Page 6 of Mafia Queen
The door closes, leaving us in the dimness.
“Violetta,” Gia says softly, putting the tray on an ancient table carved with crosses.
“Fuck you.” These are my first words to her, and they’re not strong enough.
“Just stay still.” She takes something from the tray and crouches in front of me.
“Santino. Our baby.” There are no questions or statements attached. I’m just naming the things I love the most.
The painful half of my face is suddenly cold. She’s put an ice compress on the swelling. The light behind her makes her look like a saint.
“That’s not going to do shit.” I push away the compress. “He broke the orbital bone.”
“No, he didn’t.” She puts the cold wetness back on my face.
“I wish you weren’t such a bitch, but wishes don’t make truths.”
She uses a single breath to laugh. “You were always so clever.”
“Not clever enough to see you coming.”
There are voices on the other side of the door, and we both look at it as if we can see through the wood.
When they fade out, I ask, “What did you give me? Which opioid?”
“Does it matter?” She shrugs it off like a passing grade she didn’t study for.
How did I miss the sociopathy? Should I have seen it when she focused on what marriage looked like rather than what it was? Or the first moments I knew her, when I cowered in a strange room as she stood over me, showing me wedding dresses as if it was fun?
“Hold this.” She presses my hand over the compress and leans back to pluck a bottle of water from the tray. “The doctor says you have to be hydrated.”
Mob doctors are the extended professional family of the mob priests and mob lawyers who already ruined my life. But if I want to kill this bitch and her man, I’m going to need my body and mind working at capacity, so I drain it.
“I hate you,” I say, handing back the bottle. “I’m going to kill you.” I shouldn’t warn her, but the message isn’t for her, really. I’m putting myself on warning.
“Your husband was going to start a war, Violetta. I thought you’d understand.”
Santino wasn’t going to start a war—I believe that from the bottom of my heart—but a war may have started anyway, and his intentions would have been irrelevant.
“You shot Santino. You brought Damiano to my house. You drugged me when you know I’m pregnant. What am I supposed to understand?”
“That I did what I had to do to be free.”
The morality of what she’s describing is broken, but the logic of sacrificing me or killing someone to escape is as clear as it is cruel. What I can’t sort out is how she’s acting as if the plan worked and she’s free, when she’s got me locked in an oversized, empty closet.
“How can you be free if Damiano is waiting right outside? If you’re marrying him, you’re not free.”
She laughs, then covers her mouth to quiet herself. A square-cut diamond on her finger glints in the candlelight. She’s wearing the ring. My ring. Rosetta’s ring.
“I’m not marrying him.” She scoffs with the absurdity of it. “You are.”
3
VIOLETTA
In this same church, I was forced to marry Santino DiLustro so that he could collect my inheritance—the missing pieces of theCorona Ferrea,the Iron Crown of Lombardy, worn by both Constantine and Napoleon, inset with a nail from the One True Cross, and so powerful, even those few pieces compelled a warehouse full of men to kneel before the one who held it.
The crown’s power should be filed with other superstitions. Like, if you go to mass on any nine consecutive first Fridays of the month, you’re guaranteed a place in heaven. Also, if you’re wearing a brown scapular under your shirt when you die, Our Lady of Carmel will personally pull you out of purgatory and deliver you to paradise on the first Saturday after your death, amen.
