“Tell me.”
He hesitated. “They will.”
I swung my knees around, knocking his thigh so I could look him in the eyes. He was startled when I took one of his huge hands in mine. “I’m asking you.”
“Things are changing. Salvatore’s new consigliere is ruthless and very smart. There is talk of him taking over the New York City outfit if his plans for Napoli work out.” Nico spoke of the handsome mafia boss whose specialty was transporting weapons and bribing politicians. “Rocco is getting nervous about his position with the capo. He needs more money. It’s time for those with debt to pay with money or…” His shrug was eloquent as the unspoken words or whatever else of value they had, even if it was their life hung in the air.
“And I’m the most valuable thing Seamus Moore has,” I whispered, almost afraid to say it out loud.
It was late August, and the air was thick with warmth, but a shiver bit into my spine with tiny, pointed teeth and shook me until my bones rattled.
Nico nodded and then gave me the silence I needed.
“I offered to marry you.”
I laughed. It was such a sweet, foolish sentiment especially from someone who knew better that I couldn’t help the laughter that burst from the compression chamber of my lungs.
He wasn’t offended. “We would have been good together. Pretty babies.”
“Yes,” I patted his broad knee but didn’t allow myself to see that future. “Pretty babies. Instead, what, I am to be married to some mafia boss?”
“Not quite. Salvatore’s consigliere has found someone who wants to…” He cleared his throat and looked down at my hand on his knee. He brushed a thick knuckle down my wrist and sighed. “He has found someone who wants to buy you.”
My mouth opened to laugh, I think, but only hot air escaped, fleeing as my lungs collapsed.
“You are very beautiful, Cosima, a virgin and a good girl, despite your independent streak,” he tried to explain, his voice heavy and low as if the weight of his tone would subdue me. “You cannot be so surprised.”
“Sleep with me then.” I knew he would never, not like this. Not even the most beautiful girl in Italy was worth dying over. “I’ll run away.”
“You won’t.” Rocco emerged from the small house, wiping his scarlet-dipped fingers on a scrap of grey linen that I was almost sure he had ripped from one of Mama’s curtains.
I shot to my feet, but he froze me in place with those horrible eyes.
“You won’t, beautiful girl, because if you do, your father…” Seamus appeared in the room behind him, and even in the low light, I could see the blood dripping from his hands, streaming like tears across his face from an open gash in his forehead. “…and your mother, your brother, and your sisters, they will all die. I will string them up from that tree.” He pointed at a massive Cyprus tree, the only spot of pretty on the narrow block. “With bells tied to their ankles so that their bodies sing when the wind comes. Would you be so selfish, beautiful girl?”
My imagination prepared the image in less time than it took for me to blink, yet I was shaking my head before he had even finished. The sound of bells tickled my eardrums.
I sagged.
Rocco nodded and smiled almost kindly, but my gaze was sunk deep in the mire of his morally corrupt gaze. “You will be sold to a foreigner, a man who has agreed to pay a considerable amount for you. Before you ask, I do not know the details, and I do not want to. You will be whomever this man wants you to be if you want your family to live and prosper. Do you understand?”
When I didn’t move, he came closer, taking my chin in his hands and tilting it up until my throat was closed and I was perched on my toes to reduce the tension.
“Such golden eyes. Money eyes.” He breathed into my open mouth. “It is almost a shame to lose such beauty.”
He let me go, and I struggled not to stumble as I dragged in deep gulps of tepid air.
“What does Salvatore think of this plan?” I asked desperately.
The capo had a soft spot for me that I’d never understood because it started before I’d hit puberty and every man began to take note of me.
No, the great Salvatore had been watching for years, a benevolent guardian with more in common with a demon than an angel.
I couldn’t believe he would be happy to sell me off.
Rocco’s meaty paw wrapped around my wrist and tugged me closer. Strangely, there was no violence in his gesture. Instead, as I tipped my head back to look into his dark as tar eyes, all I saw was anxiety.
