Page 8 of Mafia Queen
“I remember!” She smiles warmly.
“I’m going to kill you,” I say with a flatness I don’t recognize.
She squints, barely registering the threat, then chuckles and shrugs as if I must be joking.
“I mean it.”
“Oh, believe me, we know.” She fusses with my veil. “We ran up a thousand dollars in international phone bills planning for you to be super mad. But…” She steps back to look me up and down. “I think once we have the crown, it’s not going to matter what you want or how you feel.”
“Who’s going to marry you? After all this?”
“Here’s a secret, Violetta.” She leans so close I can smell her flowery perfume. “When a man loves you, he loves you no matter what you do.”
By the look on her face, I know she has a specific man on her mind. Maybe I know him. Maybe I can use it to break her confidence. But before I can ask who loves her that much, the door behind her creaks open.
She steps back, and I see my future husband in a simple, ill-fitting suit that makes him look like a football player borrowing his smaller brother’s clothes. He obviously doesn’t believe in the prohibition of seeing the bride before the wedding. He only gets one eyeful though. The other is poorly bandaged. I get no satisfaction from it, because his thick hands are clasped in front of him as if one holds back the other and I notice a glint.
Santino’s diamond crown ring is at the base of Damiano’s right pinkie.
I look away, unable to bear the sight of it. “You need to get that eye looked at by a real doctor.”
“We gonna do this easy?” he asks me. “Or we gonna do this hard?”
I mirror the position of his hands, though on me, it’s not a threat, but a false submission, hiding the sharp edge that protrudes between two fingers of my fist.
“Easy,” I say. “It’s going to be real easy.”
“Good.” He reaches for me, but I curl back.
“On one condition.”
“You don’t get conditions.”
Obviously, I have zero power in this situation, and he has no reason to give up any of his. But there is a ceremony to attend to, and I’ll have plenty of opportunities to kill him later, so he may be pliable.
“I want to bury Santino,” I say quickly. “Properly. I know you haven’t. Let me do it. Then you can put me in the hole with him. I don’t care.”
“I can do that.” He shrugs with the magnanimity of a kindly king. “I respect the dead.”
4
SANTINO
In the waiting room of an Italian hospital, Camilla told Damiano and me that the numeric key was a lawyer’s license number, and years later, a young woman named Theresa Rubino told her cousin that her lover, Roman, was getting an important and secret thing engraved inside Violetta’s ring.
This whole drama… It was never about Damiano and Gia’s‘mbasciata, her father’s debt, or the string of overlooked insults.
Gia didn’t resign herself to a forced wedding for the sake of peace or the security of a marriage. The bride was never confused or moody.
I shouldn’t be so surprised when she shoots me.
She always wanted to be free.
Time slows down into details without a story. Crystal-clear events shuffle like thewht-wht-whtof a deck of cards.
I stand at the pool and follow the sound of pounding fists up. I see Damiano holding her up against her window. Then—and only then—do I understand my mistake.
wht-wht-wht
