Page 91 of Mafia Queen
I close my eyes and sigh. There’s nothing she can do. This room has no windows to open and no door with a key she can steal for me. All I have are silent water pipes and gas lines I cannot break. The room on the other side of the wall has a couch, and chairs, and bloodstained hedge clippers.
With my left hand, I clench through pain to make eighty percent of a fist. The plan I’m trying to execute will probably get me killed unless I can cut a pipe on the other side of this wall.
“You want to help me get out?” I ask.
“If I could—”
“What if you could?”
There’s a pause. I’m sure she’s rethinking this, and I’ll be stuck in here with a gun and nothing to shoot besides myself.
“Tell me what you need,” she says after a deep breath.
“When this is done, I still have to kill you. I’ve never killed a woman, but I’ve never met one who earned her death with such enthusiasm.”
“I know.”
She knows. Nice to embrace natural laws men are sworn to uphold. It’s almost enough to make me trust her, which I don’t…but that leaves me in a windowless, doorless room, slowly starving while my wife is hunted like a dog. Inaction is not a choice.
“Look around the tool bench behind the couch. Tell me what you find.”
27
VIOLETTA
My spurts of competence are replaced by a single hum of panic. I have to get out of here. I have to find him. I’m not going to stay trapped behind a gate, waiting for messages or threats, when I know where he is.
This is the third time since Santino left that I’ve been warned someone is coming up the mountain, and it’s the first time I’m prepared to do something about it. My skin tingles, and my muscles throb. I’m enflamed with the possibility of finding him, touching him, hearing his voice. I have never wanted anything as much as I want him back.
I walk out of the office with the box under my arm. All the men—young and old, experienced and green, the tough guys and the softer soldiers—all of them watch me go down the stairs and past the kitchen, waiting for me to tell them what to do, but not getting close enough to ask. How did Santino manage so many of them?
They hang back as if they’re too afraid to approach me.
Celia has no such apprehension, following me onto the lawn where the crickets have taken over the night’s song.
“Violetta,” she says, catching up. “Where are you going?”
“I know where Santino is.”
“Thank God.” She makes the sign of the cross. Habit demands I do the same, but the box is under my right arm, and prayers are for the powerless. “Are they going to get him?”
“I am. No one’s doing for me what I have the authority to do myself.”
“Take me,” she says. It takes me a moment to understand that Santino’s cook wants to join me on what could be a suicide mission. “Santino took me in when no one else would. He kept me when my father demanded me back to marry me off.”
My gaze falls to her exposed forearms and the cigarette burns her father gave her when she disappointed him.
“I owe him my life, and I’m tired of sitting back and waiting for the right things to happen,” she adds.
“They’re coming for us,” Loretta calls when she’s halfway between us and the house.
Celia’s eyes go wide. Obviously, word hadn’t gotten to the kitchen yet.
“They want to trade Santino for the crown,” I say.
“You guys”—Vito gets the courage to approach—“they’ll be at the gate in a few minutes. You can’t stay out here.”
“I know,” I say. “How many are there?”
