Page 23 of Mafia Queen
He shoves forward and buries himself, taking me all the way back to reality.
8
VIOLETTA
Santino rolls up a towel and puts it on the bath ledge behind me so that I can lean my head back comfortably. The waterline of scalding heat cuts across my chest. Bubbles pop like rice cereal. I am sore and satisfied, but most importantly, I’m alive, and so is Santino. When I close my eyes, I still feel that fist hitting me, I still smell the incense and see the growing pool of blood in the church…but none of it is accompanied by the same grief.
He is here with me, and I’m never losing him again.
Downstairs, men stomp their feet, bark in conversation, and even laugh as if their boss wasn’t just saved from a bullet by a cigarette lighter. I haven’t counted the guys in the halls, but it seems like a couple of dozen. Enough to run a business in a small town, but not enough to win a war for it.
I open my eyes to find Santino naked, standing over me with a nasty bruise on his chest that—from the dark center to the blue flames radiating outward—is not much smaller than a dinner plate.
Even wounded, he is a work of beauty. Sword and shield. Warrior and protector. Attacker and armor.
Who else would accept me with my bloodstained soul?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re mad.”
“Someone hurt you.” He eases himself into the tub. Water and bubbles splash over the side as he settles across from me. He can’t lean back with the faucet behind him, so he sits with his back straight and my legs draped over his thighs.
“So you’re not mad at me?”
“Why would I be?” He runs his hands under my knees and clasps my hands.
“Because I killed someone, and I’m sad about it, but I needed to do it. I wanted to. I think…” A part of me runs in front of my words, palms out, screamingdon’t say this, even if you mean it, never say it. But I mean it. “I enjoyed killing him.”
Lifting my hands above the waterline, he inspects the blood embedded in my fingernails.
“And this should make me mad?”
“It’s not what you wanted in a wife.”
“For half of my life,” Santino starts, running a little brush against the top of the soap, “I didn’t think I’d marry a woman. I was set up to marry a crown. A position.” He scrubs the blood from under my nails. I can barely stand to look at it. “Maybe I married a fight for territory and respect. But the woman?” He shrugs. “Irrelevant. Emilio gave me a girl to keep the crown in his family.” He switches hands. “What I wanted in a wife didn’t matter, so I didn’t want anything. That place was empty, and now it’s filled with you, whatever you are. Whatever you enjoy.” He checks my nails, running his thumb over them one by one. “If I’d been free, I would have had nothing in common with the woman I married. But I wasn’t free. I was yours, and now we share the same sins.” He shows me my clean nails and lets go of my hand. “Bene.”
“How do I look?”
He considers me with cold probity, as if he has to pause to recognize his own wife. “Beautiful.”
This compliment is not a compliment. Somehow, the subject changed. I just told him I liked murdering a man. That should have sent him running. Instead, he made up a story about being unhappy with a clean, innocent woman. He’s lying to himself or me.
I feel ugly and broken, used as a pawn, thrown from frying pan to fire, wrung out and exhausted. He needs to say nice things to me, and my question is a blinking neon sign on a dark road, but he doesn’t even see it.
“I want to kill them all. I don’t want a war, but trying to take what’s mine is a suicide mission. No truce could settle what they did to you.” He focuses on my left eye. “All of them will be ghosts before I rest.”
A fire burns behind the darkness of his eyes. It casts no light. It will consume everything, including me, and I’ll be in my finest and most perfect state—a woman-shaped pillar of charred carbon. Beautiful, whole, used as fuel for a fire that burns the world.
“What is it,Forzetta?”
I’ll be his link to the crown. I’ll stay by his side while he fights to keep it, because I am from this side of the river.
But what then?
Who will we be in a kingdom consumed by fire?