“Salvatore understands the currency of beauty and flesh. This is a man who just yesterday stabbed a Neapolitan official in the eye with a fork because he disrespected him over breakfast. It’s almost sweet that you think capo would give a shit about a pretty, worthless little thing like you.”
I hissed in pain as he twisted my wrist and leaned closer to whisper, “In fact, I remember exactly what your Salvatore said to me. ‘She is a great beauty, and that is the worst luck any woman in our world can have. Too tempting to let roam free and too dangerous to keep in one place. Make sure you get a good price for her.’”
I squeezed my eyes shut because I could hear Salvatore’s smooth as crushed velvet voice say those words. He’d said similar things to me before on his rare, but impactful visits, his eyes sharp and sad like a weapon he didn’t want to use against me pressed tight to my throat.
Make sure you get a good price for her.
The words punctured themselves into my heart like a scar written in Braille.
“It’s a good thing that your pretty Elena will remain here under my protection, and Giselle when she visits on school holiday. Otherwise, there would be no telling what might happen to them,” he added casually.
My neck snapped as I shot my gaze back over to him, but Rocco ignored my desperate eyes to focus on a clump of dirt sticking to the side of his well-polished shoes.
“Don’t you dare touch them,” I said, part plea and part threat but totally ineffective.
Rocco grinned his pointy teeth at me. There was a rumor within the Camorra that he had sharpened them with a metal file when he worked as an enforcer in his youth. Looking at those sharp white teeth now, it was hard to believe otherwise.
“I have no desire to touch them, but many other men do. Your sisters have that pretty red hair like their father. Redheads are very rare in Napoli, a delicacy if you will.”
“You won’t,” I ground out. “If you want me to go willingly with this stronzo, then you will promise me never to let any of your men near my sisters.”
Nico shifted uncomfortably, and I could tell that he wished I would keep quiet, accept my destiny, and be happy that Rocco was even speaking with me in a civilized manner. The situation might have seemed unjust to someone from the outside, but the reality was that I was skating on thin ice. The men putting the finishing touches on my father’s bruised and bloody body wouldn’t hesitate to brand me with a different kind of violence.
As if reading my thoughts, Rocco swung his stare my way, scraping over my curves like a serrated knife. I wasn’t wearing anything revealing—to do so would have been begging for it—but I still had the sense that he knew my body well, that he had fantasized about it enough to accurately guess at the swell of my breasts and the incline of my waist. I was used to the descriptiveness of desire written across men’s faces, but I hadn’t yet learned how to translate it into power.
So when Rocco took another menacing step toward me, I lowered my chin to stare at the ground, my shoulders rolling in and my hands clasping submissively before my groin. It was natural, this position, this submission, but I was still hot with shame when his chuckle wafted warmly across my forehead.
“It’s a shame we must keep you a virgin for your future owner,” he said as a thick finger slid down my middle part and over the shell of my ear. It was a gentle touch, but it made me shudder almost violently in fear. “I could have sold it off too.”
He laughed agai
n, hard and strong into my downturned face before he twisted and walked to the red Ferrari parked partially on Mama’s flower garden.
Nico came to me then, placing a large ineloquent hand on my shoulder. “People will miss you.”
If he meant to be comforting, it had the opposite effect. Anger rushed up from my diaphragm like dragon’s breath. Screw him and screw anyone who thought the weight of missing me would come anywhere near to the emptiness at my center. They might not have me, inconsequential me, but I wouldn’t have them, this home, this city of dirty beauty and this family of sin-soaked angels. And into the emptiness a new man, my owner, would try to shove pieces of himself, his home, his city, his language… least of all, his cock. I was smart enough to know, even then, that the only reason I was worthy was for my beautiful veneer and the only reason someone would buy me was for sex.
I kept my head bowed, and Nico took it as the dismissal it was.
