Enamoured

by Darling, Giana

  Dante stared at me, breathing in such a controlled way I knew he had to be counting back from ten in order to stay calm with me. I had told him I wasn’t fragile a million times, but no matter what I said, he still thought I’d had enough violence and aggression to last a lifetime.

  It was the other reason he kept his mafia business separate from me.

  “I know you love your family. In fact, I know it more than most people will ever have the opportunity to. But, Cosi, that was just an exercise in stupidity! The Order has people everywhere, but London is their fucking hub. How did you think you could get away with that?”

  “I was there for barely twenty-four hours,” I snapped. “I doubt Alexander has someone stationed at London’s central surveillance hub just waiting to catch sight of me setting foot in the city.”

  Dante arched both brows and pursed his lips.

  I hesitated as he meant me to.

  It was difficult to put anything past Alexander. If he wanted something enforced, he would go to any means to see it through.

  “I didn’t see him, anyway. It was just pure bad luck that Ashcroft was at the awards and ran into me,” I argued.

  “You think Alexander is the only one keeping an eye on you? I know Frankie and I did a fine job erasing you from Italy and your old life, but you kept your name, and you’re a fucking international supermodel, Cosima. It’s not rocket science to find you. How do you know Sherwood wasn’t the one to send Ashcroft?”

  I thought about the way Ashcroft has acted, sly and giddy with it like a child who had stolen another boy’s toy.

  “No, Sherwood didn’t send him. Honestly, Dante, I think it was purely coincidental.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “No…but given Ashcroft’s plans for me, I think I can guess.”

  Dante’s body expanded even more until I thought his muscles would tear through his expensive suit like the Hulk.

  “What. Is. His. Plan?” he demanded through clenched teeth.

  “Ugh, sorry to interrupt,” the cabbie said in a thick Bronx accent, “but we’re here.”

  I peered out the window at Osteria Lombardi and felt relief pluck a resonant chord in my chest.

  “Listen, we can talk about this later, but I have to go,” I told him, leaning forward to press a kiss to his bristly cheek.

  He snagged my wrist gently before I could make it out of the car, but his face was creased with conflict as he mulled over his words.

  “I try to give you space, si? I try to give you freedom to live the kind of life you want to live because you were so long in a cage, and not just one owned by my brother. I try, Cosima, when all I want to do is stand guard like a sentry by your side every single minute to make sure life cannot fuck with you anymore. So have a care, hmm? Take pity on this overprotective guy, and promise me, when I come to you next, you’ll tell me what happened, and you’ll let me help.”

  I paused, my throat thick with unshed tears.

  “You’re not alone in this,” Dante said, his own voice thick with emotion. “You won’t be alone ever again. Not with Salvatore and me on your side, bene?”

  I nodded jerkily, then let out a deep exhale to settle my hummingbird’s heart, pounding rapidly yet so fragile in my chest.

  “Va bene,” I agreed softly, before moving quickly out of the cab, dashing at the wetness under one eye as I moved to the sidewalk.

  I didn’t look back as the cab pulled away, but the crowded streets of Little Italy wouldn’t have afforded me the room to turn around anyway.

  Mama’s restaurant straddled the line between Little Italy and the trendier Soho, the perfect place for her intimate, upscale Italian restaurant. She drew in a combination of the city’s wealthy, elegant couples and deeply traditional Italian-American neighbors.

  Italian-Americans were not like native Italians. The immigrants had packaged the culture of Italy pre-World War II and put it in a time capsule, cracking it open after passing through Ellis Island and settling in the small rectangular neighborhood of Little Italy in New York City. They spoke in broken, bastardized Italian, different than even the most obscure dialects back home because English underscored it like a highlighter, turning accents into mockeries they’d made famous with cartoon characters like Mario. They were only American enough to set them totally apart from Americans and barely Italian enough to pass for it if they ever re-entered the mother country.

