Page 75 of Mafia Queen
The room is filled with silent people.
Armando is dead on the dining room table.
They have Santino.
Well. Not all of him.
His ring is in my fist, and Dario is still holding the baggie with a piece of his body in it. This is offensive.
Santino is mine. All of him.
I reach over the table and snatch the bag away.
I’ve spent months pissed off, but I don’t know how to bethisangry. There has to be some kind of talent to containing and releasing it. Or a skill to separating it from sadness and grief, like coffee or nicotine passing through a filter—a massive centrifuge for fire and electricity. My pores are too small to fit all the rage through. It’s too big for my body. If it would fit through my mouth, I’d scream.
Wait.
I am screaming.
Everyone looks scared.
Good. They should be. Because this monster in my chest isn’t made of love and light.
Loretta isn’t frightened. She’s in front of me, her hands on my cheeks the way Santino does, saying something I can’t hear over my own voice.
She hugs me, and I run out of breath. I appreciate her embrace, but I’m too empty to cry. My fist with a ring and the hand with the baggie are folded between us, and I let Loretta hold me as long as she wants—not for me, but for her. When she lets me go, I feel the hard ball of knuckle in the bag, and for a split second, I’m reminded of Zio eating pig’s feet. Rosetta and I watching as he dragged his front teeth along the balls of the joints.
The memory is wonderful, but the smile doesn’t find my mouth in the tangled route from my heart. Even so, I have to make sure the baggie contains a finger, not lunch. I open it and find a human finger, as promised—bloodless, grayish, with the skin shrinking away and the carpal bone poking out like a branch from the gristle of flexor tendon. Between the proximal and distal joints are lines in blue ink that make two words.
LOVE RULES
“Love rules without rules,” I say to my husband as if he can hear me.
He can’t. But I hear him, loud and clear.
The feeling of being stretched by an expanding force inside me—of molecules banging against containment—goes away. The anger is still volatile and hot. It doesn’t shrink or lessen.
I am not soothed, but I am big enough to hold an exploding star.
“We need to finish this,” Dario says. “Tonight.”
“How?” I ask, still clutching the bag.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says dismissively. “You. Gennaro, is it? Let’s see what kind of ammo we have. We’re going to shoot through this problem and burn everything else. You, what’s your name?”
Carmine stammers an answer.
“Locations for every family member, friend, and mistress he’s ever had,” Dario says.
This man…this stranger, is going to descend on Secondo Vasto like a blanket of fire. There will be mass killing. Maybe we’ll find Santino, and maybe we won’t.
This is the war Santino was trying to avoid.
We’re in it.
Everyone knows it. Loretta, Celia, Vito, Gennaro, all know as they stand in silence, waiting to be told what to do.
If I want control of this situation, I have to take it before Dario does. I have to earn it, and that won’t happen as long as I’m sitting here clutching a body part.
