by CD Reiss
The man crouches in front of the chair, hands dangling between his knees. One holds a phone.
“But you did.” He raises the screen to Marco’s face. “We’re going to find her. You know that. How should we treat her? Like a woman or a whore?”
The answer is sobs.
“You only get to die once,” the man says. “Why do it in pain? Knowing you made it worse for your daughter.”
Marco shakes his head in denial.
With a resigned sigh, the shadowy man stands over a five-gallon bucket of tools in the corner, considers, then picks hedge clippers from it as if he’s plucking daisies. He looks in my direction, and I freeze in terror, because his blue eyes are coldly brutal and his mouth is full and savage, but he’s not directing his attention at me. He doesn’t even see me as he spins the clippers in a deft tic. He’s looking at the wall beneath the window.
Darkness flashes across the glass and there’s a bang to my right. I leap back with a gasp, discovering there’s a door there only as it slams open and Santino bursts out.
He’s stock still in the morning darkness, staring at me. Behind him, the door closes automatically with a soft hiss and click.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. His black T-shirt is stretched at the neck, and there are two scratch lines on his collarbone. His body is real and vulnerable. I want to heal it.
“I went to bed early, so I woke up early.”
Stepping toward me, he enters the light from the frosted window. He is conflicted. Pained. Fighting things he cannot control. He is complex and beautiful.
“Go back inside.”
“When you’re done with him,” I say, ignoring his order. “Who’s next? Gia? You think you’re going to kill her? You won’t.”
He takes out a pack of cigarettes. The backs of his hands are dirty.
“You think I’m soft.”
“I know you’re human, and she’s your sister.”
“This isn’t a television show.” He chooses a smoke and flicks open his bullet-bent lighter. “This is real. It’s too real for you.”
He brings the flame to his face, illuminating the pink of his lips and the color in his skin. I was wrong about the backs of his hands. They aren’t dirty. They’re covered in blood.
The man tied to that chair sold Santino into death and put me on an altar to another man.
“It’s not real enough. Why is he even alive?” I ask.
“Go inside, Forzetta.”
“Is it because he raised you?” The words are spit through my teeth. “You got sentimental and you forgot? I can remind you right the fuck now, he killed you and the baby inside me.”
“You think I don’t know?” He comes at me so fast I end up with my back to the wall. He’s pointing at me with the two fingers that clip the lit cigarette. “I can see your fucking face right in front of me.” He jams the cigarette in his lips and clamps my jaw, turning my head so my left eye faces him. “You want to know what it looks like? Eh?”
“I have a mirror, asshole.”
“It’s dark, but I don’t need light.” He traces the curve below my eyebrow, narrating what he sees as if it’s new to him. “You have a black arch here, and under your eye, it’s thicker and more blue. The yellow spread out around. And the eyelid.” He touches it. “Red. Bright red. Like it’s about to start bleeding if I look at it too hard.” He lets my face go and snaps the cigarette out of his mouth. “It looks like Damiano hit you. He broke what’s mine—the only thing I have that’s worth treating with respect—and he treated you like garbage. He hurt you, and he’s going to die for it. But I have to find him. So you need to go inside.”
He’s yelling by the end, and I’m stunned because I’ve never seen him like this. Sure, he’s been angry, but he’s also shaking.
“What if he doesn’t know?” I ask. “You’re wasting time.”
“He knows. And I know my business.” He flicks the butt against the wall, and it explodes into orange sparks before settling on the ground to smolder.
“Marco is the only father you ever had.”
“Get. Inside.”
“You won’t ever really hurt him enough.”
I’m right. His rage is the tell. He wants to protect me from seeing that he’s hurting someone, but he didn’t expect me to see his failure to hurt. Now he’s juggling what he has to do against who he’s doing it to. A man he despises and loves. A man who took him into his house, then betrayed him.
“Violetta, do not—”
“And you’re not going to let that guy in there really do it.”
