by CD Reiss
Copyright © 2021 by Flip City Media Inc.
All rights reserved.
CD Reiss is a trademark of Flip City Media Inc.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. I made up the characters, situations, and sex acts. Brand names, businesses, and places are used to make it all seem like your best real life. Any similarities to places, situations or persons living or dead is the result of coincidence or wish fulfillment.
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Paige Press
Leander, TX 78641
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Ebook:
ISBN: 978-1-953520-32-6
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Print:
ISBN: 978-1-953520-33-3
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Editor: Erica Edits
Cover: CD Reiss
Contents
About The Book
Prologue
1. SANTINO
2. VIOLETTA
3. VIOLETTA
4. VIOLETTA
5. VIOLETTA
6. VIOLETTA
7. SANTINO
8. VIOLETTA
9. SANTINO
10. VIOLETTA
11. VIOLETTA
12. VIOLETTA
13. VIOLETTA
14. SANTINO
15. VIOLETTA
16. VIOLETTA
17. SANTINO
18. VIOLETTA
19. VIOLETTA
20. SANTINO
21. VIOLETTA
22. SANTINO
23. VIOLETTA
24. SANTINO
25. VIOLETTA
26. SANTINO
27. VIOLETTA
28. SANTINO
29. VIOLETTA
Acknowledgments
Also by CD Reiss
Paige Press
About the Author
About The Book
An epic mafia romance trilogy that sets a new bar for just how dark a hero can get, from NY Times Bestselling author CD Reiss.
Santino is my king. My lover. My husband.
He’s the head of the Cavallo crime family and the moment he choked my vows from me, my life was bound to his.
I’m done fighting my fate, until I hear two rumors, and I’m shaken to the core.
One rumor about the past—that I wasn’t the first bride Santino took.
Another about the future—a new bride is about to be taken.
Changing the old ways is like dousing the flames of hell with tears.
But I married the devil himself, and when I vowed to obey, I lied.
Prologue
SANTINO
When I lay eyes on Violetta in her uncle’s hallway, it’s not a woman I see. She is a child clawing her way up the far side of the cliff to adulthood, like the sun just cresting the horizon line, casting a new glow on the world.
She is an unfinished transformation. I’m aware of the pressure of her adolescence pushing against the child hard enough to break it, but in that moment, the change setting upon her is not what moves me.
On that day, in the hallway, she is not a human with a body rushing through the stages of life, rising sun after rising sun, changing with the persistence of a ticking clock. She is something more.
I’m at that house to bind myself to a treasure I promised to secure and protect. Every black-veiled nonna and hot-barreled soldier will murder and die for it. It is our power, and it’s been left to me. I’ve come for what’s mine.
But when I see Violetta, the womanchild with more power and darkness in her eyes than I’ve seen in assassin or priest, I know she is eternal darkness and everlasting light.
Fate has sent me there to protect a treasure, and it is not hard stones or cold metal.
It is Violetta Moretti.
1
SANTINO
Under the cluster of three pines, right after the hard left, the tree’s roots have broken free of the cliff and reach for passing cars. Even if you get around them without getting the driver’s side door ripped off, you still have to be alert, especially at sunset, because that’s where the hill turns into a mountain. You have to change gears, get the fuck out of the way of the roots, and avoid oncoming cars silently hurtling down an extreme grade, in neutral, with their headlights still off.
I’ve driven this road unscathed many times at every time of day, but for no good reason at all, its treachery has never felt more dangerous than this evening. Bringing the car to a full stop—at the risk of getting rear-ended—to peer around the corner like a student driver seems like the only way to reach the top.
As the bumps under the tires thp-thp-thp and my mind molds three words into them, I realize why I took such care. I don’t want to die with the words la tua bella in my thoughts, sounding like Violetta’s acid-laced voice.
They’re the only words she’s spoken to me in five days.
We eat dinner at the same table. I compliment her dress or hair, and she replies with la tua bella. When I say good night, she says la tua bella. When I tell her to look at me, she whispers la tua bella. The only time she’s said anything different was when I asked her if she wanted me to tell her about Rosetta.
She said yes.
But I couldn’t give up my position. I demanded she speak to me in full sentences first. She cast her eyes down and repeated the same three words, and I walked away rather than give more than I was taking.
Even then, I knew it wasn’t a good decision, but I was unable to change it. I’m a car with broken brakes, speeding ahead in the half hour between day and night when you can get away without headlights, whipping around curves on blind faith.
La tua bella la tua bella la tua bella.
My job is to protect her. All she has to do is obey me.
But what’s driving me to madness is wanting what I was never entitled to and never expected.
Her love.
I need her to love me but, because of how I took her and what I’ve hidden, she’s incapable of opening her heart.
