Mafia Bride

by Burns, Rachel

  “Anna the safety,” Antonio called out.

  He jumped forward to throw himself in front of her, but Vinnie pushed him out of the way, and the bullet went into Vinnie not Anna or Antonio.

  He fell to the floor, but he let off one shot before he passed out.

  Chapter 36

  The light hit Anna’s eyes, and her hand moved to block the light. She still had the gun in her hand as she shaded her eyes. She was laying in Antonio’s closet.

  “Anna sweetheart, give me the gun.” Antonio needed to get it away from her fast.

  “It doesn’t work anyway.” She held up the gun. “See, the safety is still on.”

  “Just give me the gun, the safety isn’t on, and I want it out of your hand immediately.”

  “What?” She was scared holding onto it now. “You left a gun lying around and the safety wasn’t on?” she scolded him.

  “It isn’t mine and no one thought that you would take off with it,” he answered defensively. He reached for it and took it out of her weak hand. “We need to get you into some warm pajamas.”

  He gave the gun to Enzo who locked the safety in place, and then Antonio lifted her up into his arms. Vinnie jumped between them to save her. Anna had hit her head and was knocked out.

  He carried her to their bed and laid her down on her side. “I’ll be right back with your pajamas.” He hurried to get them. She was shaking again. “Where are Vinnie and Señora Raposa?”

  “Can you sit up, sweetheart? We need to get this over your head.” He lifted her to sitting. She was thinner than he had realized. He saw her naked every day, but she was somehow even more fragile now.

  Antonio put her pajamas on her. He had her leaning against his chest again, exactly like when she was sick. He stayed sitting behind her with his arms wrapped around her. “Anna, Vinnie is going to be fine. The doctor was here, and Vinnie took him to the hospital.”

  “Vinnie got hurt, trying to protect me.” She cried, and she tried to push him away, not wanting to remember what had happened.

  “It’s okay. I’m here. It’s okay to cry. You’re safe now.”

  “No I’m not. Everybody hates me. The servants think it’s funny because I get into trouble because they aren’t doing anything. They spit in my food and put disgusting stuff in it. They want me to be gone, the sooner the better. You are the only one who wants me here, and you don’t like me either. I make you so mad.”

  “Anna, what have you been doing in the household?” He was starting to realize what was going on.

  “I do everything except clean your office and cook.”

  “What? But why would you do that?” Antonio was confused.

  “If I tell them to do something, they laughed at me. You complained because you didn’t have anything to wear. I was trying to please everyone.”

  Antonio held her tightly. He had left her alone with too large a task, thinking that Señora Raposa would help her. He had put her in a position where the damn servants, people who meant nothing to him, who were interchangeable, could pick on her.

  Antonio had to make it up to her.

  “She killed my babies. How could she do that?” Anna sobbed into his shoulder. “What if she ruined, me and I can never have another child?”

  “If God doesn’t want us to have children, then we could adopt. I know that you would be a great mother. Any child would be lucky to have you. I’ll take you to New York to the best doctors. I’ll take care of this. You’ll see. I’ll take care of everything. You don’t have to worry. I will make everything better for you, I promise.”

  Antonio gently laid her down on the bed and covered her up. He went down to his office. Enzo was in there on the phone with his father.

  Antonio reached out for the phone, “Father it was a misunderstanding. She’s here. She never left. We will be coming for a visit very soon, in two days. She needs a doctor appointment with the best of the best. Have someone take care of that. She thinks that she can’t get pregnant. We need to know if that is true. We will be there.” He spoke with his father briefly telling him what happened and what the head maid had said.

  Emilio was shocked to hear that Antonio’s butler thought he was his son. He was positive that he wasn’t.

  Antonio didn’t know what to say about that. “I have to go back to Anna.” He hung up.

  “Is she really okay?” Enzo asked unsure.

  Antonio nodded at him. “I have to go back to her. She still isn’t … stable. That mad woman had her for hours. Where is her husband?”

  “I have him locked up. He isn’t going anywhere.”

  Antonio was afraid to leave Anna alone. She would be scared, and he wasn’t sure how many people were in on the attacks on his and her life.

  Antonio wanted to kill the man he knew as Señor Raposa, but if he were his brother, then his father had to decide that.

  He didn’t want Anna to be alone, and he didn’t want to be alone either. He left Enzo and went back to his Anna.

  She was still sleeping.

  Antonio undressed and laid down next to her again. He would make her breakfast himself tomorrow, and he would make sure she ate. He figured that she would eat. She had the day he sent her plate back for her. She ate as if she had been starved because she had been.

  He had so much money, and his wife was laying next to him starving away because a servant was poisoning her.

  When she was healed up, they would go to New York, and he would take her shopping and spoil her. She always meant well.

  Anna had been trying, but so much was against her. She would never be able to truly love him back if these intrigues didn’t stop.

  Too much had happened. She blamed him and felt that she couldn’t go to him with her problems.

  Why hadn’t he taken her seriously when she told him that Señora Raposa didn’t like her? He made her problem sound like a little teenager problem.

