Mafia King

by CD Reiss

  I grit my teeth, gather every bit of energy I have, and pretend to be happy for her. “Wow! I can’t wait to see it all when you come back. We’ll go get lunch and you can show me pictures. Whatever you don’t get in Italy, I can help you do here.”

  “That’s perfect.” She sighs happily and reclines in the seat. “You just had your wedding a few months ago and know what it takes.”

  She was there. She knows it took nothing, because it was nothing, but she’s telling herself a story about me and I’m not even an active character in it. Which is more or less how my story started.

  “Americans take so long to plan a wedding, but we can do it like that.” She snaps her fingers. “We could have ten huge weddings in the time it takes them to have one. Don’t you think?”

  “I do.”

  To her, this may be close enough to what she always told herself she wanted.

  Am I the terrible person for rejecting it? Am I the selfish wife who can’t appreciate the privileges of marriage because they’re going to someone else?

  Maybe. But I’ll still spend the coming days trying to find a way to stop this madness. I have two weeks with Santino to put an end to this bullshit charade. It’s not like Gia can’t live without the guy for the duration of a real engagement.

  But only a couple of months ago, Santino walked me around the four corners of the block to make me his, and I knew less of him.

  They have to turn four corners together or she will not bear children.

  Gia may return to see me prove the efficacy of that superstition.

  “I think you’re going to be a great wife, Gia.”

  “Thank you for everything.” She throws her arms around my neck. “Next time, we’ll have to go to Italy together while our husbands work.” Her voice hitches up an octave in false excitement when she says the word husband.

  “Seeing you safe is all I could ask for,” I say honestly, and hug her tightly. “You have become a very important person to me. I wish you nothing but happiness.”

  “You’re the sweetest.” She kisses my cheek. “I know I will have the best life because you will be in it.”

  Santino opens the car door and leans down to see us. “Senora and senorita. It is time.”

  We pile out of the back seat. Gia runs to her parents. Santino puts his hand on my shoulder at the base of my neck to slow me down.

  “What did you do?” he asks in my ear.

  “There’s nothing I can do. She’s brainwashed.”

  Armando stands at the base of the airstairs with his hands folded in front of him. Paola goes up, then Gia, who stops to throw her arms around him, pulling him close, on tiptoes. He pats her back, but won’t show any more warmth. She belongs to another man, after all.

  They separate, and she bounds up the stairs. At the top, she grasps the railing and does a perfect royal wave with a shining in her smile before disappearing into the plane.

  As soon as I lose sight of her, my stomach twists like a dishcloth. It stays that tight as we get back in the car, as her plane taxis to the runway, as the quaint airport full of play toys bought with blood money disappears in the rearview mirror.

  “She seems happy, no?” Santino interrupts the spiral of my thoughts.

  The morning commute traffic has gotten denser, suffocating the intersections. It looks like my heart feels. “Sure. Like she got an email from a Nigerian prince.”

  “I don’t understand.” Santino changes lanes and someone behind us honks. “Which Nigerian prince?”

  I stare at him, debate explaining it, but sigh instead. “Never mind.”

  “You’re angry with me.”

  I shut down. I cross my arms and stare out the window, stewing. If he can’t see why selling an innocent girl, or any girl, into marriage, whether she thinks she’s happy about it or not, is barbaric, there’s no point bringing up the obvious again.

  “Violetta.” He snaps his fingers in my face. “Speak.”

  I swat his hand away. He can’t tell me to speak or what to do. I’m his wife, not his dog.

  Santino jerks the steering wheel and throws the car across two lanes of traffic. I’m flung against the door, then into the dashboard as he slams on the brakes. The traffic erupts in angry horns. He grabs my face in his hands.

  “You will talk to me. You are my wife.” I try to pull away, but he holds firm. “Tell me, Violetta. Tell me the problem. She’s happy. Why can’t you be?”

  I smack his hand until he lets go. I throw open the door, narrowly missing the concrete barrier on the side of the road, and get out.

  “Violetta!”

  Santino’s shout is lost in the wind and the cars zipping by. Any one of them will flatten us because he didn’t get what he wants.

