Page 49 of Mafia Queen
His confidence wraps around me like a bulletproof blanket. It’s untested until I’m shot at, but I believe it will keep me safe.
13
VIOLETTA
He drives up the mountain in a silence so hard and thick, I’m afraid trying to break it will shatter me. We pass three checkpoints. The guards at the entrance to Torre Cavallo are more serious and more heavily armed than the last time I was up here. Even Santino can’t pass without having his car inspected.
He gets out and speaks to them in Italian. I hear relief. Success. He’s alive. Half the conversation is lost in the wind. I’m desperate to know all the details, yet I want to run out there and change the subject. Every brain cell needs to be on getting a crown I didn’t want to win a war we didn’t start.
We’re cleared, Santino returns to the car, and the gate opens. When we pass, it clangs closed.
“What’s the plan?” I ask in the short space between the gate and the house.
“Find Damiano. Find Gia.” Santino stops in front of the house. “Take what’s ours.”
“Then what?”
Then wipe them from the earth. That’s what I want him to say. Fuck the crown. But he doesn’t answer. He just gets out and crosses to my side, avoiding the question. He must think my “then what” requires a promise to be normal, but he has to know that’s over.
“If there’s going to be trouble,” I say, “I want to get my family and bring them up here. My Zio Guglielmo and Zia Madeline. Whoever’s at their house while this is going on. My Aunt Anna has to be there. All of them.”
“It will be done.” He helps me onto my feet, and in doing that, he’s the man who married me, not the one who promised the earth and stars. Who squeezed my face to get my mouth open wide enough to say my vows. Hard and cold. All business. Even when he kisses my forehead. “You go inside.”
He walks away from the grand mansion toward a row of smaller houses built into the side of the mountain. I’m not afraid he won’t wipe out the people who did this. I’m terrified of something much more real.
“Wait!”
He turns when I call out, standing ten feet tall with twenty feet worth of impatience.
“Is this…?” There are too many people here. I can’t say this halfway across a lawn, so I run to him. “Just tell me, is this going to be like it was? Where you show up in bed sometimes, but not always? Am I an afterthought again?”
“You were never an afterthought.”
“Then come home to me at night.”
“We’ll see.”
“You’ll do more than see. You’ll follow that rule, or you’ll win the world and lose me.”
Holding the side of my face, he pulls me into him. His lips are soft and yielding, and his tongue is tender. His kiss makes a lie of the stone he’s turned into.
“I will not lose you,” he whispers with his forehead touching mine. “L’amore
governa senza regole.”
Love rules without rules.
“Fuck you,” I whisper back, but he lets me go and walks to the little buildings, flanked by men I don’t know. “Fuck you,” I say to myself. “I love you.”
* * *
Naked.Alone. Wet. The doctor cleaned me out, so the bleeding is gone now, but disappointment will flow out of me until my heart decides it’s had enough.
Too drained to stand, I sit on the tile ledge that was built into the shower wall, then slide to the floor, putting the bench at my back.
“Damiano Orolio,” I say, watching the water spiral down the drain. “Dr. Farina. Gia Polito. Father Alfonso.” The bloody face of the woman stumbling out of the building had nothing to do with any of this. Revenge is for her too. “Cosimo Orolio,” I add, then start over. “Damiano Orolio, Dr. Farina…”
Without Santino here, it all hits me. The blood-soaked bedsheets. The violation of the drugs. The explosion. The crown I never wanted but now need. The impending war. And remnants of the old sorrows. The horrifying second wedding. The throat I slashed. Even leftover bits of grief from Santino’s death-that-wasn’t settle in the corners like dust bunnies.