As my realization calms me, it increases his intensity. The path before me and the road behind become clear.
“For the last time,” he starts, coming closer.
I duck and run to the little door, swing it open, and enter hell. It’s boiling hot. The stench of sweat, shit, and piss has a mass all its own, but I don’t have time to ask where it’s coming from. Before Mr. Shadows knows what’s happening, I reach for the five-gallon bucket, grabbing the first thing I touch. A crowbar. Fine.
I face Marco. His nose is smashed, and his eyes are swollen mostly shut…the way mine was not long ago.
“Violetta.” He breaks into a bloody smile.
He’s relieved. He thinks I’m going to save him because I’m a woman. That’s incorrect.
I’m going to break him because I’m a woman.
“This is for betraying your king.” I bring the crowbar down on his knee with all my might, and the scream cuts through the thickness of the smell. “And this is for my baby—”
I bring the crowbar down on his head, but it doesn’t land. The man of shadows catches my arm mid-swing while Santino’s halfway between the door and me. Marco’s screaming and writhing as much as the rope lets him. The chair legs tap on the concrete floor from his effort.
“Let me go,” I growl at the man.
He smirks, and inside that half smile are a thousand ways to murder me and not a single feeling about it one way or the other. I realize I’m panting as though I’ve just run as far as I can. I’ve hit my limit.
Santino takes the crowbar and flings it aside. He starts to say something to me, but thinks better of it and decides to face his sobbing uncle. With his foot on the seat of the chair, Santino pushes it over. The tied man’s leg bends in an unnatural angle. I broke it. Compound fracture. Gotta hurt. Don’t care. Not after what he did.
“Talk,” Santino says, then points at me. “Or my wife will be the one to break Gia.”
Mr. Shadows gets between the man on the floor and me.
“You can lead, follow, or get out of the way,” he says in a deep, resonant voice with an accent from somewhere in America. “And we already have a leader.”
Santino’s crouching by his failed father, tapping his cheek in a cross between tenderness and violence.
“Santi,” I say.
He turns to me with his hand on the bloody face. “Forzetta.”
“I’ll wait for you outside.”
He nods, then takes out his cigarettes and lighter with his free hand and gives them to me. I take them.
“Go,” he says, turning back to the matter at hand.
I back out of the little house. The man with the brutal gaze closes the door, and I’m left standing alone in the half light of dawn with an emptiness in the place where I kept the violence I just released.
With a shaking hand, I open the pack of cigarettes and eventually still myself enough to get one out. I put it in my mouth and—with massive effort and the grind of metal on metal—I open the lighter and touch the flame to the tobacco.
I’ve never smoked a day in my life, so I cough. The world swims a little. It’s not a high that makes me feel ecstatic or even content, but I am physically buoyant. When I take a second drag, I don’t cough, and the high disappears. The cigarette does not fill me or bring me any real satisfaction, but I understand why Santino smokes after he breaks into violence.
This will not become a habit, but it’s not
my last cigarette either.
15
VIOLETTA
Santino doesn’t come out of the building. I stamp out the butt, pick it up, and roll it between my fingers as I reenter the house through the kitchen.
“You’re up early,” Celia chirps, breaking an egg into a huge metal bowl. This side of the house smells like bacon.
“You’re awfully chipper this morning.” I throw the butt in the trash.
“I’m making eggs.”
“Where’s the bacon?” I ask.
“The oven.”
The sizzle is as loud as a rainstorm when I crack open the door, but Celia slaps my hand away before I can even see if it’s done.
“There you are,” Loretta says as she enters. She takes the top off of a huge coffee urn. “You weren’t in your room. I got worried.”
“I took a walk around.”
“See anything interesting?”
I saw Santino and a stranger torture Marco Polito, but not hard enough.
I saw my king weighed down with a guilt he didn’t understand.
