by CD Reiss
I open my eyes to find Santino naked, standing over me with a nasty bruise on his chest that—from the dark center to the blue flames radiating outward—is not much smaller than a dinner plate.
Even wounded, he is a work of beauty. Sword and shield. Warrior and protector. Attacker and armor.
Who else would accept me with my bloodstained soul?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re mad.”
“Someone hurt you.” He eases himself into the tub. Water and bubbles splash over the side as he settles across from me. He can’t lean back with the faucet behind him, so he sits with his back straight and my legs draped over his thighs.
“So you’re not mad at me?”
“Why would I be?” He runs his hands under my knees and clasps my hands.
“Because I killed someone, and I’m sad about it, but I needed to do it. I wanted to. I think…” A part of me runs in front of my words, palms out, screaming don’t say this, even if you mean it, never say it. But I mean it. “I enjoyed killing him.”
Lifting my hands above the waterline, he inspects the blood embedded in my fingernails.
“And this should make me mad?”
“It’s not what you wanted in a wife.”
“For half of my life,” Santino starts, running a little brush against the top of the soap, “I didn’t think I’d marry a woman. I was set up to marry a crown. A position.” He scrubs the blood from under my nails. I can barely stand to look at it. “Maybe I married a fight for territory and respect. But the woman?” He shrugs. “Irrelevant. Emilio gave me a girl to keep the crown in his family.” He switches hands. “What I wanted in a wife didn’t matter, so I didn’t want anything. That place was empty, and now it’s filled with you, whatever you are. Whatever you enjoy.” He checks my nails, running his thumb over them one by one. “If I’d been free, I would have had nothing in common with the woman I married. But I wasn’t free. I was yours, and now we share the same sins.” He shows me my clean nails and lets go of my hand. “Bene.”
“How do I look?”
He considers me with cold probity, as if he has to pause to recognize his own wife. “Beautiful.”
This compliment is not a compliment. Somehow, the subject changed. I just told him I liked murdering a man. That should have sent him running. Instead, he made up a story about being unhappy with a clean, innocent woman. He’s lying to himself or me.
I feel ugly and broken, used as a pawn, thrown from frying pan to fire, wrung out and exhausted. He needs to say nice things to me, and my question is a blinking neon sign on a dark road, but he doesn’t even see it.
“I want to kill them all. I don’t want a war, but trying to take what’s mine is a suicide mission. No truce could settle what they did to you.” He focuses on my left eye. “All of them will be ghosts before I rest.”
A fire burns behind the darkness of his eyes. It casts no light. It will consume everything, including me, and I’ll be in my finest and most perfect state—a woman-shaped pillar of charred carbon. Beautiful, whole, used as fuel for a fire that burns the world.
“What is it, Forzetta?”
I’ll be his link to the crown. I’ll stay by his side while he fights to keep it, because I am from this side of the river.
But what then?
Who will we be in a kingdom consumed by fire?
“Do you need the crown?” I ask. “To kill them, do you need it?”
“If I have it, Secondo Vasto will follow my lead. Some of Damiano’s men—not all of them, but enough—will abandon him. And when I beat him into the earth, his strongest will follow me instead of trying to take his place. I won’t have to kill them.”
This is the trajectory of my life if he wins this war—from this moment to the point where it disappears over the horizon. My eventual, inescapable intimacy with death. My embrace of the unacceptable. I am already a murderer, and if I continue down this road, I will become harder and harder. I will die brittle and heavy with the bitter taste of borrowed power on my tongue.
“What if we didn’t get the crown?” I say.
He looks at me as if I didn’t hear a word he just said. But I did. I heard all of it.
“What if we just…did a different thing? Made a different choice? What if we didn’t assume it was inevitable? What then?” I lean into him. The bathwater swooshes around me and splashes to the floor. “What if you and I just drove away? As far as we could go…just went. And what if we stopped somewhere and had this baby and a couple more and just…lived?”
“And then?”
How can he not get this? It’s so perfect.
“The war Damiano’s bringing to Secondo Vasto is only a war if he has an enemy. What if we opt out? We leave the crown at the lawyer’s. He can steal it or find some other way to get it. We don’t have to care. Let him have it. We’ll be ten hundred million miles away. We can never think of the stupid crown, Gia, the Orolios, or any of it ever again except when we tell stories about how it brought us together. We can play with our grandkids in an old house, and one day, we’ll die from something old people die of.” I lay my hands on his face the way he’s done to me so many times. His eyelashes are wet from the bath steam, gathered into black blades. “Imagine it. We can be normal.”
My body floods with elation. The unglamorous possibility of the ordinary mixed with the frightening probability of his volatility is a powerful drug.
“Me?” he says, taking my wrists and putting my hands against his bruised chest. “With me?”
I take a deep breath.
It’s more than bringing Santino into harmony with the modern world. There’s salvation for both of us in normal. Normal people don’t kill their enemies, watching the life go out of their eyes. Normal people aren’t forced into unforgivable sins.
“We’ll be free,” I say. “Really, really free.”
He rubs his eyes as if he has to clear out the junk. They’re bloodshot when he’s done, and yet…he still can’t see what’s right in front of him.
