by CD Reiss
“You want to work with me?”
“Yeah.” He shrugs a little as if he wasn’t ready to answer a direct question but might as well, since I asked. “And maybe I can climb the ladder, then… some time… we can be like it used to be, on the other side. On a personal level. You’re in charge and I can be… once I prove myself… like a right-hand guy.”
Back home, Damiano and I were partners and equals. That’s what he wants, and if I were the same man as I was then, I’d give it to him. I’d embrace the past and make it the future. But right now, I don’t trust him on either side of the ocean.
“If I say no?”
He throws himself back in his chair, arms out, palms up, as if my answer renders him innocent of any consequences. “Like you said. Marco’s got holes in his pockets. He’s a bad investment.”
“He is.”
“So that’s a no?”
“I’ll bless you cashing him out. Not the repayment schedule.”
“Bene.” He nods with a rueful press of his lips—like a parent who didn’t want to have to punish his child but now has no choice.
“Is there a problem, Dami?” I stand.
“No, no.”
“You sure?”
“I was just remembering that day.” He backs toward the door. “In the hospital with Emilio. Just us and that fucking consigliere. Nazario Coraggio. When he gave you Rosetta, and he gave me—”
“What about it?”
“Who knows why he did it, besides us?”
“And Franco Tabona?”
“He knew shit.” He shakes his head and tsks. “I never told him. I never told anyone. Tabona went after your wife to get to you. Man, if he knew? Shit. It woulda changed the math real quick. But it was fun watching you wipe them out.”
I should have killed Damiano the first time he implied my wife was a target, but he’s still Cosimo Orolio’s son, and I rule a small, peaceful corner of the world. Cosimo would have sent a hundred men from Naples. The resulting war would have raged for a day—maybe two—before he crushed us.
When Emilio died, I was nineteen and officially, I was no more important than a loyal soldier. Cosimo filled the vacuum without shedding a drop of blood, but he couldn’t maintain the scope of Emilio’s territory, because no one believed he could. Within six months, his boundaries were as tight as a fist, but about as small—without America, and I was sidelined within his organization.
I was worried about the Tabonas. This was a misdirection of myself.
“Doesn’t matter the reason,” I say. “Franco Tabona sends men for my wife, Franco Tabona gets wiped out. That math never changes.”
Loretta watches us from the kitchen, arms crossed like a big sister letting her brothers fight it out.
“You think I told them,” Damiano says, “but I didn’t. If any of them knew? What would they do with her?”
We both know exactly what would be done with Violetta if everyone knew the nature of my promise to her father.
“After they take what you married her for? They gonna just kill her or take a day to give everyone a dip in her sauce?”
I’m standing before he’s even finished, hands on the table, leaning in his face. “Don’t talk about her ever again.”
Loretta comes outside with a bowl of fresh ice she knows we don’t need. She’s there to make sure whatever happens is witnessed.
“I kept the secret,” he says, seeming unafraid. “Even kept it from my own father. And you won’t even offer me a taste of friendship.”
Loretta puts the bowl on the table. I sit back and jerk my chin toward her in a dismissive motion. Damiano flicks his wrist at her. She goes inside.
“You stole what was given to me.” He jabs his thumb to his chest. “For once, I was first in line and you stepped over me.”
“The crown wasn’t meant for you.”
“Violetta was given to me.”
“She was always mine.”
“You took her.” Damiano pounds the table. “Ripped bread out of my mouth. I come here and ask for crumbs in return for saving your uncle, and you won’t even give me that.”
I cannot discuss who owns Violetta for another moment, because there’s more than a promise to a dying man at stake here. Damiano’s either baiting me to take out his eye, which would start a war, or he’s sincere and is willing to start a war over his version of the truth.
“My friendship can’t be bought,” I say, standing slowly, ready to leave.
“And my silence hasn’t been paid for.” He drops two cubes of ice in his glass.
“You want a war, Dami? You don’t remember the last one well enough?”
“You owe me.” He pours himself more sambuca. “All this time, not telling every capo in the four corners how to get at the treasure he gave you. Peace ain’t cheap, and the note’s gonna come due before her birthday.”
“Enjoy your sambuca.”
I leave him there and give Loretta a quick goodbye before tearing down the hill.
The way home is deceptively less treacherous.
2
VIOLETTA
The mountains shudder when Santino speaks.
“Vai.”
He holds his paper between us, asking nothing else of me for now. I’m hungry and he can fuck himself, so I sit down to breakfast.
“Buongiorno.” His greeting rolls off his tongue like marmalade dripping off burned toast.
I’d like to know where he’s been spending so many of his hours, but since Italy, I’ve only said three words to him, over and over. It’s losing its power, and at this point, it’s more of a habit I’m revving up to break.
“La tua bella.” In our new language, this can be loosely translated as “go to hell.”
The bread in front of me looks like a crumbling bathroom tile.
Santino’s not exactly cowed by my anger, but he isn’t trying to break me. Either he understands what he did to me, or he doesn’t care. No matter how disrespectful I am, nothing makes him tell me what happened with Rosetta.