  My siblings and I didn’t like to spend time there in that cramped neighborhood slowly shrinking under the expansion of China Town. It felt claustrophobic and tragic, like maybe we’d worked so hard to escape Napoli only to wind up right back inside another version of it.

  But Mama loved it.

  She wasn’t an old woman, but she was set in her ways, and her ways were just as antiquated as the Italian-American ideal. She believed in the outward strength of patriarchy and the secret skillful workings of the matriarchy. She spoke Italian whenever she could get away with it, and though she wasn’t bigoted, most of her employees at Osteria Lombardi were Italian or Italian-American because of it.

  She’d escaped a small world, a world that was a cage, only to carefully lock herself inside another one. It made her feel safe, I knew, but it also made me feel sad for her.

  We weren’t on bad terms.

  We could have been, and part of me even thought we should have been, but I took too much pride in my ability to intellectualize and understand a person and their motivation to truly blame her for her past.

  Especially given that both her mistakes had come from falling in love. First with the wrong man at the right time, and then the reverse with the other.

  She wore the weight and the indignity of those decisions every day in her dark eyes, her demons making the brown seem black with shadows.

  At first, when I’d moved back with Salvatore and Dante at my side, she had been quiet, almost shy with shame around me. She knew I knew the truth about my parentage, and she wondered when I would strike out against her, and more, when I would tell Sebastian and take another child away from her.

  But I didn’t tell anyone.

  My year of slavery and its contrast of deep horrors and tender mercies went into a locked box in the farthest reaches of my soul and stayed there, untouched.

  It was a defence mechanism, maybe even an unhealthy one, but I wasn’t going to castigate myself for it.

  I’d been through enough.

  So had my family.

  I didn’t need to throw a bomb into the middle of my family just as we were all reaching for each other and our dreams.

  Still, Mama and I existed on my terms. She walked on eggshells around me, and a small, horrible part of me enjoyed that. She deserved some discomfort for telling lies, for ruining my life before it had even started.

  Without her, I wouldn’t have been a pawn to the mafia or to Alexander.

  But it was also why I cut her so much slack…because without her, I wouldn’t have met Alexander.

  And no matter what, I’d always treasure my connection with him.

  I pushed through the wooden doors of Osteria Lombardi, inhaling the yeasted scent of focaccia and semolina dough as I walked across the dark wood floors to the back of the restaurant. It was a traditional space, exactly how you would imagine an elegant Italian eatery right down to the bookcases stocked with regional wines, the exposed brick walls, and the old, weeping candlesticks at each table.

  I loved it there. It was the manifestation of a dream Mama had dreamt her whole life and never believed would be possible. Sebastian and I had made it so through hard work and sacrifice.

  Just being inside those four walls made all of it—the pain, the separation, the scars both physical and unseen—so fucking worth it.

  “Mia bella figlia,” Mama called out operatically as she pushed through the sliding doors from the kitchen to see me. “Come give your mama some love.”

  Obedient as any Italian to their mother, I hustled over to be embraced in her sweet bas
il and semolina scented arms, crushed against her bosom with both cheeks bussed in the traditional Italian greeting.

  Satisfied, she pulled back but kept her arms around me and studied me with a fierce frown on her handsome face. “You look dead on your feet, piccola. Sit and let Mama feed you.”

  I followed her to our family table at the back of the room and allowed her to fuss over me, holding out my chair and taking my purse.

  “You let me fix you something, si? You need more meat on your skinny bones, Cosima. It’s not so good to be skinny like this. No men like a woman with so little to hold, capisce?”

  “Si, Mama,” I allowed even though I had enough meat at my tits and ass to warrant being featured on Sport’s Illustrated despite my slim limbs.

  Mama and Giselle had the same lush, deeply curved bodies that most men drooled over, whereas Elena and I got the long, lean forms of our fathers.

  I’d once thought we both inherited it from Seamus, and it had taken me a long time to realize I much preferred being genetically tied to Salvatore.

