Copyright 2018 Giana Darling
Published by Giana Darling
Edited by Jenny Sims
Cover Design by Najla Qamber
Cover Model Mariam Agredano
Cover Photographer Xavi Smoke
Formatting by Stacey at Champagne Book Design
License Notes
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Part Two
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Part Four
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue
Playlist
The Affair
Thanks Etc.
About Giana Darling
Other Books By Giana
To Serena.
Your friendship has changed my life. You are my fairy godmother, Yoda, best friend and confidante. Thank you for everything you do for me.
#McDarling4Life
“I want to be inside your darkest everything.”
—Frida Kahlo.
It was the biggest day of my life.
I know most people say that about something joyous; a graduation, a wedding ceremony, the birth of their first child.
My situation was a little different.
Sure, it was my eighteenth birthday, but it was also the day I was sold.
And I don’t mean sold metaphorically. As far as I was concerned, my soul was still intact although my father might have been selling his in return for the thousands of dollars he would receive for my body. He wasn’t that worried about it. And honestly, neither was I. If Seamus Moore had a soul at one time, it had long ago dissolved into cinders and ash.
You’re probably wondering why I went along with it. Even as I sat in the beaten-up red Fiat my twin brother, Sebastian, had just fixed for the fortieth time beside my potentially soulless father who was singing along to Umberto Tozzi as if it was a normal day, I was wondering the same thing. My eldest sister Elena was taking a free online ethics course, and even she didn’t know the moral answer to the question my life had been reduced to—was exchanging one body worth the price of multiple person’s happiness?
I didn’t really care that she didn’t have a response. To me, it was worth it.
“You remember what I told you, carina?” my father asked over the tinny swell of sound from the car speakers.
“Si.”
“In English,” he reprimanded gently with a crooked smile in my direction. It was as if I was just being a silly child and teasing him with my mini rebellion. I wanted to tease his skin with the edge of a cold blade, but I held my tongue between my teeth and bit down hard until the fantasy dissolved in pain.
“Tell me,” he continued.
“No.”
His hand found my slim thigh, and his steely fingers wound around it in a rough squeeze. I was used to his physicality, and it did not intimidate me, not now when I faced a potentially much more dangerous future. But I indulged him anyway.
“I am not to look his eyes—”
“In his eyes,” he corrected.
“In his eyes. Or speak unless I am directly spoken to. I will obey him in all things and keep him in comfort. I understand, papa, it is like Italian marriage, but with a contract instead of vows.” I was fluent in the language, but stress ate at my erudite mind like termites.
He grunted, unamused with my droll comparison. Even though Seamus was not Italian—his Irish accent, deep red hair, and ruddy complexion would always betray him as otherwise—he had assimilated himself into every facet of the culture until being Italian had become a kind of religion to him. And my father’s version of a priest? Let’s just say, you’d never want to meet Rocco Abruzzi, the man who ran a large gambling operation for the current Neapolitan capo, Salvatore Vitale. He was unassuming enough with flaccid features and brows that sagged over wet black eyes, but he had unusually large hands and he liked to use them to deal cards, diddle women, and pound in the faces of those who reneged on debts, those like my father.
Seamus drew a hand over the lingering bruises on the right side of his jaw with fingers that were scabby and missing their nails. There was only one reason, in his mind, that I was being sold. And that was to pay off his incredible debt to the underground leaders of Napoli. For years, I wished that they would just finish him off, slice him up and drop him into an alley somewhere for someone to find and kick at, too afraid to report the murder to the police. A few times, when he had been missing for long enough, I thought my fantasy had come true only for him to show up the next day, bright eyed and bushy tailed as if he had been at the spa, and not on the run from men with wet eyes and bloody hands.
“You must speak English with him, carina, in case he does not speak Italian.”
I straightened at the information, not because I was uncomfortable speaking English. Seamus had made sure that all of us could speak it to some extent and I had studied rigorously for the past two years with Sebastian. If we were going to get out, English was going to be a thread in our lifeline. No, what had startled me was my own father’s lack of knowledge about who was waiting for us in a villa inside Rome.
“You don’t know who is buying me?” My grinding teeth made my words gravelly, but I knew he could still understand me.
My heart was in my stomach, and that was in my throat. I felt like one of Picasso’s strange imaginings, my body twisted up with tension and fear so that I couldn’t even recognize myself as human anymore. I was trying to focus on anything but the great and terrifying unknown of my future—the dust motes in our dirty car, the smell of alcohol leaking from my father’s pores, or the way the hot southern Italian sun burned through the windows like flames.