I slow down and drop into a familiar driveway on the side of the hill, pulling up to the house I signed over the day after I bought it. All the lights are on and Loretta’s already waiting for me in a jacket, slacks, and bare feet.
“Ciao.” I kiss her cheeks. “Your shoes.”
“I just got home from work.” She goes inside. Once I close the door, we fall into speaking Italian. “You still have perfect timing.”
“I won’t keep you long.”
“Too bad. Will you take an espresso?”
“Si, grazie.”
We are in the kitchen now. She’s put on slippers. Our habits together are the same. I’m leaning against the counter and she’s filling the Moka with water, not looking at me, as if my presence functions as audience to her femininity, not a participant in the scene.
“You know where the sambuca is,” she says with a jerk of her chin toward a familiar cabinet. “If you want to correct it.”
“No.” I tsk, softening the refusal. It’s one of the ticks I never thought about until Violetta.
“You’re such a good boy now.” She scoops dark brown powder into the Moka pot, baiting me, then glances over with a shrug. “So what brings you, at this hour, to my house on the hill?”
“A favor.”
“Of course. What is it this time? More clothes to burn in the fireplace?”
“Easier.”
“How exciting.” She’s droll, turning the knob on the stove. It clicks, but no flame appears. She sighs, tries again.
“I have it,” I say, getting the stainless steel Zippo from my breast pocket. I turn on the gas and flick it
. The burner flame appears with a whoosh and I step out of her way.
She doesn’t move though. She just stands there, looking at me.
“I heard what happened in Amalfi,” she says. “With Siena.”
“Women gossip too much.”
“I heard it from a man.” She adjusts the pot on the burner. “You should have told her, you know.”
La tua bella
“Why should wives know everything?”
Her scoff is so slight, I would have missed it if I didn’t know her so well.
“What good would it do?” I add when she takes down two cups instead of answering.
“What’s the favor?” She places the cups on a tray.
“I want you to talk to Violetta. Woman to woman.”
“About?” She grabs a lemon from the fruit bowl. “Limone?”
“Si.” Telling her seems redundant, and the request itself is humiliating. She can’t refuse me, but the danger is Loretta will tell one too many people he has no control over his wife. The Moka spits steam. “She needs to know why.”
“Why her sister was first? Why she was in Italy? Why she died there?” She peels a curl of skin from the lemon. “Because no one knows the real answers to these questions.”
“She needs to…” I clench my jaw so hard against the list of humiliating answers, I can’t finish.
Talk to me? Listen to me? Love me?
Did I come all the way up this mountain to ask this shameful favor? I’m not going to beg any woman or man to help with my own house.
“She wasn’t raised right,” I say, forcing my jaw loose. “She doesn’t know the way things are.”
“Does she not know? Or not accept?”
Loretta picks up the tray and takes it outside without another word. I grab the full bottle of sambuca and follow. Despite my earlier refusal, I’m going to need to correct the espresso.
When I get outside into the humid night air, I smell the roses around the patio and the rosemary from the herb garden. I hear crickets calling to get laid. All of it is to be expected, but knowing the smells and sounds of the place makes the difference more clear.
There’s cologne. A man. And it’s fresh in the air—not the stale remnants of yesterday’s guest.
Loretta sets out the cups and we sit, overlooking the lights of the city. I drop the licorice aperitif in my coffee and hold the bottle over hers. She nods, and I use it to correct hers, then I set down the bottle and lean back. When the breeze flows from the west, the cologne smell disappears behind roses.
“I’m not asking a lot,” I say. “Tell me the problem you have now that you didn’t have the last time I brought her.”
She sips her coffee. I don’t touch mine. I don’t even rub lemon on the rim of my cup. It would be too strong in my nose and mouth. I cannot lose the advantage of knowing a man lurks in the shadows.
“The problem,” she says, “is nobody asks you to explain anything. We all just jump. Meet me here? Like this.” She snaps her fingers. “We do it. Keep my wife in your house? Done. Throw yourself off this cliff?”
“I didn’t ask you for that.”
The breeze changes direction, and the cologne comes up from the east. Behind me and a little to the left. He is wide, whomever he is, likely to attack from my non-dominant side. I cap the sambuca.
“Not yet.” She sips her espresso and does not look behind me even for a moment. “You need to talk to her. Tell her you’re still mourning her sister.”
“I’m not.” The air changes again, but I don’t need it. I feel him breathing. He’s in the bushes of the terraced yard, heading up the concrete steps to the patio. If there wasn’t a man present, I would explain that I married Rosetta because I promised to. But Violetta? I didn’t need a promise to marry her. I needed a reason to stay away from her. She scares the hell out of me. “Violetta is my wife now.”
The sound of his feet on the stones is hidden by the wind, but I feel the air move and the electricity from Loretta. Grabbing the sambuca bottle by the neck, I stand, spinning around and swinging the bottle in a heavy arc.
