Page 42 of Mafia Queen
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“It’s so empty,” she says. “But tomorrow? This quad? This path here? Going to be full of students staring at class catalogs. They’ll see their friends for the first time in months. Size each other up. Who changed? Who’s the same? They’ll review the same food on the same campus and tell old jokes to see if they’re still funny.”
As long as she was my wife, I never cared whether or not she went back to school. One way or the other, it didn’t matter. Now, suddenly it matters that she gets what she wants—not just what I allow.
“Can you still go?” I offer.
“No. It’s too late.”
“They can bend the rules, no? I can talk to someone. Convince them.”
She laughs, looks up at the dome light.
“You are one hundred percent yourself.” She grabs my hand without looking at me. “It’s not against the rules. I can walk up here tomorrow and register. I just don’t want to.”
Of course she doesn’t. How could she go to school so soon after the trauma she just went through?
“Next year,” I say. She doesn’t reply, and we sit for a minute, holding hands in the front seat. Not one person crosses our path in any direction. The campus is holding its breath.
“They thought you did it,” she finally says. “My eye. The miscarriage.”
“I know.”
“I told Dr. Sanchez that if she said another bad word about you, I’d walk out. That no man I’ve ever met knew how to love me like my husband, who’s so good to me I can’t believe how lucky I am. But if he—meaning you—ever laid a hand on me like that, you wouldn’t be taking me to the doctor. You’d be dead and buried.”
Inside, I laugh. It comes out as a smile and a breath. “I believe it.”
“I said I was attacked. Robbed. Mugged. Whatever. I said the authorities in Secondo Vasto knew and were looking for the guy, but…” She looks at our clasped hands. “I told her the mugger drugged me and took me to a second location. You found me and saved me. I told them I wanted to know if I was roofied, so I asked for a tox screen. I know they have a little lab in the back for certain things. They did a hormonal too.”
She stops, swallows. I want to jump down her throat and pull out the words, because Damiano is still coming for her. He’s hovering over this conversation like a vulture, but I cannot say so. I have to bide my time for her.
“I’m going to kill him, Santino.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Farina. I don’t like that I killed someone in a church or anywhere…but Farina?” Her eyes finally meet mine. They’re glassed over with tears. “He didn’t just give me an opioid. He gave me misoprostol.”
Am I supposed to know what she’s talking about? Because I don’t. I’m not a nurse or a doctor or a pharmacist. I’m a capo who extracts tributes and breaks bones.
“I don’t understand.” Even as I say the words, I know damn well what she asked for and why. As uneducated as I am in the ways of medicines and bodies, I know where this is headed.
“It caused my uterus lining to shed.” She blinks, and tears drop down her cheeks. “Without that shot, I’d still be pregnant.”
It’s my turn to look away. No woman could see the murder on my face and still love me the way I need her to. “I will kill him for you. For both of us.”
“Why would they do it?” she pleads through sniffles and a wet cracking sound in her throat. “Why, Santi?”
“So I don’t have an heir to the crown.”
“Fuck that thing,” she says under her breath.
The profanity is like a knife slicing me open, exposing the inside of my heart. Fuck that thing. It’s not important. None of it is. Everything comes down to Violetta and the home we build together.
We will build nothing in a war. I will spend my time protecting her instead of cherishing her. This is not the life she ever asked for.
I turn so my gaze meets hers. I won’t say this without eye contact. She can’t think I don’t mean it with all my heart.
