Page 10 of Mafia Queen
And God says I will tell her one day, but the devil laughs from far away and says, “Enjoy sainthood while she’s getting raped,coglione.”
The shock of the devil’s truth turns me away from heaven and back to Earth. I see my body from above, flat on my back at the edge of the pool, one leg dangling in the water. A man in wet clothes crouches nearby, pulling Emilio’s ring off my finger.
“I told you there wasn’t no blood,” he says nervously, his voice close to me even though I’m a mile overhead. He pulled me out for that fucking ring.
“So shoot him,” says the man standing a few feet away.
I know the voice. He’s Lucio. From Lasertopia. Cosimo’s man. The one who acted as if he didn’t speak English. This man is a threat to everything I love. From the moment I saw him, I could tell he’d committed murder more times than he could count on his fingers.
Emilio’s ring comes off. It is meaningless. It’s not what draws me back. The increasing need to save Violetta pulls me through the thick space, against a tide, like a fish on a hook.
The man holds the ring up to the sun—to me—as I speed back to earth. He is Calimero Tabona. This is where Damiano is getting his strength—from the few Tabonas left after they tried to take Violetta. They are based on the other side of the mountains, in Green Springs, and now they’re here. Calimero starts to put the crown ring in his pocket.
“That’s Dami’s.” Gia’s words come from somewhere out of my vision, which has folded like an envelope.
Calimero shrugs and tosses it in the direction of her voice.
I spin through space with the ring. Vengeance unhooks me from Heaven, and when she catches it, I drop back to Earth like a stone, meeting my body on the pool’s edge. Breathing into motion, everything is everywhere. I’m facing every direction, seeing through closed eyes, and I know the backstabbingstronzettaleaves without another word.
She’s unfinished business. Her and others. Damiano. Marco. Maybe Loretta. Eventually Cosimo.
I can’t die until they pay for what they’ve done to Violetta, what they intend, and what they’re going to do. My soul takes back possession of my body as if blown into the fingertips and toes by the breath of vengeance—I’m going to kill all of them.
Animated by that sudden expansion, I take Calimero’s legs from under him, sweep up the gun he drops, and shoot in his direction. The pop of the gunshot is drowned out by the whooshing in my ears. I hit his thigh.
A shadow alerts me to Lucio’s movements. I point the gun at his chest, praying for a lucky bullet, and blow his face into a blackened hole of meat.
My vision is still swimming and my chest hurts. I expel two bullets in Gia’s direction before I bend and retch a lungful of pool water. It washes away a streak of blood on the tiles. Like a drunk committed to the inevitable, I heave again, coughing up the contents of my chest.
With a slam from the front door, Gia walks out of my range. For now.
A man sobs. It’s not me. Holding myself steady against the table, I look around. The green of the trees is shockingly vivid. The pool water is so transparent I can perceive the brushstrokes in the concrete’s turquoise paint. And the man dragging his bleeding leg as he crawls is cast in shadow as dark as the sun is bright.
I am here.
For whatever purpose God or the devil let me live, I have my own reasons for not letting death take me.
Wobbly for the first few steps, I intercept Calimero’s path to Lucio’s gun. He stops and looks up at me, his leg gushing on my patio. He won’t last long.
“Please,” he says.
“You need a tourniquet.” I crouch in front of him.
“I have a wife and a son.”
There was a time I wouldn’t have been moved by those words at all—except to extend his suffering for the insult of assuming I’d take on his personal problems. I’m surprised to find my understanding has expanded. I do care about wives and children.
“So do I.” I check his gun for bullets and snap it closed. “And you’re going to tell me where to find them.”
I press the gun to his forehead.
“I don’t know.”
This is a man who is either not getting the message or who’s been threatened with more than death.
“How old is your son?”
Calimero groans in pain, eyelids clamped shut. He’s losing consciousness. “Fourteen.”