  “Why did you marry Seamus?” I blurted out, freezing Mama like a bug in amber.

  Her wide, light brown eyes blinked at me as her mouth opened, then closed.

  I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms, deciding to follow through with my spontaneous interrogation. In the three years I’d been reunited with her, I’d yet to ask any of the hard questions. Honestly, I even avoided talking about it too much with Salvatore because every mention of Mama just made him deflate like an old balloon.

  “I deserve these answers,” I reminded her, not unkindly.

  With a heavy sigh, she sank into the chair beside me. “I knew this day was coming, but to have it here now, it is still difficult. Seamus was exotic, si? So fresh and different. I liked this. My father was a fisherman when this was still big industry in Napoli. He was very popular and always had big parties. During one party, Seamus was there with locals he met at the university. My father was so traditional, and I wanted different for myself. Seamus was from America. It was so glamourous for us Neapolitans who had never been beyond Roma. He spoke with an accent, and he had this fire hair, yet he knew so much about Italy that I did not feel stupid when we spoke. He found me almost right away and stayed with me the whole night even though I was just sixteen and not the most beautiful woman at the party.”

  She stared down at her soft, worn hands, gently fingering the slight indentation that still remained from decades of wearing a wedding ring.

  “We married quickly in those days. My father, he did not mind Seamus in the end, but he died just after I was pregnant with Elena. He might have helped when Seamus started to gamble and drink…” She shrugged. “My mother, she was long gone to a sickness. There was no one left. When Seamus started to become…the man you remember him to be, it was too late to turn to anyone. There was no one left, you see?”

  My heart constricted with empathy. Wasn’t that exactly how I had felt when Seamus first told me he was selling me through the mafia to the highest bidder to repay his debts? As if the only person with the power to do anything was myself?

  “I had Elena and then Giselle. I was just a girl really and I had few skills, but good hands in the kitchen. In Napoli, you know this is not so special. It is the men who own the restaurants, and we had no money to open one anyway. Seamus did not like me to work. A traditional Italian family, this was his dream.” She laughed bitterly, her eyes glazed as she stared over my shoulder at her past. “He got one more typical for Napoli than he could have dreamed of, si?”

  I nodded tightly, trying to swallow the burn of my mama’s tragic story.

  “I was walking by the docks to buy the fish for dinner one day when I saw this man,” she said, her voice dipping into low, velvet tones as she began the part of the story where my real father came in. “He was very tall and very big across his chest like a man who works with his hands for a living. I liked this. He seemed…esperto?”

  “Capable,” I offered.

  “Si, so capable. It was very different from my husband with his books and his words. This other man, he looked at me, Cosima, for such a long time that I stopped to watch him look at me. I had Elena on one hand and my baby on the other hip. He looked, and then he just walked to me like this.” She used her arms, swinging them firmly, her brow lowered in mock concentration. “He walked to me, and he said his name, Salvatore, and did I want to get coffee right now with him.”

  I could imagine that. My strong, determined father seeing my beautiful mother across a stinking fish market and deciding then and there to have her.

  His sense of conviction was something I admired and aspired to.

  I thought of my plan to dispatch of Ashcroft, and my resolve hardened.

  “I went. Then the next day, I went once more. This was again and again until I was so innamorato with him, I couldn’t see beyond his golden eyes.” She smiled softly at me then. “The eyes he gave my twin babies.”

  She had been enamoured with him.

  There was something about her word choice and the way she spoke about Salvatore that panged in my heart like a gong. This was the way I’d felt about Alexander.

  Both men had entered our lives like a storm, and where there should have been only devastation in their wake, there was beauty too in what remained.

  “Why didn’t you just leave with him?” I asked the million-dollar question, and it tasted metallic on my tongue.

  The dreaminess in her eyes snuffed out.

