by CD Reiss
“You’re going to let him marry Gia. For money.”
“To stop a war!” His voice rumbles across my chest and I really think I might combust before he even touches me.
Santino grabs the neckline of my dress in both hands and pulls them apart, ripping the dress in two, leaving me exposed and backing away, yet ready to be ravaged.
“You’re an animal,” I say, flinging myself at him with no plan but to get closer without giving an inch.
He grabs me by the waist and throws me over the gold-painted dresser. The carved wood edges dig into the tender skin of my stomach. My pussy quivers at the pain and the roughness of his hands as he flings the back of my dress up and spreads my legs apart.
“You’re an animal,” I repeat, but this time, it’s not an insult.
From behind, he shoves my thong aside to split my most sensitive lips. I gasp at his touch and he murmurs to himself in Italian. His finger runs the length of my seam, rough like the rest of his touch, and I begin my slow, glorious death.
“How are you so wet?”
“Fuck me and find out.”
He smacks my ass. “That mouth.” He smacks it again. Hard. “Do not speak to me like that in my own home.”
“This is our home,” I manage.
“You cook!” Smack. “You clean!” Smack.
My ass burns from his blows, and still I want more.
“You run the house.” Smack. “You talk to the other wives about who’s a whore.” His hand drops to my right nipple and pinches hard. I see stars behind my eyelids and my breath catches in my throat. I’m seconds from coming and there is nothing else in life I need more, right now, than this. “But you do not get into my business.”
“Gia’s my business!”
“Nothing!” His fingers work my nipples so hard the pain threatens to morph into an orgasm. “You hear me? Nothing of this again!”
I summon all my strength, open my eyes, and look over my shoulder. “Make me.”
He takes me under the chin and pulls my head back. He’s so tall and long that his torso covers me. “I’ll choke the back talk out of you, Forzetta, God help me, I will.”
“Fucking try.”
He lets go, but the pressure of his body pins me hard against the curved edges of the wood. I hear him unbuckle his belt.
“Tell me how bad I am.”
“You are so fucking bad.” His belt is out of the loops with a whick. “Why does torturing me bring you so much joy?”
“Because you’re a good man.”
“And you need to learn your place.”
“What are you going to do about it?” I give us both a last taste of defiance before complete surrender.
He wraps the belt around my neck and holds it closed while his other hand opens his pants to release his cock. I am a fool. I underestimate his ability to take me places I don’t think I want to go until I arrive.
“I’m going to stop you from talking.” He yanks me back by the belt. “You like that. Eh?”
“I love it.”
He pushes my legs open with his feet, holding them wide.
“Because you are a naughty fucking American girl.” In one thrust, he’s deep inside me, pulling me to him by the throat.
“I’m so bad.”
“Just take it.” Santino presses my hips down.
He doesn’t want it to be easy. God help me, he wants to destroy me and I want him to. I want him to take me to the edge more than he wants to go there.
“Hurt me,” I egg him on.
“I’m going to break you.” He smacks my ass and the sting is pure pleasure.
“Yes.”
“Stop talking.”
He rides me like a jockey using a belt as a rein, hips at a gallop, then a canter, then a run, faster and deeper than any man his size should. I squeal.
“That’s what your voice is for. Now take it.”
This is not sex. It’s punishment. It’s violence. It’s a drug and I’m an addict.
“You like when I talk.”
“I like when you’re fucking quiet!” he roars.
Then he picks me up, throws me over his shoulder and pitches me onto the bed, dropping me onto my back. Towering over me, he grabs behind my knees and pulls me to him, the back of my dress sliding against the duvet, and spreads them wide.
“Your mouth needs to talk less.” He shoves four fingers inside me, tugging on the hood of my clit, sending shockwaves of bliss up my spine. “And your cunt needs to talk more.”
His fingers are slick when he pulls them out.
“I want more.”
He shoves them in my mouth. I taste myself, gurgling around hard knuckles.
“You don’t know what you want.” He heaves his massive cock into my waiting, begging cunt. He’s loose and feral, angry and passionate, trying to impale my heart with every thrust.
“This is what you need.” He grunts, cupping my jaw with his palm and pushing his fingers into my mouth. “To be put in your place.”
The heady fumes of an orgasm build into a mindless fog. I am nothing. I do not exist outside him and the building promise of release. He owns me. I’m his toy. His American whore. His growling in Italian comes from the other side of an ocean.
“You. Stay. Out. Of. My. Business.” His thrusts punctuate each word.
Euphoria finally cracks open. Everything goes rushing to my pussy as the earth opens and the heavens cry, and I scream his name the moment before he thrusts me into voiceless oblivion.
He curses, closes his eyes, and lets his fingers slide from my mouth when he comes. He stumbles back with his dick out, shiny and wet, leaving me panting on my back. I wipe the hair from my face, but my arms are overcooked noodles and flop back to the bed.
Santino takes me by the ankles, spreading them to the width of his arm span and wedges himself between my legs. Is he going to fuck me again? Right now?
“Are you hurt?” he asks with his forehead touching mine.