As soon as the thugs had left, I went to the front steps and picked up my book. It was in English, the first book my father had ever brought home from work at the university. A collection of mythologies by an American woman, Edith Hamilton. It wasn’t something that had intrigued any of my siblings, and I had claimed it as my own almost the second Seamus had stepped through the doors holding it and a bottle of American Bourbon.
I flipped to the story of Persephone, the beautiful child goddess who had been abducted by Hades with the consent of her father and to the obliviousness of her mother. My thumb tore the corner of the page as I jerked it closed, my damp print catching on the cheap paper and bending it.
“Cosima.”
Seamus stood in the doorway. Well, he leaned against it, his body colourful and deflated like a child’s old party balloon. They had pulled out three fingernails on each of his hands and he held them tenderly to his chest, even though I could tell one shoulder was dislocated. Without a word, I climbed the three steps, grabbed hold of his torso, and popped his arm back in place. His breath hissed out from between his dry, cracked lips, but he didn’t protest. After all, this wasn’t our first time doing this.
“It’s a good idea,” he said.
His damp forehead glistened, and I couldn’t resist the impulse to mop it with my shirtsleeve.
“It is,” I agreed, but only because emotions were impossible.
Each heartbeat forced them from my blood, condensing them into a small box tucked behind my breastbone. If I reacted now…Well, someone would end up dead, and I didn’t like the odds of it being me.
“You can’t tell the family,” he warned.
“No.” It would be my family who would die then. Thrown in front of me like broken shell casings in my standoff against Rocco and his crew. I was doing this for them, and I wouldn’t allow them to get in the way.
I’d leave a note on the kitchen table as I did when I had a sudden job come up in Roma or Milano. Explain that I had to be out of the country for work, and I didn’t know how long it would be before I’d return.
They would be upset, of course, but they knew it was a necessary evil of our survival.
I was often gone.
So it would take them a while to realize I wasn’t coming back at all.
“I’ll take care of them.” Seamus always did a good job of pretending to be a father. When he was home, he tucked us in, his alcoholic breath soothing as he sang Irish lullabies. He read to Elena, who still, much to her frustration, struggled with English, and he posed for Giselle, who loved his red hair and freckled face so much like her own. Only with Sebastian was he distant, and even then, it was due to my brother’s lack of respect and his blatant disapproval of everything Seamus stood for. If Seamus was in the house, Sebastian, often, was not.
And then there was me, his favourite daughter. It wasn’t saying much, Seamus didn’t have the heart to truly favour someone, even Mama, and honestly, I was everyone’s favourite. In a family of fractures, I was the pane of glass.
But being his favourite had taught me enough about Seamus Moore to know better than to believe a word he said. And as I smiled sharply into his molted face, I knew he was proud of me for seeing through his bullshit. It showed him that he had taught me well.
We were almost there.
The signage for Roma promised us a farther fifteen-minute drive, but I recognized the route well enough, even in the dark, to know we would be there in ten. After that, we would ascend the hill to Aventine, the exclusive neighborhood outside of the tourist scope, tucked among leaves and hedges like a hidden Eden. I had never been to that part of the city. My infrequent modelling career had given me no reason to stray outside of the centro storico unless I was craving my favourite slice of pizza from a small trattoria in the Jewish Quarter.
As we climbed the hill, the Fiat huffing inelegantly with effort, I twisted my hands in my lap and forced myself to take three deep breaths. I had my own plan, and it was about time that I set part one in motion.
“Papa.”
Seamus looked over at me and smiled as he pulled into a small side street. “Yes, carina?”
“I have one condition for the sale.”
One red eyebrow rose, and though I looked nothing like him, it was uncanny how similarly we expressed ourselves in the flowing movement of our hands and the elasticity of our features. I felt a hard pang in my chest and wondered if it was because I would miss him or because I so deeply hated him.
“I will disappear, right here, right now, unless you agree to my terms,” I said.