I looked at what a war will mean for my soul and accepted it. Embraced it. I saw it all, and it wasn’t interesting. It was horrifying, and I couldn’t look away.
“You can see more stars up here,” I reply. Only when Celia pours coffee into the urn do I notice the three pots of coffee waiting on warmers.
“Do you want some?” she asks as if I’m a kid eyeing the juice boxes.
“I’ll get it.” I get a cup for my own coffee. “How did you get all this together so quickly?”
“It was all in the basement.” She checks the bacon and slides out the first of three trays. “This won’t be the first war this house has seen.”
“I never considered you had to feed the guys.”
“The women don’t sit around wringing their hands,” Loretta says.
“And we’re ready,” Celia says. “But how are you? Do you need something for…?” She indicates my black eye by drawing a circle in its general direction.
“I’m fine.” I guess I should help in the kitchen, being a woman and all. I like cooking and working in a team, but I can’t help but glance at the buildings outside, where I used a crowbar to break a man’s knee. “Aren’t you guys scared?”
“Of course.” Celia shrugs, removing the bacon with tongs. Her sleeves are rolled up, revealing forearms dotted with whorled skin the size of burning cigarettes.
When I look at the building I went into—the one with the Shadowy Man inside—the door is wide open.
Have they moved Marco? Was he alive when they did it? Or is he still tied to a chair?
A short guy with a leathered face brings a mop and bucket inside the little building.
I excuse myself and run upstairs to the room where I slept. It’s just as I left it, but the bathroom door is open, and the shower’s going. The black T-shirt with the stretched neck is pooled on the floor, and smoke and the smell of burning tobacco mixes with the shower’s steam.
I strip off my clothes and open the shower curtain. Santino has his elbows on the wall and his head dropped between them while the hot water pounds his shoulders. When he looks up, the cigarette between his lips gets spotted with droplets.
“Santino,” I say, reacting to the exhaustion in his eyes. “What happened?”
“There was no point fixing his knee. That’s what.”
I get into the scalding shower with him.
“He had it coming,” I say, running my fingers in the same direction as the wet lines of hair down his chest.
“Listen to you. Judge and jury.”
“Did he tell you where they are?”
“What if he did?”
“We’re going to go there and fuck them up, right?”
“I don’t know.” He takes one last drag on the wet cigarette before it’s too soaked to smoke, then tosses it into the toilet.
“You don’t… What?”
“It could be a trap to get me to leave you alone here. Then what?”
“This is a fucking compound.”
“I’m aware.”
“Okay. So you can take me with you.”
He scoffs, hands roaming over my body. “Which is more dangerous? Leaving you here so they can take you again? Or bringing you into the mouth of the volcano?”
“How many times have you left me home and nothing happened? Or the times you went out with me and we were fine? It doesn’t matter which you choose. You just have to kill them…or I will.”
He puts his arms on either side of my head, backing me against the wall. “Do you have any idea what this life does to a person? First, you lose control of the people you love. Then, you lose control of yourself, and this is happening, right now. You were so pure when I took you. You were clean and innocent. Now, you want a trail of bodies behind you.”
“If I changed, it’s because of you.”
“You think I don’t know that?” he snarls in my face. “You’re filthy. Ruined.”
Oh, fuck him and his dumb chauvinist ideas. I have no time for it.
I push him away. “If you don’t want me anymore—”
He pushes me back against the wall, and I’m flooded with desire.
“Are you blind?” He caresses my breast, sucks in a breath when he pinches the nipple. “I want you more than ever. Can’t you see that? I’ve destroyed you, and I should be sorry. I should get on my knees and beg for God’s forgiveness, but why? I’ll only do it again.”
This poor man is going to wreck himself with guilt. He should be proud of how strong I’ve become.
“I know I wasn’t dragged into marriage by an altar boy.”
“You’re wrong.” He tilts his head. “I was an altar boy.”