“I’m fine.”
He doesn’t seem satisfied. I pull him down to me.
“No. Mi…” he starts, but can’t finish without swallowing. “Mi dispiace.”
The Italian words for an apology are “I am not pleased,” and in this case, he means it literally. He’s not pleased with himself. He’s ashamed and regretful.
“Look at you. Look what I did. Your dress is torn. Your throat will be bruised. Inside… I hurt you.”
“I’m fine,” I say again.
“No!” he shouts, standing, still fully dressed with his dick out. “You want to help Gia. Where’s my excuse? I wanted to hurt you for no higher reason. This…” He holds out his hand to indicate my body as if what he sees is illustration enough. “This is not what a man does. A man keeps his wife safe, even from himself.”
When I get up on my knees, I feel the back of the torn dress draping over my calves and wrestle out of it.
“I asked you to do it.” I toss the ruined dress on the floor. My thong’s so stretched out it’s falling off, so I roll onto my back and whip that off as well. “I begged you. I egged you on.”
“That’s not a reason to beat you like a dog.”
“Stop, please. It’s not like that.”
I throw the destroyed underwear to the side, and when I do, he sees me from behind and falls in the ornate wingback chair as if he’s been pushed. I get up and check the mirror. My bottom is almost fire engine red. I don’t remember him spanking my ass that much, but I was distracted by my craving for more. Admittedly, it hurts—just like my sore pussy and aching shoulders. I can find plenty of other parts in pain, but Santino’s posture is hunched. He’s covering his face, but not his eyes, as if he has to look at me to understand the wrongness of it.
“No,” I say. “What we did together is beautiful. Please don’t turn something so good into a sin.”
“It’s not good!”
“If I said stop, would you have stopped?”
He rubs his jaw, unable to meet my gaze.
“I don’t know.”
“Would you have wanted to stop?”
“Yes, but… I was outside myself. Violetta.” He comes to me and cups my face, finally looking me in the eyes. “I lost control. This time, you liked it. What if next time you don’t? What will I do then?”
“You’ll stop.” I reach for him, laying my hands on his cheeks. He looks confused, perplexed even. He doesn’t look like the mighty ruler who defends against hardened killers and mouthy women. “You’re my husband. Mine. I won’t let you give in to inertia. It’s my job to make you a good man, Santino, a great man. I’ll fight an army to clear you a path between you and who you really are.”
I let my hands slide away and get off the bed.
“I know you want to help Gia, and I know why you think you have to wait. But you can’t. There is no time.” I look away. “Because I’m worried about the baby.”
I look back at him, waiting for the recognition of what I’m saying.
He whispers my name like a prayer.
“I’m worried if we’re having a girl, and you don’t stop this from being okay right now…” My sobs rush so fast, I can barely get the next part out. Santino reaches for me, but I put my hands out to keep him away. “I’m afraid you’re going to sell her.”
“No.” His first word of denial is laced with awe and surprise, but falls on deaf ears.
“I didn’t kill you, but I will. To protect her, I will slit your throat while you sleep.”
“Why are you talking like this?”
“Because I mean it. I love you, but I’m not making empty threats. My daughter will be born free.”
“No child of mine—” he starts, but I put my hand over his lips.
“No child. Say it. Say no one will be born with a price tag.”
Without a stern word or command, he takes control of the conversation, tenderly holding my neck and jaw in his huge hands and putting the tip of his nose to mine.
“I swear to you now, my wife, my Forzetta, my blood violet, that as far as my territory stretches, every daughter and son will be born free. There will be no more arranged marriage. No debt brides. No forced weddings. So help me God, I’ll burn in hell for everything I’ve done, but not for breaking this promise to you.”
I take him by the wrists and put his palms on my belly. “Your promise is to her.”
“Sì.” When he agrees in Italian, I believe him, releasing doubt and fear.
“Thank you.” My voice cracks and the tension flows out of me, because believing him is all I want right now.
He kisses the tears from my cheeks and neck, getting on his knees and wrapping his arms around me with his ear to my stomach, listening to the sound of life growing inside me.
24
SANTINO
Kneeling before her while she sobs, my brain is soup being stirred. I feel the meatballs bang on the spoon. Escarole gets tangled in the handle then washes away. This and that. No and yes. Up-down-sideways. Save her and free her. Bring and take. Lock and key.
All the while, I’m being cooked, and there’s no going back to who I was or what I wanted before. The times I wanted to crawl inside Violetta and live there were prayers made whole. I’ve taken root, and I cannot bear her misery any more than I can stand for her to be in danger.
Then today, I became the danger, and I swear two things.
One, I tell her. No one will be told who to marry.
The second thing, I swear to myself. I will not lose control with her body again. Not like I just did. She can shoot me first.
I’ll be as rough as she wants, but I will not hurt her in anger. I am not a child. I am not a baby crying for milk or a frustrated toddler. I am a man, and I decide what I do and what I do not do. No matter what she does, I will keep my head about me. I cannot stop her from setting my life on fire, because I struck a match and burned hers to the ground.