  Well, maybe because I’m not getting what I want. It’s not even just about Gia. It’s about me. I barely remember what it feels like to not be his wife, to not feel this close to danger.

  “Don’t you understand?” Santino grabs for me and I roll out of the way. The cars driving past ruffle and flare up the bottom of my dress and I can’t muster the energy to care who sees what’s underneath. “There’s no problem!”

  I spin around on my heel, but catch on some loose gravel and nearly slip. Santino reaches for me, but I push him away.

  “Talk to me!” he shouts.

  “About what? About you? Or Gia? When I first saw her, she was everything I left behind. She was everything that made me who I was. All those things about myself I had to let go of when you forced me to marry you. But now? Now I see her and I don’t even know if any of who I was had value and I don’t know if who I am now has value. All I want is to know someone else in the world can decide for themselves if they’re worth a damn. Not a price tag. Not how big a debt they cover. But if they’re worthy humans. But she’ll never know and I’ll never know, because you suck, and I suck, and it all sucks. I don’t know where I belong and it doesn’t even matter.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Santino yells over the traffic. He extends his palms. “I can’t unmarry you.”

  “Yes, you can,” I yell back. The words come out so violently, they break past generations of marital tenacity. “You know it’s not right. Prove it. Prove you could have me without forcing me.”

  I know this is asking more from him than I’ve ever asked before—more than asking him to pay the debt.

  “Are you kidding me?” He looks at me as if I’m stark-raving insane.

  “I’m not crazy!” I yell again.

  “I never said you were!”

  “Then quit looking at me like that!”

  Angrier than ever, my whole body hurls toward him but slips on a piece of tossed trash, and my world goes sideways. It happens in slow motion, the world turning, the cars honking, the heavy stench of burnt rubber on blacktop.

  Santino yanks me back to the side of the road, panting. The driver of the car that almost hit me throws us several middle fingers before peeling back off into traffic.

  I could have died, all because of this stupid, awful, horrible group of men who think they can just control the world with—

  “And then you go jumping into the road!?” Santino’s angry Italian interrupts my own panic. “You could have been hurt! Get in the car!”

  He pushes me back to the car, keeping his body firmly between the rest of the road and me. When I look at him, I see the horror in his eyes. So when he opens my door and pushes me inside, I let him.

  I could have died. Again.

  When he gets back in the car, I can see he’s exhausted, and it’s because of me. He dragged me into his life, and if you put a gun to my head, I’d bet he regrets it. Without me, he’d be muscling his way through his days according to the rules he grew up with. But here I am next to him, challenging him at every turn.

  Santino earned this torture and more for what he did to me. Kidnapping me, imprisoning me, making me love him. I don’t have sympathy for what he’s done and I don’t excuse it. But I still love him, and tha
t’s the absurdity I can’t figure out.

  We have to be together for a reason. There has to be a higher cause. Some greater good I can make from what I’ve been through. But first, Gia has to be freed.

  We’re about a mile from his house when I break the silence. “Can you pay Marco’s debt?”

  He sighs with both impatience and resignation. “Paying the debt insults both men. It says they aren’t in charge of their own affairs.”

  “Yeah, well, Marco isn’t or he wouldn’t be in this problem.”

  “He’s not in a problem if he can pay it, and he can.”

  “By selling his daughter.”

  “These are traditions.”

  “Change them.”

  “Traditions are not laws.” He looks at me when he turns onto the street we live on. “A law is signed one day and changed the next. There’s no congress or parliament to change tradition by signing a piece of paper, because traditions… they are an agreement. No one writes it down. No one has to. The understanding is there.” He jabs his sternum. “The power I have—the power your father had—it is only given because it is agreed.”

  My glands spit adrenaline into my bloodstream. I’m mainlining rage so hot I have to clamp my jaw shut and breathe, breathe, breathe. Only when he’s in the driveway can I speak sensibly.

  “You’re saying if you use your power to fix the traditions that give it, you lose your ability to wield it.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s power for, if you have to work so hard to keep it?”

  He parks at the door and waves away Armando, who rushes up to help us out of the car. I’ve twisted around to face Santino, but he won’t look at me.

  “You’re not happy,” he says.

  “I guess not.”