“In this life you made in your head,” he says, “who will I be? What will I be?” He presses his fingers to his chest, thrusting his head forward. “I can’t crawl out of my skin and into this TV show you imagine.”
Why is he not jumping on this? What’s the holdup here? I’m presenting him with a treasure map, and he’s disputing the value of what’s under the X.
“I don’t understand how what I just described is unappealing.”
“No, Violetta. Of course I want a quiet life. I don’t reject your version of normal. It rejects me.”
He’s terrified. By suggesting a life far away from his world, I’ve struck fear into his heart. Maybe I’m going too quickly, but it’s not like I have a choice.
“How do you know?” I ask. “Is the king of this little place really all you are?”
He looks away. I’m hurting him, and I don’t know how to stop.
“Please, Santino,” I plead. “This is our only chance. You rule me. Always. Please. If we get that crown and you win, I don’t know what I’ll become. I don’t know what we’ll become.”
He settles his hands on my knees. The plopping water and softly cracking bubbles relax me into the pause between. I want this moment to last forever, with the hands I thought I’d never feel again, and the echoes of the voice I thought I’d never hear again. I want to sit in silence with the things I thought I’d lost forever, because I know it won’t last, and I’ll grieve over and over.
When he touches my belly, I put my hand over his and hold it there.
“I’m scared something bad happened,” I say, looking at the ceiling.
Now that Santino is here with me, the questions I couldn’t ask come flooding in like a test I’ve been cramming for.
How vulnerable is the pregnancy this early?
What’s the chance I can carry it?
Will the baby be broken?
What wil
l be the effect of having a murderer for a mother?
Is it my fault?
Is this why I want to run away so badly?
“Violetta?” Santino calls me from the other side of guilt.
“I don’t know anything.” Opening my eyes, I clutch his arm as if I’m in danger of falling. “We might not know until it’s born, and what if it’s bad, Santi? What if it’s hurt forever?”
“They didn’t teach you in school?”
“I was second year. It’s not like I finished.”
Reaching over me to the counter, he blocks the light above to pick up his phone. “You know where to look it up?”
“Yes.” I look around for a towel to dry my hands so I can search for the possibility of congenital defects caused by maternal opioid use. Then I’ll drill down to non-addictive, single mass dose. Then check to see if the mother murdering a man in a church becomes the burden of the child.
The colorful boxes of Santino’s home screen stare back at me.
All I have to do is tap it and all the knowledge of the universe will be available to me in stark, impersonal language. I will interpret it as it relates to my own situation and adjust my life and expectations from there, adding in the fact that I have killed the second man who kidnapped me and may spend the rest of my days running away from consequences of that.
“I feel like I failed you,” I say, still trying to get the courage to tap the web browser. “There was no blood in the pool, but I let myself believe you were dead. They put drugs in me that might hurt our baby. I thought I’d lost everything, then I killed someone.” I scrunch my face to keep the tears inside. “I didn’t think about it enough…what it would mean…because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to talk myself out of it. I chose it. I know where the arteries are, and he didn’t protect them because he thought I was harmless.”
“You are not harmless.”
“I’m not, and I’m scared.”
And all I have to do is look up the effects of maternal opioid intake on fetal development, yet I can’t. I have to know, but I don’t want to be told by a study or a data set. My heart is too brittle, and I’m too frozen over, too distant, too blank, to hear the truth shouted over the cold expanse of space.
Santino takes the phone from me and puts it to the side, then looks right through me from two inches away. “You had no choice.”
His excuse is too easy. It’s the reasoning of madmen and thieves. There were a hundred options that didn’t involve murder, yet that’s what I chose.
“I didn’t do what I had to do,” I admit not just to him, but myself—reigniting that rage with every word. “I did what I wanted to do.”
Santino leans back onto his knees, and the water swooshes, displacing into my belly. He’s not trying to get farther away. I know this much. He’s listening. Taking in the whole of what I’m saying.
“I wanted to kill Damiano, and it wasn’t over the crown or being forced to marry again. His life offended me. His breath. His heart beating on this earth while yours wasn’t.”
There’s more, and I shouldn’t say it out loud, much less to a man I need to love me—a man who prizes gentle femininity. Speaking the rest is a mistake, but I can’t stop. I can’t live with him not knowing I have this inside me. The burden would break me.
“I’d do it again, Santi,” I continue, despite my better judgment. “I killed the wrong man, but if Damiano was in front of me…for real this time…I’d make it last longer. I’d watch him suffer. You’re right, I’ve changed, but I’ve always been terrible and broken. You should leave me. You should send me away. Far away.”
Santino’s eyes drop, looking down, chin to bruised chest, and I fear he’s disappointed, or worse. It’s possible I’ve killed more than one man. I may have left our love for dead.
“If it’s hard for you to love me now,” I add, “you need to be honest with yourself. Nothing’s going to fix that. And I won’t act like it didn’t happen.”
He picks up his head and touches the tops of my hands, gradually tightening around them as his gaze locks onto mine. “Neither will I. When I say you’re mine, I mean all of you. The violet that heals, and my Forzetta, who kills when she has to. And when she wants to.”