I manage to override the torque of my swing about an inch from his left temple because my eyes deliver two pieces of information to my brain.
One, the man is Damiano.
Two, his hands are up to show they’re empty.
“Cazzo,” I bark, snapping the bottle back. As I do, I notice the bulge in his jacket. Hands up or not, he’s carrying.
“Cristo,” Damiano says. “Little jumpy, no?”
“What the fuck, Dami?”
“I was just coming to say hello.”
“Like a cat going to bacon.” I sit down again and sip my coffee, an indication that I’ll stay. “That cologne stinks like a fresh asshole.”
Damiano sits across from me, not hiding the gun. I won’t hide mine either.
“He didn’t think you’d meet him.” Loretta stands.
“So you let him wait in the bushes?”
She winces in reaction to the anger in my voice. Good. She should flinch, and yet, I shouldn’t blame her. She has little power to choose her path.
“You know I don’t like being played with,” I add.
“It’s on me,” Damiano says, then adds a formal nod. “Chiedo perdono.”
I’m being placated, but tonight, my curiosity is stronger than the insult.
Loretta folds her arms. “He has something important to tell you.”
“Thanks, babe.” Damiano pats her hand, then turns to me. “You’re so paranoid. What the hell was I going to do? Kill you? For what? This one?” He jerks his thumb toward Loretta. “She’d fucking shoot me for touching you wrong. Ain’t that right?” He looks at her with affection, which she returns.
“Shooting would be too good for you.” She goes inside.
Damiano watches her ass as she walks back toward the house. “You gave up a good woman.”
“I had duties elsewhere.”
“Sure.” He drops into her seat and pours the liqueur into the cups. “Speaking of. How’s that spark plug you married?”
He could be asking an innocent question to make small talk, or he could be taking my temperature to see how hot I’m running at the mention of my wife.
“Ask Siena.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard she came by your place in Amalfi to say hello.”
“Did you send her?”
“Why would I do that?”
I don’t know why he’d send his sister to cause trouble with Violetta and me, unless he didn’t know if it would be trouble and he wanted to find out.
Loretta comes out of the kitchen holding two cups with ice and sets them on the glass tabletop with a click.
“Look at her,” he says to me, talking about Loretta as if she’s not there. “Good as bread.”
“Tell me if you need anything.” She glances at me, then pats Dami’s shoulder.
The door clicks behind her. He pours sambuca for each of us and holds up his.
“Salute.”
“Salute.”
We touch glasses and drink.
“Now,” I say. “You can tell me what you want.”
He fixes his cuffs, rearranges his legs, lets his eyes wander like a bored child in summer school. “Your uncle Marco. On the other side.”
Marco is my zia Paola’s husband, and while my aunt raised me when my mother couldn’t, Marco allowed her to take me in, and I’m frequently torn between gratitude and disdain for the fact that he did no more. He was never a father to me, and not much of a father to Gia and Tavie either.
“What about him?” I ask.
“He got himself into a little bit of trouble with my dad.”
I try not to laugh and fail. Marco Polito has no business getting into trouble with Cosimo Orolio, who runs Napoli like our old boss, Emilio Moretti, ran territory ten times the size.
Damiano refills his glass and tops off mine. “He borrowed some money to cover a bet, couldn’t make the payments, this and that, my father picked
up the loan—”
“You’re speaking to your father now? Since when?”
Damiano pauses by drinking. The ice topples into his upper lip. He wipes the cold water away with his fingertips. “Not at the moment.”
“That’s a shame.”
“They say blood’s thicker than water, but when I was thirsty, what did he offer me?” He pours a third cup of sambuca. “Nothing. Sa-fucking-lute.” Damiano slaps back his sambuca.
This is not how we do it. We are not children or animals. He’s either been spending too much time with the college kids on the other side of the river, or he’s trying to calm his nerves.
“I’m gonna bail him out.” Damiano clicks his glass down. “Marco. Your uncle. I’m taking care of it. All I need is your blessing and it’ll be paid.”
I don’t give the blessing right away, because once I do, I’m responsible for it, and I’m not interested in crossing Cosimo Orolio right now.
“And your father agrees?”
“Through an emissary, yeah. He don’t care.”
“How’s Marco paying you back? All his pants have holes in the pockets.”
Damiano shrugs and looks away, and I know—finally—loosened by conversation and sambuca, he’s getting to his point. “I figured it’s an act of good will. Between you and me.”
“I have no ill will toward you.”
“Yeah. Sure. I know. It’s fine. But see, I gotta tell you. Man to man.” He puts his elbows on the table and clears his throat. “I miss it. Being inside, you know? With a… kinda… family, I guess. Not as payment so much, but so just saying… in good faith, I can get some of that back. Here. Me and you.”