“Of course.” I look from the droplets on his cheeks as they drip to his beard and down at the taut lines of his body and reach for the rigid angle of his erection. “Whatever you are or were, it’s you I want.”
“You’re not ready for what you have in your hand.”
There are parts of me that need rest, but he’s not seeing the full picture. My body has a place for him.
“You think I ruin so easy.” I turn my back to him and put one hand against the wall and the other on my ass. “I’m tougher than you think.”
In silence, he draws his touch down my back and to my cheeks, spreading them open. I look over my shoulder. His expression is hidden. All I can see is the water dripping from a triangle of hanging hair.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Destroy me. I want you to.”
He reaches for the shelf of supplies and knocks over the shampoo, the conditioner, body wash, and bar of soap until he finds the cream, then he sits on the ledge.
“You’re going to destroy yourself.” He drops a line of lotion on his cock, then fists the shaft. “Come here.”
I stand between his knees, and he turns my back to him. I feel his slick fingers probing. Two enter my ass, and I groan with pleasure as he stretches and spreads the muscle.
“Touch yourself,” he commands, pushing my legs open so my swollen clit hangs ready.
I rub between my legs. He removes his fingers and pulls me down on him, guiding his cock to my ass, then he lets go, leaving me in control.
Spreading my legs to either side of his, I lower myself onto him, gently opening, paying attention to when the pain comes and when it goes away, until he’s buried inside me. I wait for a command or instruction, but I get nothing but a groan from behind. I rise, then fall, fingering my clit as I fuck him with my ass, lingering when I push him deep, forcing down with my weight when his head is at the edge, finding a rhythm that matches his grunts.
He doesn’t need to tell me he’s close. I feel it in the way his fingers curl on my back.
“Come with me, Santi. Can you? Now?”
In answer, he grabs my hair and pulls my head back, as if he can’t culminate without controlling some part of me, and that’s enough to send a seismic orgasm ripping through my body. My cries echo off
the walls, and when they die down, there’s just the sound of the water beating against the tiles.
When I lean back, he wraps his arms around me and whispers in my ear, “I love you, my violet. I am so afraid to play this game and lose you.”
“You can’t lose me as long as you love me.”
“Lo voglio. Per l’eternità. Even death won’t keep me from you.”
“Don’t prove that twice.”
“No.” He lays his hands on my cheeks. “Marco told us they’re at Vasto Quarry. When we attack it, you’ll be afraid. You’ll worry about the danger. You’ll think I’ve lost and I’m leaving you. But I won’t be. I’ll be loving you.”
Santino and I walk down the grand stairway arm in arm. Men run past the front windows. The door swings open as we step onto the marble floor of the front foyer. Carmine bursts in first, then Vito, a bloody hand over his bicep.
“Jesus.” I run forward to look at Vito’s arm.
“We rooted out the roaches,” he says to Santino.
“It looks like you did something,” I complain, directing Vito to the nearest chair.
“Sent them to a hotel,” Carmine chimes in.
“It’s a motel, stunad,” Vito snaps back, then resists when I try to look at his wound. “Don’t worry about that. Just a scrape.”
“Can someone interpret for me?” I pull Vito’s hand away. A globule of blood bubbles between the shreds of his jacket. I let him cover it again.
“There were Tabonas at your zio and zia’s,” Santino says to me, then turns to Carmine. “Gone, yes?
“Dead as fuck.”
A few other guys burst in. I recognize Remo and Gennaro among them.
“Where are they then?” I ask, looking out the open door for my aunt and uncle. They’re not there.
“They wouldn’t come with us,” Vito reports. “They don’t trust nobody right now. Guglielmo’s still on the porch with a partigiani Beretta.”
“Fuck.” I’m cursing because my zio is being a pain in the ass, but also because the blood’s started to seep between Vito’s fingers. I run into the kitchen and look under the sink, praying for a first aid kit.
My prayers are answered. The white metal box is as small as a textbook. I run back to Vito.
