Page 36 of Mafia Queen
Fuck this crazy fucking woman for not moving.
“Please. For the sake of everylibrettowriter in the world.Basta.” My shout echoes off the side of the mountain, but she does not move. “My wife needs you.”
Done hesitating, she goes for her fucking bag.
10
VIOLETTA
The bleeding tapers off. The pain subsides. I curl into the hot water bottle and sleep for twenty-five hours, only getting up twice for the bathroom like a zombie.
The spark inside me was snuffed, along with the hope that Santino and I could ever melt into the world’s background and just be together with this child.
Tears don’t come when I try to cry it out. Instead, my stomach growls like an angry cat. I need to eat. Opening the closet out of sheer curiosity and optimism, I find my clothes have been moved here. The dresser drawers are full of my things. It’s as if my life’s been transported whole cloth from Santino’s house to my newly claimed family fortress in the mountains.
I shower, line my underpants, and—because I can’t bear the thought of being constricted or even seen—I put on a black tank top and loose pants.
My left eyelid is brushed with a web of broken purple veins and hangs lower than the right. Matching semicircles hover inside a sickly yellow corona.
The wound reminds me of what I’ve gone through. Santino is alive, but the rest of it really happened. I was kidnapped, drugged, treated like an object with temporary value, and only saved by a miracle. The life seeded in me wasn’t so lucky. I’ll never know for sure if it was the drugs or the stress or if I would have lost it anyway, but what does it matter?
They were careless and disrespectful with my family and me.
That one broken eye squints to see something it can’t when all the light gets in. A shadow behind me and before me. A darkness that’s not anger with Damiano and Gia. I do not feel a fiery rage at the thought of them taking everything from me for the sake of an ancient artifact. What I feel is stretched—as if some internal organ has expanded and hardened, or an intangible that I carried inside me has found its shape. It’s a feeling given form, and it’s the colors of the bruise—purple and yellow—mixed to mud, fired to solid ice, and left to harden in the cracks of my heart.
When Santino saw me in my Z’s hallway, I was a child. He saw something I thought was the woman inside me. It wasn’t. He saw this calcifying mass of darkness in its shadow form. It fills in my broken places, holding me together, making a shell over the grief and despair.
Now I can say to my reflection what I’ve been too sick and afraid to think.
“They’re all going to die for this.”
* * *
Celia smellslike basil and rosemary, and it’s comforting that no matter how much I change, some things in the world stay the same. In the middle of our embrace, my stomach logs another complaint.
“Let me get you something,” she says.
“Just toast, if you can. Where is he?” I ask, sitting in the little kitchen nook.
I don’t have to say his name. The pronoun is enough. I need to know how he’s planning to kill the people who destroyed my pregnancy. Even if they didn’t mean it and I miscarried from stress or the opioids. Even if what they almost got away with had nothing to do with the actual bleeding, it’s their fault. I want a list of the plans, the timing, and the amount of pain he will inflict. I want veto power on anything too merciful.
“Around.” Celia sets about making the toast on a cast-iron skillet—old school—while I wonder where exactly “around” is in this compound. “It’s been a little hectic around here.” She touches a corner of bread and snaps her arm back, shaking her hand from the heat. “Men coming and going. And one woman.”
She picks up a butter knife and waves it toward the back doors, where rows of tables are being set up. A woman in a green dress unfolds chairs.
Loretta.
“What is she doing here?”
“There are fifty men here.” Celia shrugs and slides the toast onto a plate. “I can’t do everything myself.”
Santino brought Loretta to help? I don’t know what to make of his choices. I find it hard to believe she doesn’t still desire him the way any normal woman would. If he thinks he’s going to live in some backward paradise where the husband keeps a wife and a mistress under the same house, he has something coming.
Loretta slides open the door and enters the kitchen, seeing me right away. “You’re up!”
When she double kisses me, I stay stiff and unresponsive.
“Ah, your eye,” she says with concern.
