by CD Reiss
Rosetta hadn’t been able to stop looking at the pictures. She had that day’s newspaper in her suitcase when we came to the States. She’d hidden it in our closet. Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night to find her under the covers with a flashlight, staring at the newsprint until—she said—Mommy and Daddy looked as if they’d exploded into little dots. It was as if she could wish that ink off the page and into the three-dimensional shapes of our parents.
No, neither my parents’ deaths nor Rosetta’s had anything to do with Elio. But I felt it just the same. My life. Zia Madeline and Zio Guglielmo’s. And Santino. My husband. Any one of us could be killed at any time.
I can’t find the words, so for the rest of the car ride, I stop looking for them.
Had I put not myself in danger when I ran? Had he almost gotten killed? He and how many others were in danger every day? Guilt weighs on me, raw and sharp. I was born into this world. How could I not know the stakes?
I’m not stupid enough to run again. The next time I run, it’ll be to my death, one way or another, and only my death. They all know I know it.
I open the bag next to me and get my shoes out. Guilt might be a ball and chain holding me in place, but I don’t need to be carried into the house like a weightless child.
There are men with guns all over the property. From here, with my eyes wide open, it’s obvious I live in more of a compound than a Lego house, and I’ve never been so glad to see it.
Santino turns to me, reaching between the seats to stroke my cheekbone with his thumb. “You’re safe here. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
To my surprise, I do feel safe with him. His thumb brushes my lips, and my eyes flutter closed, imagining—despite the revulsion accompanying the desire—that he’s kissing me.
“No one will hurt my beautiful blood violet.”
The moment lasts forever. I let myself get lost in gratitude, falling into darkness where I accept my powerlessness and embrace his protection. Having a man to deal with the ugliness of the world for me, so I can pretend to only see the beauty. Zia always said this was the way we lived and that was it.
When he takes his hand away, it’s over, and I’m back in a life I hate.
When we get out of the car, Santino barks orders at the men. Everyone moves quickly and efficiently. They don’t look scared, but they don’t look comfortable either. Maybe because I’m in a nightgown and sneakers, but probably because the object they’re committed to protecting is home.
Santino takes my bag and leads me upstairs. He doesn’t carry me this time.
“Where are we going?” I ask as if I don’t know, and he’s silent as if he also finds the question redundant.
We’re going up to my prison.
Together in my room, there’s a pause heavy with sexual tension, carried almost entirely in the fierceness of his eyes.
He throws the bag on the bed.
“I told you not to run, and you did,” he says, delivering old news but with a new twist.
He’s not just telling me what we already know. He’s coiled to do something about it, and I know it’s going to hurt. I won’t be able to resist. Here, in this room, he has all the power.
“C-can you b-blame me?” I stammer. “I mean, like—”
He throws me on the bed face-first, holding my wrists together behind my back with one powerful hand. When I try to wriggle away, he pins his weight on me, growling in my ear.
“Stay still and take your punishment.”
My God, he’s going to rape me. I scream, begging desperately for help, but he doesn’t even try to shush me.
Instead, he spanks my ass so hard it hurts. My scream turns into a gasp.
“You are mine.” With every word, he spanks me harder, and the thin fabric of my nightgown does little to soften the sting as he strikes one cheek, then the other. “You are my property.”
He yanks up the nightgown, exposing the underwear. I am fully humiliated and wildly aroused as he starts again, and without the nightgown, the blows are newly painful.
“You will behave like you are mine.” He finds fresh skin in the backs of my thighs, smacking exposed skin, and torments my increasingly raw cheeks.
“Ow!” I kick and wiggle, but he holds me down. “It hurts!”
“You do as I say. And you do not…” He pulls my waistband down to my thighs, exposing my ass. He’s panting with not just effort, but his own desire, laying his hand on my hot skin before he hits it again. God, it hurts so much and I never want him to stop. “You do not run. You don’t even turn your face from me.”
My ass is ravaged, but he doesn’t stop, and between the searing pain, a fleshy slice of arousal beckons beneath his eyes, begging for satisfaction.
“How was I supposed to know?” I manage between gasps. I’m still not going to cry in front of him, but I am so degraded I can barely hold back.
Santino smacks my ass so hard I yelp. “Know what?”
“That some gang of goons would try to stuff me in the back seat of a car. You never told me. You never told me anything.”
“Now you know.” He spanks me and clutches the raw skin. I howl in pain, then he slaps the place where it hurts. “It will eat me alive if something happens to you.” Again, he slaps me. “I’ll go to the ends of the earth to save you.” Again. “I’ll commit murder before another man hurts you.”
I can’t even hear my shrieks past the ringing in my ears.
He spanks me like a doll until I’m limp.
“It hurts,” I sob.
I don’t tell him to stop. I could beg for succor, but I want him to do whatever he wants with me. I want him to rip away my resistance and take my submission.
“Who owns you?” His voice rumbles and crashes around me.
“You do.” I gasp.
“Say the whole thing.” He smacks my ass again.
There is no question. “You own me.”
