Page 73 of Mafia Queen
“I am not stupid!”
“Good,” I say. “Because the stupid ones get themselves killed.”
“I don’t want them to hurt you anymore, Santi. I am so sad. I miss Tavie. I miss how we were. How you took care of me always like a big brother. I don’t like this, and I don’t know what to do. Please. I’m begging you. Before he hurts her.”
“Then I’ll kill him the way I killed your father.”
She shrieks, and the high-pitched wail goes on for hours.
* * *
“Dov’e?”a man’s voice asks a thousand years later, before another punch lands on my jaw.
I don’t even try to guess his name. Everything is mixed up. Time is optional. This is a blessing. I don’t know how long Violetta’s been without me, worrying. I don’t know if she’s been able to do something brave that’s going to get her killed.
“Ce l’avete voi.” I tell them they have the crown, but that doesn’t make it true. My brain is scrambling time. Obviously, they don’t have it, or they wouldn’t ask.
“If I had it,” Damiano’s voice breaks through the haze, “you’d be dead.”
A chill shocks my skin and settles in my bones. I’m drenched in winter cold. My clothes and hair are soaked through. Carlo Tabona stands over me with an empty bucket. An ice cube rocks on the bottom corner, and his face—the black moustache and low forehead under a deep widow’s peak—snarls down at me.
“Welcome back to America,” I say to him. “I still have to kill you for Elio.”
He slaps me across the face because I’m duct taped to a fucking chair, and I can’t do anything about it.
“That’s for chasing me all the way to the other side,” he says, then hits the other cheek so hard I see stars. “And that’s for the money.”
Goffredo Tabona paid for his nephew’s life in cash. But really, once Carlo was in Napoli, he was out of my territory. The money came with a promise the kid would never return.
“You know what I had to do to pay it back?” Carlo asks.
“Get fucked in the ass by all your dead bastard ancestors?”
He’s about to hit me again, but Damiano stops him.
Carlo tosses the bucket on a tool bench and throws himself onto a mustard couch so old, the first woman to get pregnant on it is probably a grandmother by now. An ice cube settles into the space between my waistband and my spine.
Dami straddles a metal folding chair, forearms resting on the back, thick hands drooping in front. The white part of his wounded eye is blood-filled in one corner.
“Gia’s getting bored,” he says. He grips the chair back and taps Emilio’s crown ring on the metal. That’s the fist that hit my wife. The one that changed her forever.
“Am not,” she objects. “I think we should just go up there.”
“Same thing.”
“That’s not the same. He killed Papà!”
“There are fifty guys up there!” Damiano yells at her. “You wanna die? You go up first. Wag your ass at them. See where it gets you.” She gives him the finger, and he turns back to me. “Look, you’re a dead man either way. But if you tell your wife to give it up, we let her live.”
In this weakened state, it’s easy for a man to lose his shit. Easier when the love of his life is threatened. That’s what he wants, but even if I could be manipulated like this, I don’t have the fucking crown.
“Dami, use your head. You don’t have it. I don’t have it. Who has it?”
“You really are tough to crack, you know that?”
“We need to find them,” I say.
“We?”
