Page 38 of Mafia Queen
“Why would I?” He takes my wrists and keeps my hands close to his heart.
“You’d spontaneously combust.Poof. Go up in flames.”
He raises an eyebrow and fails at taming a smirk. Let him laugh. I have things to say.
“Don’t make me explain the science of it,” I continue. “It’s got to do with the friction created when you rub your dick against the natural order of things. Okay? So I’m not worried about Loretta,per se.”
“If you want her to go,” he whispers close, “I’ll send her away. I want you to be happy.”
My husband’s face is soft for me, but I see the hardness of a man who has had to make difficult decisions, and the regal indifference he will exhibit when he sends Loretta away.
“No,” I say. “It’s fine. She’s all right. But there’s history, and I don’t want it to come up in conversation. I don’t want to hear about how much you liked tastingficaor how rough you were or any shit like that, because I won’t take it out on her. I’ll take it out on you.”
For a moment, I worry that I’ve overstepped into a serious threat, but he smiles.
“You make me weak. I’m standing here, ready to promise my woman anything and everything to not take her jealousy out on me. Without a single detail from your lips, I find myself afraid you’ll take your love away. Who would I be then, my violet? Without you loving me, who am I?”
Before I can explain that’s not what I had in mind, he spins me around and—gently but firmly—pushes my back against the wall with my hands over my head. My body is stretched before him, and like an animal, he runs his nose along the edge of my jaw to inhale my scent.
“So I need to know,” he continues. “how will you abuse me if you’re unhappy, my violet?”
“I’ll come into bed naked and suck your dick.”
“This is not much of a punishment.”
“I’m not done.”
He kisses me over and over and says, “Go ahead then.”
“I’ll take it, but I won’t swallow. So when I kiss you, I can wash your filthy mouth out with your own cum.”
He keeps his grip on me when he laughs, but lets go when he kisses me, still smiling as he wraps his arms around me so tightly I’m lifted from the ground.
“Violetta,” he says into my shoulder, rocking me back and forth as he repeats my name. “I didn’t imagine a woman like you existed.” He pulls away, brushing my hair from my face with tender urgency. “You won’t ever hear a word about the past. I will treat your heart with care… as if it’s fragile, when it’s not. And I’ll love it as if it’s my own, because it is.”
We kiss again, and the world falls away. We are a normal couple worrying about normal things, a mortgage, a birthday party, who’s doing the dishes tonight. It’s as if there’s no crown, no war… nothing but us.
“Come,” Santino says after a one minute eternity has passed. “Let’s get you to the doctor.”
11
SANTINO
I park the Alfa Romeo near a field with rows of white tents and signs pointing students toward the first letter of their last name. Registration day at the university. If her life had gone to plan, Violetta would be here with a list of classes, but she stopped asking about it, so I stopped promising it.
She’d be pregnant, but that stopped too.
Everything stops for this war.
In the waiting room of the student clinic, a girl with a nose ring and her mother try not to stare at me with loathing, but can’t help themselves. They know I end what other people begin.
“I don’t think they like me,” I murmur to Violetta.
She picks up a magazine, flips through it, and holds it up to hide our faces. “They think you gave me the black eye.”
“Cosa?” I ask herwhat,but I am not as surprised as offended. I need to explain to every one of them that I do not, will not, cannot ever harm this woman.
“Violetta?” a nurse calls from the desk.