He runs his fingertips over my raw ass, and God it hurts and damn it feels so good. I want that hand between my legs, and then I realize he must be able to see how wet I am in this humiliating state.
What does that mean to him? To me? Am I his whore now? His little slut fucktoy?
His fingertips brush my seam. Now he definitely knows how wet I am.
“You want me to fuck you? You want me to take what I’m entitled to?”
I do. My body screams for it. My center wants his hand to take me to places I’ve never been, not in my wildest dreams.
But I cannot give myself to this man. Not fully. He cannot know he has me, no matter what he makes me say.
I swallow hard. “No.”
He’s silent. Then, “I choose not to, then. For now.”
He lets me go and heads for the bathroom. I get up on my hands, sobbing in pain and frustration, and pull on my panties, then stop when the elastic makes the flesh scream. He drops a tube of lotion on the bed, rubbing his hands together as if the spanking made him sore too.
He’s so tall and powerful, I don’t know whether to feel threatened that he’ll give me what I want, even if he can’t admit it, or safe that he won’t.
“I can put that on you.” He indicates the lotion. “Or you can do it.”
It takes a moment for the sting of my ass to clue me in that the lotion is to soothe the angry skin.
I grab the tube. “I’ll do it.” When I roll to a sitting position, I suck in a pained breath and twist to the side, which hides absolutely nothing from him.
“I own you,” he says. “Those aren’t just words. I won’t let anyone hurt what’s mine. And you? I don’t care if you keep your legs closed for me the rest of your life. You are my blood violet. Mine. Forever. Don’t forget it, or I’ll prove it again. I’ll use my belt on your ass and save my hands to punish your tits.”
His seriousness can’t be questioned, any more than the enormous rod pushing against the crotch of his pants.
“I won’t,” I say, unable to look away from his erection.
“When you go out, you’ll have a man assigned to you. Be on time for breakfast.”
He closes the door behind him, but doesn’t lock it.
Peeling off my nightgown and stepping out of my underwear, I go to the bathroom and turn before the full-length mirror.
My ass is blotched with a red so deep it’s almost blue, and the backs of my thighs, which he paid less attention to, are a playful pink.
But as I rub the aloe lotion over the places he abused, I know that’s not where he did the most damage. The skin will heal in a few days, the contusions will turn yellow, then disappear. My ideas about myself are changed forever.
I’m not only a whore he’s degraded and debased, I’m unbearably wet. Swollen. Throbbing to be touched by him. I’ve only masturbated a few times in my life, and I’m tempted to do it again.
And I wonder, would that huge dick hurt? Would he be gentle? Or would it be as callously cruel as the moment he squeezed my face to force me to say “I do”?
I try to imagine a gentle Santino, but the cruel daydreams push out the sweet ones.
He would be terrible.
He’d hurt me.
He’d make me do disgusting things.
He’d use my body like a toy, and the more I imagine his brutality, the more demanding my arousal becomes.
I turn the shower water to cold so I can freeze out my desire.
He can’t have that part of me.
I’ll stay put and be good, but I won’t touch myself and think of that monster.
No matter how much I want to.
21
VIOLETTA
I wake slowly, letting my body adjust to being conscious before I open my eyes. Ever since I returned from Loretta’s, I haven’t been allowed away from the house. Santino has been here more too. Whatever business he conducts, he has been doing it from home.
Seeing him around and sharing meals with him is pleasant in ways I never expected. He has his own charms, and it’s getting easier to see them through the cracks in his cold cruelty. When we’re eating together, he makes sure I’m taken care of before he is. When we talk, he listens with an intensity that drives deep questions about who I am. Why do I want to be a nurse? Why the ER? Why trauma? How does it make me feel? How do I react to patients, to blood, to the suffering of others?
Maybe he asks so many questions so I won’t have time to formulate my own, but I gave up on asking him anything until I know he’ll answer.
Because of this, he thinks he’s punished me into being a good and obedient wife, which will give me room to move, room to escape. It’s not because he’s slowly breaking down the walls I’ve put around myself.
At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself for over a week.
The windows in my room have little transoms on top to let air in. Once Santino showed me how to open them, I never closed them. I can hear the birds chirp, and I imagine I can fly away with them, out of this tower…away away…but my imagination dries up after that, because it would be a life of not knowing what I want. The why. The how. The who of the man who tore me away from my life.
Freedom into a life of ignorance doesn’t seem possible, but still…I dream of those first few minutes, before I start wondering what puzzle piece I’m missing. This cannot, absolutely cannot, be the entire story.
Below, I hear the slice of a body through water, and approach the window. Santino swims with a body carved from marble. I heard you were supposed to gain weight after getting married, but he’s as lean and muscular as ever.
Out of boredom, but more a desire for company, I throw on a sundress and give my hair a quick toss on the way down to the pool. At least outside, the walls don’t feel so constricting.
He’s getting out of the pool by the time I make it down there, water running in the divots between his abs and pecs, and the happy trail of black hair that leads below his waistband is wet and flat. He’s so fucking beautiful it actually hurts me to look at him. The war between desire and fear that erupts internally has threatened, more than once, to rip me in two.