“Well then.” He waved his hand to go on before flicking the turn single and coasting to the front of a large wrought iron gate. He rolled down the window, but the gates opened before he could speak into the intercom.
I waited, taking in the sloping driveway bracketed by beautifully cut grass and spiraling trees. The house appeared almost immediately, large and traditional with a red clay roof and golden stucco walls. It was beautiful, certainly, but a fake, a very obvious modern reproduction of something the owner could have had authentically with perhaps a few less amenities.
“You need to leave,” I said as I got out of the car quickly and reached into the back to snatch the small duffel bag I had hidden under my seat. “I packed your clothes, some money.” Money that I had shamefully stolen from Sebastian’s getaway fund. “Even your pipe is in here.”
“How thoughtful,” he said, rising out of the small car and staring at me from across the hot metal.
“I’m serious, Papa.” My accent thickened noticeably as my anxiety spiked. We didn’t have much time to linger in the driveway. I had already seen a curtain twitch. “I need you to swear to me that you will never go back there.”
“They need me,” he said, but it lacked conviction because even Seamus Moore wasn’t a good enough liar to make that true.
“They really don’t. You’ve only brought the family shame and misfortune. Until now, it was almost forgivable. You have a gambling problem and a silver tongue.” I shrugged. “You were born like that. But now, you’ve gambled away your daughter. And I won’t ever let you put Giselle or Elena in the same situation.”
“Ah, I see. So you think this is a good trade? The golden daughter martyred for the wicked father?” Seamus’ eyes twinkled merrily. He delighted in my mind, in the games and trades he had imparted to me like wisdom. It wasn’t wisdom, it was foolery, but if he wanted to believe otherwise, I didn’t really care.
“No, I think they’ll be better off without both of us. We attract too much attention,” I said.
The redhead gambler involved with the mafia and the beautiful virgin they lusted after… it didn’t make for a happy ending for anyone, but especially their loved ones.
“Arrogant.”
I shrugged.
“Your sisters are beautiful, too. And your Sebastian.”
My heart started, stuttered, and stopped at the mention of my brother, my other half. But I had thought this out carefully, and I knew the statistics and probabilities of their future more clearly than
I could ever foresee my own.
“A handsome man is still a man. And with you gone, they’ll actually have a chance of getting out,” I pointed out.
“No one just ‘gets out’, Cosima.” It was the first time my father’s voice had changed from anything but pleasant. “Not without consequences.”
“I know.” I nodded, the finality of the movement like a hammer. “What do you call this?”
I tossed the bag back into the car and slammed the door shut before turning on my heel to head for the massive oak doors of the villa. A small portfolio containing the only things I cared about in this life was clutched under my arm like something precious and superfluous, like a football.
I waited until he stood beside me at the door to say, “Swear to me.”
He hesitated. “I’ll need some more money.”
I almost smiled; so predictable. “If you’re willing to steal mob money, I won’t stop you.”
He kicked at the door, his knuckles too raw to knock. It opened suddenly, as if someone had been waiting with his or her hand on the knob for us to arrive. A man stood before us, dressed in an expensive black and white suit that matched his salt and pepper hair which was thick and deeply parted, tidily combed, and slicked to one side. He was the least impressionable man I had ever seen in my life; entirely pale like only a Brit could be with bland, fleshy features. Without a word, he stepped aside to allow two men in black to pass through and frisk us.
I could tell Seamus wanted to say something, object or, more probably, make an inappropriate joke, but one haughty look from the butler stopped him. It was easy to ignore the hulking man who moved from behind the butler to pat me down, brushing his thick fingers over my breasts and groin; he was professional and barely paid my face a cursory glance. It was the first time a man had shown himself to be sexually unaffected by my audacious curves, and I was strangely aroused by it. He wore sunglasses even though he had emerged from the cool, dark interior and when he grasped my arm firmly to tug me into the house, I shivered slightly.
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