  Antonio should have taken her seriously. It would have been the least he could have done.

  Anna had taken care of him, washing his clothes and cleaning. She hadn’t gone to him. She believed that he wouldn’t care, and that he would tell her it was her problem.

  Chapter 37

  A maid was outside of his bedroom door as he left. He felt a need to protect Anna from her. He looked the young woman in the eyes, staring her down. She looked guilty of something. “How old are you?” he demanded of her.

  “I’m twenty-four.”

  He nodded. She was four years older than his wife. Anna was still so young. Too young to deal with the staff. He wasn’t sure how he should solve that problem. “My wife is sick. Leave her alone. Go clean something.”

  The woman nodded and went off to a bedroom. He kept his eye on her while he went down the stairs. He had a feeling that she was waiting for him to leave so she could pick on his Anna.

  Antonio went into the kitchen and looked around. They had been preparing breakfast.

  Antonio grabbed a frying pan and threw three eggs in it. He searched around for bread or toast or something.

  The servants offered to help him, but he ignored that.

  He found some and buttered it and put her favorite jam on it. He laid them on a plate and flipped the eggs.

  When they were finished, he put them on the plate himself and then left. His staff had watched him with their jaws dropped.

  He returned to the hallway to see the maid slip into his room. He knew it.

  Antonio hurried up the stairs to her. He had caught her in the act of disobeying him. She was so fired, he thought.

  The maid was already backing out of the room again. “I told you to leave her alone. You’re fired. Leave.” Antonio wanted to see what she had said to his wife. Was Anna crying again?

  “Enzo asked me to check if she was really in there,” the maid protested.

  “And I told you to stay away from her. Pack up your things and leave.”

  “Please Señor, I need this job.”

  “You haven’t been w
orking for months, and you beg for your job?” He shook his head at her audacity. “Go, before I throw you out.” He walked past her and went in to his Anna. Her food was getting cold.

  “Anna, darling. I made you breakfast. I’ll help you sit up. You can lean on my chest again.”

  She had woken up and saw one of the maids staring at her, and now he was there. She was afraid of the servants. Being attacked and held tied up in a secret room behind his closet had made that fear much worse. The things the Señora had said to her were terrible. Anna thought that she was going to kill her. She told Anna that she wanted to kill Antonio too. It was in that moment that Anna knew that she loved her husband. She didn’t want to lose him.

  Anna knew that she would never be able to handle the staff. She wasn’t a figure that demanded respect.

  He laid a plate of food down on her nightstand. Then he lifted her upper body up and slid into bed behind her. He leaned her against his chest and stroked her hair to the side, exactly like he had the last time she was sick. “I’m so sorry you bumped your head again.”

  “I think it’s my Achilles heel,” Anna told him.

  “It does seem to be that way,” he agreed.

  “He pushed me down the stairs.” Tears began to fill Anna’s eyes.

  “Anna, no. You are going to eat now. This isn’t a time to cry. It’s a time to get stronger.” She needed him, and he would make her all better again, and then she would smile for him again. He remembered their wedding night. She had smiled at him and blushed.

  “I’ll hold your plate while you eat.” He wanted her to get stronger.

  Her hands were shaking as she picked up the fork. She was scared about what could be in her food now. She pictured bloody chicken eyes under the yellow egg yolks.

  Antonio guessed what the problem was. “I swear to you that I made the food for you myself. No one else touch it but me.”

  Anna shook her head.

  “Anna, you aren’t feeling well. You need to eat and get stronger. We will be going to New York soon. You are going to the doctor’s. He will tell us if you can have children or not. Adoption takes a long time. We need to get started. You have to get stronger so we can have a child.”

  She cried with worry. Would their child even like her, or would it hate her too?

  “Anna, I swear. I made your food myself. It’s okay. You can eat it.”

  She took the first bite, and then she gulped the rest down so quickly that she started to choke.

  “Good girl, Anna. You’re such a good girl.” He patted her back until she stopped. She leaned back against his chest. She was starving away right under his eyes.

  Why could he never do right by her? He looked back over everything that had passed between them. He didn’t know the first thing about her. They had been married four months already, and the only thing he knew was that she was quiet, that she could sing, and that she liked rough sex, and that she wanted to have a baby. Still, he knew Anna better than anyone else did.

  Vinnie associated quietness with being good. He often told him that Anna was good. Antonio knew that there was a big difference. Anna was quiet because she was afraid of him. He needed her to come to him with his problems, but she was too afraid of him for that.

  He held her without saying anything to her. While he held her, he wrecked his brain, trying to think what should he say to her? Asking her questions to get to know her would be stupid after so many months of marriage.

  He was scaring her again. She had done something terrible. He wouldn’t let her get away with that, she thought. She lied to him in a roundabout way, making him think that she was getting the servants to do their work. She stole from him.

  “I understand that you have to punish me again.” She sniffled a little with sadness clenching at her heart. “What I did was wrong, and I lied about it.”

  “What did you do?” Antonio asked her.

  “I took the gun and hid it away.”

  “That wasn’t doing something wrong. That was foresight. You saved both of our lives by doing that.”