  “He was le mafie and not small, capisce? He was rising like this.” She slapped her hands together. “One day, we walked with my babies. I was pregnant with you, but just, and I had not told him this. A man from another mafia, le Cosa Nostra, he attacked us because Salvatore had done something. He took the knife here,” she said, pressing a hand to her upper right shoulder. “And my girls, they were not hurt, but I was inside here.” She moved her hand again, this time to her chest over her heart. “I knew this was no life for my babies. Seamus, he was involved because of the cards and the money. But Tore, he was involved because he liked this life, and I knew he would not leave it.”

  She shrugged as if her shoulders were waterlogged. “I asked, we fought, he begged, and I cried more tears than one person should in one lifetime, but this is life, uh? We make decisions, and this was mine.” She stared at me again, squaring her shoulders and tipping her chin in a way that was so me, it made me want to cry. “You can judge me for this, piccola, but this I will not ever regret. Look at what we have today because of this choice.”

  I was still too mired in her story to argue with her that we were exactly where we were that day, sitting in her restaurant in the America of her childhood dreams, because of me more than her.

  I could give her pride. It would hurt no one to let her have that after everything she had been through.

  The door at the front of the room ricocheted opened, heralding calls from my brother as he commanded the space. Mama snapped out of her melancholy to hustle up to him and squeeze him even more tightly than usual.

  He frowned at me in question over her smaller form, stroking her hair softly to comfort an ailment he couldn’t understand.

  I shrugged one shoulder, unable to give voice to her story.

  Or my own.

  Were all love stories inherently tragic?

  Was that what made them so epic? Not the gentleness of connection between two souls or the comfort of their union, but the inevitable loss of it at some time or another.

  I wondered if I loved Alexander in retrospect more than I ever had while I was with him, and I came up blank.

  My emotions toward my Master were too convoluted to untangle. Most of all, when I thought of him now, all I felt was grief and embarrassed hatred.

  I tried to pay attention as Sebastian sat down, then as Giselle and finally Elena joined us for lunch, but my mind was lost to musings.

  I had a degenerate Lord blackmailing me for sexual favours, a worried mafioso and
soon-to-be worried father on my hands as well as lingering, eternally unresolved feelings for the man who had once owned me.

  I figured, even though my family didn’t know it as they gabbed about Elena’s plans for adoption and Giselle pretended too hard that she didn’t care about them, then as Sebastian stormed out because of Elena’s rude inquiries about Savannah Richardson, they could damn well cut me some slack for being distracted.

  Cosima

  “No.”

  “Listen to me, dear heart.” Jensen Brask tried to reason with me over the speakerphone as I stood in the bathroom preparing for a charity event that evening. “We need you. Clemence Bisset has dropped out because she had an anaphylactic attack! It’s not like I planned this, but you really are our only hope to keep this campaign on schedule. You cannot tell me you don’t care about St. Aubyn. I know after that Bulgari afterparty you resigned from your spokeswoman role because you ‘had your reasons,’” he said, slightly mockingly. “But this is one of the best fashion houses in the world, and it’s the one that gave birth to your stardom. You owe it to us to substitute for Clemence.”

  I sighed so heavily, I blew my powder brush off the sink sill and onto the floor. After picking it up, I braced my hands on either side of the porcelain basin and looked into my tired yellow eyes.

  There was really no way I could risk going back to England. Once in the past four years had been one time too many. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that I could survive another visit without drawing the all-seeing eye of the Order.

  “Laying on the guilt trip a little thick there, Jen,” I accused him as I resumed carefully contouring my eyelids with dark brown and gold shadow. “You know I will always be grateful for what you and St. Aubyn did for my career, but I was serious when I said I would never work for the brand again.”

  Alexander Davenport owned the fashion house. There was no way I was going to have anything to do with any aspect of that man or his business.

  He’d made it clear to me I had no role in it either.

  When I’d first discovered the connection, I thought he might have set the entire thing up with Willa and Sinclair, that my duo in shining armor had been sent from the lord of the manor.