“How are you not disgusted by me?”
“You want me to be honest?”
“Sure.”
I don’t really want to hear it. I want him to forget it entirely. Pretend it doesn’t exist so that I can avoid any honesty that comes with the word disgust attached. He makes it ten times worse by sliding to the other side of the tub.
“I don’t know,” he says with amazement in his voice. “I should be…something. Disappointed. Maybe disgusted, like you say. You’re not what I see in the wives of other men. You’re who I want, but also, you’re who I was given. And you’re more. More…” He looks around the room as if the right word will appear on the walls. “I am more in love with you now than before. L’amore governa senza regole.” I understand the words, but he translates anyway. “Love rules without rules. You are outside expectations. Bigger than the law or tradition. A filthy sinner like me can never reign over a woman like you.”
“The only place I want to be reigned over is the bedroom. And the bath.”
Smiling, he stands, slick with wet, patched with bubbles sliding down to gather around his erection.
“This, I can do.” He holds out his hand for me.
We get out of the tub together. He snaps a thick towel from the cabinet and covers my shoulders.
“We’ll have to get the crown,” I say as he carefully dries me from fingertip to under my arms.
“Yes.” He gets on his knee to dry my feet, moving upward. Over my breasts and collarbones, his touch is reverent, soothing, healing.
“Today. Before Gia does.”
He pats my face dry with gentle taps, then gives himself a quick toweling. “She can’t walk in and take what’s yours. The lawyers… It’s not a camorra firm. The genius of your father’s consigliere was using outsiders, so it’s not like what you call a ‘mob priest’ or a ‘mob doctor.’”
He’s playfully mocking what I’ve said before, but with the mention of a mob doctor, a lump rises in my throat.
“No.” I try to swallow the lump, but it sticks, reminding me that I need to be looked at. I can’t avoid it too much longer. “I want to see an obstetrician. A real one. Not Dr. Salafia—the one who checks to make sure brides are virgins.”
“He died last May.” He hangs up the towel, not getting it.
“Not Farina. He’s no doctor.”
He tsks a no. “There’s a doctor on Tamino Avenue. Aselli. We can go tonight.”
“Not here. On the other side of the river. A real doctor with no loyalties. I think I can still use the student clinic. You need to take me first thing in the morning or I’ll go myself.”
He holds up his hands to stop me, then puts them on either side of my face. “We go together. Always. Everywhere. Together.”
I believe him. God help me, I believe him, and inside that box of faith is a prize—a shining truth.
Trust. I trust him.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “I’ll call tomorrow and make sure they can see me.”
“No. I’ll call them and tell them when we’re coming.”
Santino leans down, picks me up in his arms, and carries me to the bedroom, where he lays me on the covers.
“It’s too early to sleep,” I say, even though I’m completely exhausted. “We haven’t even had dinner.”
“Just relax.” He stands at the side of the bed, body fluid, bruised, ready to get dressed and walk out of the room to whatever business awaits downstairs.
My cells and bones react to the thought of him leaving before I fall asleep. No. He can’t.
“You going to feed me this?” I reach for his cock, wrapping my hand around the base. He leans over and parts my legs.
“Again?” He kisses inside my thigh. “You’re insatiable.”
In answer, I pull him into me and wrap my legs around him. He kisses the unbruised side of my face, and I turn so his lips touch the broken vessels and still-swollen skin. He pauses, then gently kisses where I’m hurt.
I sigh. It’s exactly what I need.
Mostly exactly, but I want more.
Pushing into him, I press his erection on my seam. We kiss as he slides along the length of it. I moan into his mouth, jerking faster as all the pain and worry flow between my legs and transform into pleasure.
“Please,” I whisper. “Don’t make me beg.”
“I won’t, my violet.” He pulls back and realigns at my opening. “Maybe tomorrow.”
I’m so wet his massiveness slides in without friction, stretching and filling, but so slowly I’m taunted by every inch. He is unyielding but shaped for me, fucking with gentle force that asks no questions and tells no lies. In it, I am safe, but not from him.
Someday he’s going to destroy me, but not today.
Today, I am filled but not overflowing. Broken but not shattered.
He holds me so tightly, I am powerless.
“Be still,” he murmurs in Italian. “Just open your legs wide, so I can feel your sin from the inside.”
I am still.
He fucks me to the depth of my sins, and loves me for them.
9
SANTINO
I hold my wife, wondering if I can ever make her happy.
When I stole her and forced her into marriage, she was the signature at the end of a contract. I didn’t care if she was miserable, content, anything. All she had to be was breathing.
When I started to love her, I didn’t doubt I could be everything she needed.
Even after Damiano stole her, I was convinced she only had to be rescued to be content.
But this plea to be normal? I can’t pretend to misunderstand what she means. It’s not four children in an Italian-speaking house with due cucine and big Sundays. It’s not the normal I know. Her normal is barbecues and July Fourth. There are lawnmowers and garden beds. Husbands working behind desks all day. There’s more to it, I’m sure, but I can’t picture it in the real world. It’s all television, but a different channel than the laughable mob movies where tough guys say capeesh without any irony.