I hand him a towel.
“You look better,” he says. His voice slices through my thoughts like his body slices through the water—easily, forcefully, elegantly.
I pause. That’s a back-handed compliment if I ever heard one. And I’ve heard plenty—Scarlett is queen of the back-handed compliment—but he’s not getting away with it.
“What’s that supposed to mean?
Santino shrugs and switches to speaking in Italian. “I want you to be happy. If that’s not possible, because of our arrangement, I at least want you to be content. Today, you look more content.”
Warmth spreads through me so I focus on the blinding sun in the pool to burn my retinas instead.
I answer back in English. “I’m bored today. The house is…beautiful but it still feels like a prison. I know I tried to run, and you’re afraid I’ll do it again, but I’m going nuts.”
He frowns a little, but it doesn’t look as though he’s disappointed in me. Ever since the incident, he’s stopped ordering me around so much and acting as if I’m thirty seconds from inciting a war.
“I’m not keeping you from running.” He sits on the couch with the towel over his shoulders. “Because I know you won’t.”
He’s right. I won’t run. At least, not the way I did before. If I ever try to escape again, I’ll be so sure of the plan I won’t have to run. I’ll walk.
“Then why?” I sit on the seat perpendicular to his.
“Unfortunately, my Forzetta, there’s nowhere else safe at the moment.”
“How long before I can go somewhere?”
“I won’t lie and make up a date. Truth between us is sacred to me.”
As if I’m a separate person, I watch the warmth inside me as the comment seeds grow. I observe objectively, wondering why it’s even there and trying to measure how much I’ve changed. How I’ve let feelings of safety transfer from my aunt and uncle to the man who took me away from them.
I don’t really call him my jailer anymore, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t, and something in my body or expression betrays those thoughts, because he sits straight with utmost attention.
“I can make you a promise.”
“Okay,” I say as I sit back to listen.
“We will go out for your birthday.”
“That’s in over a month!”
“It is, and then you go back to school. Your life will be your own, but it will be a life with me.”
That may tempt some, but I’m left unsatiated. “And I’ll be miraculously safe in a few weeks?”
“If you behave.”
“If I behave.” This is the archaic mindset of my family that I never thought applied to me. Maybe I’m too American for all of them. “What if I don’t?”
“You behave for your zio and zia.” He shrugs. “For the law. For your school. Why not me?”
My turn to shrug, because he didn’t threaten a punishment, nor did he intimate that I won’t be safe. Instead he turned it back around to a question of why I can’t see him as having the same authority as the written law of the land. I have no good answer for that—at least, none he’ll accept. Because Santino is old world and I am new. Because he is classic and I’m modern.
He sits on the lounger next to me, only feet apart so I can almost feel the dampness still resting on his skin. He leans in to give me his complete attention.
“Why not?” he repeats. “You know I won’t ask you to do anything that will cause harm.”
Nothing else in this world matters. Just our conversation. Just me. Not his doll in a box. Not the guns he carries. Not the men a finger-snap away. Only me.
I don’t think there is anything sexier in this moment.
“I’ll try.”
He switches back to English. “Good.” He smiles at me and it breaks my heart how beautiful it is when he does. “What do you want for breakfast?”
“Everything.” I can’t stop the groa
n from escaping my lips. “I’m starving.”
“Answer me in Italiano.”
I know I once spoke Italian as fluently as any five-year-old growing up in Naples. I know I used to think, count, and dream in Italian. But moving to America, where my zia and zio lived for most of their lives, squashed that part of my life. School didn’t teach Italian. After years of disuse, I’ve retained enough to understand most of it, as long as it isn’t spoken too quickly.
Being around Santino has helped, but speaking it is still something completely different. Speaking rusty Italian around fluent speakers is horrifying. Like taking a verbal test in front of the whole class over a subject I never studied for.
He looks at me, expecting obedience. If I do what he asks, I gain more freedom. It’s not an arrangement I like, but it’s one I understand.
“Um.” I concentrate on the pool and not the beautiful face of a traditional Italian boy. Man. Whatever. “Patate. Pancetta. Espresso.” I pause, reaching back for the word I can’t seem to locate. “Uova?”
“No.” His disappointment floods me. “Use a whole sentence. Say ‘I want’ first. Lists are for children.”
But I’d have to conjugate the verb and I just can’t…
“You know I don’t speak Italian.”
“You did speak Italian.”
“More than a decade ago. I’m just an American girl now, remember?” I flop back in the lounger, frustrated. With whom, I’m not entirely sure. “Were those words wrong?”
“They were correct.” He almost sounds amused. “Now, try again. I’d like…”
“Voglio pancetta—”
“Try again.”
I frown at him. “But I—”
“You were close. Try again.”
He sounds unendingly patient. This man is an enigma of infinite possibilities. Dresses me in the finest, seduces me with violence, threatens my family, encourages me to attend school and speak my mother tongue.
But if he’s going to make me conjugate verbs every time I need to eat, I’m going to starve.