“I hope you aren’t going to question your new…” He paused. “…guardian like that, Cosima. Remember, respect. Have I taught you nothing?”
“Yes. You’ve taught me to distrust men, never blindly obey anyone, and to curse God for giving you the capacity to father children,” I said blandly.
I could focus on the hatred of my father that blazed like a dying star in my belly instead of that awful fear threatening to overwhelm me.
Hatred was more powerful than fear. One was a shield and an armament I could utilize while the other could only be weaponised against me.
“Be grateful someone is willing to pay for you.”
“How much?” I had refrained from asking so far, but my pride wouldn’
t allow me to go on unknowing. How much was I worth? How much money could be found in the flare of my hip and the divot of my collarbone, in the meat of my tits and the folds of my sex?
It was his turn to grind his teeth, but I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t answer me. Honestly, I didn’t think even he knew. It was a perverted friend of a perverted friend of my father who had set up the interaction, some human trafficker that Seamus had played cards with one time when he was drunk enough to admit he needed money and give away the secret of his beautiful daughter, the virgin. His trump card, as he often, tenderly, referred to me as.
The news had gotten back to the Camorra, and the rest was history.
“For how long?” I asked, and it wasn’t the first time I’d done so. “He can’t possibly own me for the rest of my natural born life?”
“No,” he conceded. “A period of five years was promised… with the possibility of renewing the contract again for double the price.”
“And how much of this dirty money will Mama and my siblings see?” I demanded even as my mind whirred.
Five years.
Five.
I’d be twenty-three when all was said and done. If I was off the modelling track for that long, I would be too old to continue to any kind of fame and fortune. I could have done without both, but I wanted to be able to provide for my family until the end of their days.
If I were a twenty-three-year-old washed-up model without any education to speak of, I wouldn’t be able to do that.
So, some of the windfall from my sale had to go to my family.
There wasn’t any other option.
“Enough to cover my debts,” he admitted, adjusting his sweaty hands on wheel. “Nothing more.”
I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the windowpane, bringing up the sepia toned snapshot of my childhood home in my mind’s eye. A box of concrete pasted together by crumbling mortar and bandaged with planks of brittle wood my brother had cut himself. It was a small home on the outskirts of Naples in a part of town the tourists could never reach even if they became lost. My city was a place of dangers and illusions; webs cast between buildings and at the end of roads, catching you in their sticky fibers just as you reached for a promise behind the netting. No one could escape it, yet tourists came, and people stayed.
I didn’t want my family to be condemned to those depths forever. There was no way I was going to sell my life away for anything less than security for my family.
Seamus shot me a concerned look. “I can feel you thinking, Cosi. Put a stop to it right now. You are in no position to ask for anything more.”
“And you are in no position to tell me what to do or think,” I retorted.
Just when I thought I had a lock on the anger, he had to do something to break those chains. I hated the taste of fury in my throat, and the metallic bite of it on my tongue. I wasn’t a senseless, angry woman. I was passionate, but to a point.
Elena had taught me from a young age that if you could understand something, its motivation or context, you held power over it and over your reaction to it.
I tried to channel that now as I sat in a car with my father on the way to my new master with little to no assurances for the people I was even doing this for.
As the car pulled farther away from the spidery tendrils, I could feel the throbbing pulse of the city recede at my back. It wasn’t beautiful like the rest of the country, though it rested on the ocean. The harbor was industrial, and though it was only an hour away from Roma, unemployment plagued Neapolitans like the Black Death, and it showed in the dirty faces of adolescent pickpockets and garbage strewn across the walkways in place of pretty flower boxes. People were tired in my hometown, and it showed. But I wondered how people couldn’t find a certain beauty in that?
I didn’t want to leave. It wasn’t my choice, yet I had accepted the pain of its inevitability easily, my body absorbing the shock without consequence. My love for crumbling, beautiful Napoli was a drop in the bucket compared to my love for my crumbling, beautiful family. I was doing this, selling my body and maybe my soul, for them. I’d get them some of the money they were due or else the sale was dead in the water. The mafia would kill my father; we would still by haunted by the looming shadow of their influence, and we might never get out of that godforsaken city alive, but at least we’d be together.
I drew up their beloved faces in my mind’s eyes, etching them into the black screens of my lids so that every time I blinked, I would be reminded of the reason for my sacrifice.
I knew all too well the realities of our situation. If Sebastian didn’t leave soon, no matter our economic status, he would be forced into the Camorra, who had been nipping none too gently at his tender heels for the past two years. He was now eighteen, old for recruitment when the average age of youth inducement into the mafia was as young as eleven.