Did he love her?
Did he ever love me?
Does it matter?
Yet I’ve been too angry to ask directly. I’m starting to think my three-word strategy is backfiring.
“You should go out today,” he says from behind his newspaper. “Do some shopping.”
Me, doing anything he suggests, is self-harm. Disobedience is a reflex, not a choice, but it’s a choice I would make even if I thought about it.
When I started my most recent semester at college, I had no idea I would end up married to the most powerful mobster in Secondo Vasto, living in his dollhouse, helplessly and carelessly ripped apart in body and mind. In a beachside bedroom on the shore of the Amalfi coast, I finally let myself believe my husband had chosen me. That when he took me from my family, it was as much for love as honor; as much about what he was owed for my father’s debts as what he would have wanted anyway. A desire no less intense for being poorly expressed and cruelly implemented.
I gave him my body and my pleasure. I let him rule over me, and I let myself love being ruled by him, opening the fingers that had clenched around my own desires—relaxing into an unturned palm to show him the shards of ancient clay, fired in my false freedoms, broken in my protective fist, and I said, Take it. Take it all.
Like a man making a wish over his birthday candles, he blew the shards and dust away, leaving me with nothing to hold. He took nothing for himself because he didn’t want what I had as much as he wanted me to offer it all to him.
I understand why he’d bring her here to marry her since she wasn’t quite eighteen.
Santino DiLustro had been engaged to my sister, Rosetta, long before I was ever in the picture. He didn’t want me. He didn’t desire me. He wanted my sister, my beautiful sister, who had been stolen from me once when he took her to a festering misery of a country, and again when he let her die ruined and alone—wearing the same ring he won’t let me take off.
I turn the stone t
oward my palm so I don’t have to see the way the sun hits it, and I eat my tasteless toast.
I am a woman of precious stone and solid honor, and when I pushed him away our first night back, screaming those three words—la tua bella la tua bella—his lack of violence or threats spoke volumes. He knows he fucked up.
Good.
He knows I hate him.
Even better.
I don’t know the thickness of the line I’m walking, or what I’ll do in the moment before he does something violent enough to push him to reach for a cigarette. And that danger has its own buzz of electricity. I’ll say la tua bella as long as it fucks him up, even if it fucks me up.
I want him to hurt. I want him to struggle.
I want him gone.
I can’t wish him dead. Death is too good for him. And all this wanting and wishing does nothing. I have neither money nor friends. I have no choice but to make him as miserable as I am.
“Violetta,” he says, and I realize the unchewed toast is putty in my mouth.
“La tua bella?” I say with a lilt that could mean, “yes, dear?” or “how can I help you?”
When the women gossiped that he was a whoremaker, they weren’t talking about Loretta. They were talking about Rosetta.
“Please don’t do this anymore,” he asks softly from the other side of a stone wall of silence.
Did he woo her, I wonder? I’m Forzetta, but she was la tua bella. Did he bring her flowers and trinkets to show he was thinking about her? When the debt came due, did he ask for her hand and think he was getting the better of the deal? How does he like the interest on the loan now that he’s stuck with me?
Did he steal me the way he did because he didn’t really want me?
Was she taken like I was, by surprise and against her will? Did she sleep in the same dollhouse room, overlooking the pool he slices into every day? Did she spend the first nights huddled in the same corner, wishing her life was over?
I remember she was excited to go to Italy, and I was jealous that she got to go. Did he meet her there? Did he steal her there? Did he drop on her like a surprise? Or did he afford Rosetta a loving kindness he’s never extended to me—cherishing one sister and abusing the other?
The more corporeal questions practically ask themselves.
Did they share the same room? Was she willing to open her heart and so much more to him as soon as he took her? Was he gentle with her? Or did he rough her up like he did with me? Did he stick those powerful thumbs up her ass and bring her to gasping orgasms?
Did we really ever share the same man?
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can’t stop hurting.
I thought I could change things. I thought I could carve my own path.
I was wrong.
I’m the same trapped, scared girl I was in the wedding chapel. How it is possible to go from so blissfully happy to terrified all over again?
The answer sits before me, wrapped in a custom suit and brooding eyes.
Santino.
This is all his fault. All of this. Anger scorches a trail through me, hot and sharp, leaving blackened, smoking dust from heart to mind to toes. He could have saved her. Siena said he wasn’t there when Rosetta died, leaving her with strangers, instead of safe with me and the Zs.
Of all his sins, this last one should be the one he burns in hell for.
I may not have the power to escape this nightmare, but I have the power to live it on my own terms. He can no longer just take what he wants.
“You will talk to me,” he states like a cold fact.
Is that all he wants? Me to talk to him?
Well, I had a speech class where I did nothing but talk, and his demand that I talk to him opens up new opportunities to confuse and hurt him.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” I say, slowly at first as I dig deep into my eleventh-grade curriculum. “That all men are created equal, that they are—”
“Wait,” he says. “Slow down.”
“Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable—”
“Violetta.” He leans forward. “What are you saying?”
Of course he doesn’t recognize the Declaration of Independence. In context, it’s outside his experience. The real problem however, is that the content exists outside the context of his will.
“Unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights—”
“I speak four languages,” he hisses. “Not this gibberish.”
“Bummer.”
“What does it mean?” He growls, thrusting himself in my direction, as if he wants to insert himself down my throat.
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means you must return the first thing by giving me the second, or the third will never happen for either of us.”
He doesn’t get it, and he wants to. I can see it in his face. He’s trying to break it down and find some clear course of action in my words that doesn’t involve him letting me go.
“It means,” I continue, “go fuck yourself.” I enunciate each word in English. Fuck him and his Italian. That world already chewed me up and spat me out. It’s not getting back in through my mouth.
“There are things you don’t understand,” he says.
“Because no one tells me anything.”
“That’s the way it is.”
“What part of ‘go fuck yourself’ do you need translated?”
“I am protecting you.”
“You. Are. Killing. Me!” My shout scrapes the walls of my throat, louder than I intend, weaker than I want. The wall around me doesn’t even shake, and neither does Santino DiLustro.
When I clench my fingers into a fist, the diamond indents the tender skin of my palm. It belonged to Rosetta first.
Is it bad luck to wear someone else’s ring? Did I miss that particular superstition? It wasn’t passed down through a family as an expression of eternal love. This ring claimed a woman—one woman—as his bride. For the other, it is a locked metal cuff.
Jumping up, I pull off the engagement ring and nesting wedding band and throw them onto the table in front of him. They skid and slide over the edge. He catches them.
“Did you force her? Did she know she had no choice?” I croak with a voice unused to new words. “Because Zio and Zia sent her to Italy. They took her shopping before she left. I went with them. They never mentioned dressing up to meet her husband. They never mentioned you at all.”
He puts the rings in his pocket. “I took her to the other side to get things for the wedding. Lace and almond confetti. Please sit.”
I can’t even believe what a different world she lived in with him.
“So she knew?” I decide to go for his jugular without thinking too long about it. “Or did you just rape her outright?”
“Shut your mouth.” He bolts to standing as if ejected from his seat.
“You did,” I say with one finger up in his face.
“Never. And don’t you ever even say it again.”
“Then you killed her, and took me to get your debt paid.”
“You do not know!” He leaves the sentence without specifics, as if to say it’s not that I’m missing any particular knowledge, but that I—Violetta Moretti—just don’t know.
“You do not know, Santino.” My voice hits the ceiling and bounces back twice as strong. “You do not talk. You do not explain. I don’t want to hear it.” I jut my arms forward and push him. He barely moves, as if he knows I’m lying. I need to hear it. “You can justify yourself to God.”
“I will.” He takes my wrists in a tight grip. “I will be judged by God and sent to hell by Him. Not by you.”
“Fuck you.”
I try to knee him in the balls, fail, twist, and wind up on my back on the floor with him straddling me at the hips and pinning my wrists above my head. His chest heaves. His eyes are feral. I can hear his pulse roar in his veins.
I am an animal under him
, freeing my left wrist for a moment, but he catches it and stops trying to restrain me while his attention is on my clenched fist. He lets my right arm go and reaches into his pocket to retrieve my rings.
“You took these off.”
I say nothing. I have nothing new to add.
“Open.” He shakes my wrist, but I don’t obey. “Violetta.” My name is a warning.
“You stole my sister from me.” The words come out in a spitty, hissy mess. Angry, hot tears well up in my eyes. “You stole my family from me. You stole my life. And you had the audacity to act like your hands were clean this whole time. Fuck. You.”
I spit in his face with the same strength I used to spit on the picture of him and my father, leaving a stringy K from his eyebrow to his upper lip.
He looks as if he’s going to send me to meet my sister.
Instead, he growls one word through clenched teeth. The line of spit moves with his lips. “Open.”
My defiance is used up, and I open my left hand so he can jam the rings onto the fourth finger.
“The only way these rings come off is if someone cuts off the finger. Do you understand?” He leans down so close to me that, if I wanted to, I could lick my spit off his face.
“I’ll keep Rosetta’s ring to remember her.”
With a jerk, he stands over me—one foot on either side of my chest like a highway viaduct over a barren field of rage—slips a handkerchief out of his pocket, and wipes his face.
“You were not the only one on this planet to experience grief.”
Lying on the dining room floor with throbbing wrists and heavy breaths, I stare at the flat white ceiling with the unlit, dripping-crystal chandelier in the center. Sunlight creeps in through from the south, where the glass patio doors face onto the pool.
“But it’s mine,” I say. “She was my sister, and it’s my grief.”
“It’s mine too.”
This truth colors him like a dye that seeps from the inside out. His grief is mine, but it’s not just for Rosetta. It’s for the father he never knew and the mother who abandoned him, for his own disappointments and brokenness.