I don’t know why it took me until this moment to see it so clearly, or why the threat of a daughter was the only thing that could remove the scales from my eyes.
My wife’s life was destroyed in a single day. She was dragged to the church. She was forced to live in my house, under my rules. I have every power over her, and though she’ll be fine tomorrow or the next day, in my heart, I know that I was so angry she put a gun to my head, I could have killed her just now. I also know now that from the moment I saw her, I never chose to let her live. I’ve been a car speeding ahead, steering around the curves with a broken brake. Today, I would have finished what I started. I would have crashed and broken her body, but I came inside her, and once that happened, the car ran out of gas.
Violetta and I got lucky. She wasn’t forced to marry a heartless man, and I didn’t marry a mindless woman. But fortune is not a friend to everyone.
I have to be a man and break the world so Violetta, Gia, my daughter—none of them have to depend on luck just to live.
She kneels with me, then we lie on the floor together. Her sobbing slows to calm breaths. I rub streaks from her face. I want to give her a bath to wash my filth off her, but if I do that, I’ll lose my nerve. She can bathe herself.
“We’re not going to end this from the floor.” I get my feet under me and hold my hand out to her. “Let’s put the gun away.”
I help her up. She hands me the gun, but I don’t take it. When she starts for the basement, I redirect her down the hall, past the double doors to the room reserved for business.
She was never meant to come in here, but that’s all changed. I can’t put closed doors between us any longer. I will have her by my side as I expand. Her counsel. Her voice. Her castle joined with mine.
With her, I will rewrite traditions into laws.
I turn on a lamp and sit behind my desk. I open the sideboard drawer.
“Put the gun here, where we can get to it.”
I let her place it there, and slide it closed.
She takes a chair by the window and crosses her legs, tapping on the wooden parts of the arms with impatience and expectation. How can I still want to fuck her, now that she has a life inside her?
“I have a plan,” she says.
“Okay.” The engine of the gold-faced clock grinds and ticks.
“You offer any father who wants to sell his daughter a low-interest loan.”
Biting back a laugh takes more strength than anything I’ve ever done. “I’m not the state government or a bank.”
“Which means you don’t have to get a committee to sign off. You just do it.”
“And what if they sell their daughters anyway?”
“Why would they if you can refinance the loan?”
“And every loan shark and bookie from here to Naples would just nod?”
She shrugs. “Fuck them.”
Now, I laugh, because she thinks too much of my influence, and too little of my power.
“What you’re missing, my sweet Forzetta, is that ‘mbasciate is usually the groom’s prerogative, and the father is eager to get her gone without paying a bride price.”
“Jesus Christ, are you serious?”
“And the debts?” I put my elbows on my knees. There’s so much to explain. “Not always the case. Sometimes the marriage is to join territories or avoid a war.”
“Gia’s marriage is all the above.”
“Yes. And she’ll be married before I have the crown.”
“No, she won’t be.” Her gaze is far-fixed, searching for a way to undo what’s been done. “What if you have to stop it? Like someone forced your hand or something?”
“Someone like my wife?”
“Maybe.” Her eyes are everywhere, taking in the layout of the room and the things in it. “I never asked you about your grandfather’s furniture.” She rubs her thumb along the ornate curve of the chair’s edge.
“What about it?”
“Why won’t you get rid of it?”
“I love it.”
“You know it doesn’t go with the house, right?”
“I kno
w. But when my mother was raped and the man didn’t offer to make an honest woman out of her, my grandfather rejected her. Threw her out.”
“Wow. Asshole. What about your grandmother?”
“Dead. My aunt Paola found her sister in an asylum in Aversa, then found me with the Sisters of the Assumption. I was born in the Montesanto Metro station. And still, my grandfather wanted nothing to do with her or with me.”
“But Paola took care of you.”
“Only when she got married to Marco, who I will always be this grateful to.” I hold up a finger and thumb an inch apart. “But no more than this much. Paola took a job and moved my mother to Trieste, then took me in. My grandfather still wouldn’t meet me. He let his daughters live in shit instead. So.” I lean back and spread my arms, indicating the entire house and everything in it. “When he died, I took his things and put them in my house so every day, I sit in his chairs and eat off his tables. I won. I beat him. I own his life now.”
She nods, looking around the room with fresh eyes. “You really know how to hang on to a grudge.”
“It’s in the blood.”
“Yeah. Speaking of blood…” She stands. “Mine’s low on sugar, and I can’t think. Can we finish this in the kitchen?”
She’s not asking for permission, and I have the choice to follow her or get left behind.
25
VIOLETTA
His voice rattles the windows of my dream, which has no story or point. No lesson. It’s just pink lines crisscrossing my vision. Two. Four. Ten. Bifurcated. Crisscrossing. Never curved. Always in parallel pairs like elongated equal signs. A web across my vision in every direction. I’m not panicked. I’m not trapped inside them, trying to escape. We’re just in the same noplace, the pink lines and I, coexisting.
I went to bed alone, but the lines vibrate when he speaks, and somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, I know he’s beside me.
“Take it,” he mutters.