I squeezed my eyes shut to distort the vivid image of my male self with a gun in one hand, blood on the other, and money, stacks of it, in his mouth. Sebastian was smart and able, afflicted with a beauty so striking it often brought him unwanted attention. I hoped that he would use some of the money to leave, maybe for Roma, and use his beauty to pull himself out of the stinking hole of poverty we had been born into. Even though I knew he wouldn’t—couldn’t—bring himself to leave our sisters and mother alone, I chose to believe my fantasy.
Just as I hoped that the money would continue to go toward the education of my prodigal younger sister, Giselle, so gifted with a pencil or brush that she could render whole people on a page with their emotions and blood trapped beneath the surface of her painted strokes. I’d been practically living in Milano and Roma for the past year working any gig I could get in order to send back money for Giselle’s education at L’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She was too talented to be held back by our poverty, and too pretty and soft at heart to deal with the shark-infested waters of Napoli. I knew last year when Elena’s older boyfriend began to take undue notice of our shy sister that she had to leave. Her education was funded on my ability to provide for it with my modelling, and now that I was being sold, I needed to assure she would have the means to continue without me.
Ideally, funds would be left over for my smartest sibling, Elena, so she could attend a real school and earn a real degree. For Mama, a new home with a kitchen well equipped to deal with her delicious fare. And for my father—the man who just then was driving me towards my future as a bought woman? Well, for Seamus Moore, I could only wish for the best his soul would buy him in this life. A quick death.
Nico, one of Abruzzi’s men—not much older than me and the only man in the Camorra who I had any sort of good feelings toward—had shown up at the house last week with Rocco and some others. I was home from Milano for the week to celebrate Sebastian’s and my eighteenth birthday, and I’d been hoping to avoid the Camorra. Mama had been at the market with my sisters, and Sebastian was working at the factory in town, so the men had been able to retreat inside for some grappa, and Nico had stayed outside. “To keep me company,” he had explained, but I knew now it was to keep an eye on their investment.
I had continued to read, my hair falling between us to create a thick obsidian curtain, but the well-loved, well-worn book shook slightly in my hands. My heart seemed to balance on a wire that thrummed dangerously with a staccato beat.
“What’s happening?” I finally asked, unable to maintain the pretense of reading when my body was so attuned to the finality in the air.
The house felt like grounds for a funeral, only I didn’t know who had died.
When I turned to look at Nico sitting beside me on the front step, he was gazing down at me with warm brown eyes. I only allowed myself to like Nico a little because his eyes hadn’t yet turned wet and very, very black.
He spoke in the Italian of Napoli, filled with slang and more Latin notes than other dialects. His voice was hoarse and warm, like the sound of a well-fired furnace, and when I think of my home, my native tongue,
it’s Nico’s voice I hear.
“You are the most beautiful girl in Italy.”
I wasn’t supposed to roll my eyes, but growing up with beauty, I got away with more than most girls, and a lifetime of favour had taught me bad habits. I was lucky that Nico only smiled in response.
“I’ve heard that one before, Nicci.”
He shrugged his hulking shoulders. “Doesn’t make it less true.”
“No,” I agreed and collected my rippling mass of waves into my fists. “You know, one day I am going to cut it all off.”
He shook his head, and I wondered if he knew I wouldn’t, that it was my security blanket, that I slept with it draped over my arm like a child with a stuffed rabbit.
Instead, he said, “It wouldn’t make a difference.”
I looked across the street at the yellow grass and glaringly bright yellow house under the yellow sun. Yellow was my least favourite colour, and sometimes it seemed that Napoli was soaked in it. Not burnished in gold but drenched in something hotter, a shade with a stench, like urine.
“What are they talking about today? More debts?”
Nico was slow to shake his head, but then again, Nico was slow to most things. His stature made him the perfect thug, but the goodness in his heart and the methodical pace of his thoughts made him a less-than-ideal villain.
I sighed. “I don’t understand why they don’t just kill him.”
Usually, he ignored me when I spoke with a mouthful of vinegar, but he continued to shake his head. “No, they have another plan, Cosi. And it involves you.”
Immediately, I understood I was dead. Maybe not literally, but from the second Nico enunciated those words, I knew that my life was no longer my own. We had expected this, of course. Seamus could only play so many hands of cards before the only thing left was me, his trump. We all knew it—my twin brother, my sisters, Mama—but no one would talk to me about it, not even when I pressed.
And now that day was here, and I was alone on the steps with a man I hardly knew. It pretty neatly foreshadowed my fate.
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