take a deep breath.
It’s more than bringing Santino into harmony with the modern world. There’s salvation for both of us in normal. Normal people don’t kill their enemies, watching the life go out of their eyes. Normal people aren’t forced into unforgivable sins.
“We’ll be free,” I say. “Really, really free.”
He rubs his eyes as if he has to clear out the junk. They’re bloodshot when he’s done, and yet…he still can’t see what’s right in front of him.
“In this life you made in your head,” he says, “who will I be?Whatwill I be?” He presses his fingers to his chest, thrusting his head forward. “I can’t crawl out of my skin and into this TV show you imagine.”
Why is he not jumping on this? What’s the holdup here? I’m presenting him with a treasure map, and he’s disputing the value of what’s under the X.
“I don’t understand how what I just described is unappealing.”
“No, Violetta. Of course I want a quiet life. I don’t reject your version of normal. It rejects me.”
He’s terrified. By suggesting a life far away from his world, I’ve struck fear into his heart. Maybe I’m going too quickly, but it’s not like I have a choice.
“How do you know?” I ask. “Is the king of this little place really all you are?”
He looks away. I’m hurting him, and I don’t know how to stop.
“Please, Santino,” I plead. “This is our only chance. You rule me. Always. Please. If we get that crown and you win, I don’t know what I’ll become. I don’t know whatwe’llbecome.”
He settles his hands on my knees. The plopping water and softly cracking bubbles relax me into the pause between. I want this moment to last forever, with the hands I thought I’d never feel again, and the echoes of the voice I thought I’d never hear again. I want to sit in silence with the things I thought I’d lost forever, because I know it won’t last, and I’ll grieve over and over.
When he touches my belly, I put my hand over his and hold it there.
“I’m scared something bad happened,” I say, looking at the ceiling.
Now that Santino is here with me, the questions I couldn’t ask come flooding in like a test I’ve been cramming for.
How vulnerable is the pregnancy this early?
What’s the chance I can carry it?
Will the baby be broken?