  “Vinnie was the one who stopped her, not me,” Anna protested.

  “You held her off until he came. Every second counted, and you used them all. I was beginning to think that you lied about having the gun. How many boxes did you look through?” He grinned at her.

  “I knew which one it was in. I wanted her to get distracted for a moment so I could hide it in my skirt and then somehow give it to you.”

  “You are such a smart girl. I love you more than my own life.” He wrapped his arms around her tighter. She rubbed her head against his chest. She needed him.

  Anna turned a little in his arms and laid her hand on his chest close to her chin. Yes, at moments like this it would be easy to fall in love with him.

  She wanted to be loved so much, but he claimed that he loved her every day, but she hadn’t said it to him yet. He had jumped forward to save her when the Señora surely would have killed her.

  Antonio still couldn’t think of anything to say to her. He didn’t know what her interests were, other than that she wanted a child. He knew nothing about her, but he did know that he would be devastated without her. Being without her, or letting her go wasn’t an option.

  “Talk to me Anna.” He wondered if she really would.

  “What do you want to hear?” She sounded so small and breakable.

  “I want to hear you babble about anything you want.”

  She rubbed her head over his heart a little before she cleared her throat and started in. “Should I tell you why I was in New York?”

  “Okay.” That had been something he had wondered about from time to time.

  “I was away at school when one day my mother called. My father had died. The roads had been slippery. He had an accident and died instantly. It came very unexpectedly. I didn’t have enough money to stay in school. I was going to college to become a grade schoolteacher. I had to quit and find a job. One of my teachers pulled a few strings and got me a job In New York of all places. My mother had a friend who needed someone to take her apartment. Everything was settled.

  “My mother bawled as she waved goodbye to me at the airport. She had nobody, and then I also had nobody. In the blink of an eye, my life changed.” Anna wiped her hand over her eyes. “Everything happened so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to mourn my father as I should have.”

  “Where did you learn all of those languages?” Antonio asked to distract her.

  “It had been a hobby of mine to borrow tapes and things from the library to learn foreign languages at home as a kid.” She peeked up at him for a second before she laid her head down on his chest again. “I was shy back then too. Well, my shyness finally paid off, and I got a job that paid enough to support me. My mother said it was better than staying in school. She bragged that I had found a good job without wasting good money on college. She was trying to talk up the job.

  “I somehow landed in New York before I really knew what had happened. I had a one-room apartment that I was extremely proud of.

  “I was a nobody at work. I had one of those cubicles, exactly like you see on TV. I worked in a room with fifty other people, but I was alone. I had been working there for about two months when you took me away. I was a translator. Did I tell you that?”

  “For what language?”

  “Languages,” she corrected him. “French, German and Swedish.”

  “Really? And you learned those from the library?”

  “Summer camps too. It was what I was interested in.”

  “I see. A schoolteacher? Typical female.” He had to smile. She cried every month when she got her period. She really did want a child, his child.

  “I guess so, but that was what I figured that would suit me best. Summers off, who wouldn’t want that?”

  He smiled at her little joke. “So you really do want to have a baby too?” He hoped that he would want to hear the answer.

  “We’re married. It’s proper now
. There isn’t any reason not too.” She was surprised by his question.

  He smiled to himself again. “Yes, but do you want a baby?”

  “Of course, I do. The baby could be my friend.”

  His wife wanted a friend. She had mentioned something along those lines on the plane before they arrived here, and he had told her that she would have friends here.

  “You’ll have friends now. The others stayed away because of the rumors that the Raposas were spreading. They sabotaged you on every level.”

  “I am going to take you to New York in a couple of days. We will go to the doctor’s, and we will see if we can have our own child or not. Otherwise, we will adopt a child. Do you have a problem with adoption?”

  “No, of course not. I think it’s a great idea.” She would love anything that would love her back. Her only fears were how the staff would treat the child. Could she protect it? What a joke, she couldn’t even protect herself.

  “If the doctor says we can’t have children, then I will see to it that you have one by Christmas.” It was an odd promise, and he knew it, but if his wife wanted a child, then she would get one. He didn’t plan on going through a regular adoption agency. They wouldn’t give them a child anyway. Not with his family history. But here he could easily find a child and lay the baby in Anna’s arms.

  She didn’t know what to make out of that. It sounded nice of him on one side, and it sounded obsessed on the other. Would he love the child? Dare she ask him?

  “Why do you want to have a child?”

  He laughed lightly. “It’s time. I don’t know. I keep picturing a son and teaching him things. I can even picture him in his football uniform.”

  He felt her stiffen up. “But a girl who looked like you would be nice too. Now that I picture differently. I can see you two singing in the living room together. That would be so nice.” He was grinning as he thought about it.

  “When is Christmas?” Anna asked.

  “In three weeks. We will celebrate with our families.”

  “In three weeks. That’s so soon. I relieve you from your promise. Easter would be better. That way we could pick out the right child. Picking one out by the drop of a hat isn’t very … safe.” She had wanted to say mature but thought better of it. She was still waiting for him to announce her punishment about stealing the gun.