  It’s not hard to admit that, because how can happiness be the point in a marriage arranged by fiat and entered into by force?

  “We are Catholic,” he says. “We don’t divorce.”

  On his lips, the word divorce sounds like a foreign language. The jab of pain in my chest when my heart skips a beat is fleeting and replaced by a dead weight. Divorce is what people who married for love do when the thing that kept them together dies. The traditions that tie Santino and me are thriving.

  “I know.”

  “You want an annulment then?” he asks with a calm that makes any answer seem consequence-free. It isn’t. But what he’s trying to tell me is that I can say yes, and whatever the consequences may be, they will not be imposed by him. He looks me right in the eye. “Yes or no?”

  This is not a test. It’s not a drill. It’s not sarcasm or an offer he’ll snatch away.

  He’s serious.

  I can end this thing with him.

  I can be free again.

  All I need to do is say yes. I want an annulment. The sooner, the better. While the sheets are as clean as my conscience. Before there’s a child involved.

  But the dashboard clock changes and still—locked in his gaze—I say nothing, because I don’t want to end this marriage. Not now, because I need to stay close to Gia, and maybe not ever, because I want, with all my heart and not a bit of my head, to stay close to him.

  Santino’s trap isn’t the traditions or the threats anymore.

  I’m living in the prison of my own feelings.

  He isn’t offering me an annulment. He’s offering me a choice.

  He’s laying everything he has on a single bet, and he’s going to win.

  19

  VIOLETTA

  I leave the car without telling him what I want because even though I know what I want to say, I don’t want to say it. Once I do, the words can’t be unspoken and the offer won’t be made again. If I want to leave, I’ll have to run away.

  “I need to know now,” he says once we’re alone inside his house.

  “I’m not letting it go,” I reply. “If I stay, don’t expect me to let what happened to me happen to anyone else. I don’t want to make your life a living hell, but I might have to.”

  “Old sins have long shadows.” He tosses his keys on the table. I’ve never seen him miss, but this time, they slide over the surface and clap to the floor. He doesn’t pick them up. “Every day, I wish I was more for you. I forced my way in, but I can’t force you to stay.”

  “It’s not about me anymore. She’s terrified, Santi.”

  He holds out his hands, a gold ring on each fourth finger. The crown ring is modest on the back side—indistinguishable from the wedding band on the left. He’s offering me what he has. Nothing. He can’t help me because he’s helpless. He has no power to do it. Both hands are tied in gold.

  I lay my hands over his.

  “I know.” He looks down at our clasped hands. “Those first days… I couldn’t see you. I couldn’t let myself.” He won’t look at me, just at the gold bands that decorate our fingers.

  “Help me end this,” I whisper. “You’re not a bad person.”

  He waits for the qualifier—the “but” before the twist of the knife. Instead, I leave the statement unarmed.

  “You should be careful.” He cups my face, close now, his words of caution lighter than a breath. “When the devil caresses you, he wants your soul.”

  “Maybe you’re the one who should be careful.”

  His lips meet mine before my last word is finished. The soft pressure of his mouth doesn’t demand a response. It doesn’t even ask. The kiss is not taken from me, nor is it willingly given. When our mouths open together, nothing is exchanged, neither consent nor command, because what we create can never be owned or stolen by either of us. It is ours—woven from our in-between space, from the warmth of our bodies escaping through the cracks in our hearts.

  More than our wedding, this kiss is a sacrament.

  “If I release Gia,” he says, “will you forgive me for not releasing you?”

  “I do forgive you. But what if I didn’t?”

  “I’d release her anyway.” With another kiss, he presses me against the wall, the gentle vulnerability of his mouth turning hot and hungry.

  “Wait.” I push him away only far enough to let my lips make words. “You will?”

  “I will.”

  “You’ll pay Marco’s debt?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “I’ll give Damiano what he really wants.”

  “Is it—”

  He cuts me off with a kiss before answering. “It’s not Gia. Not even a wedding.”

  The aggressive shape of his hardness pushes against my thigh, and I lift my leg to his hip to move the shape to center. He takes that leg under the knee, then the other, and I lock my ankles around him, digging my fingers in his hair as he kisses me, drawing him closer. I want to eat him alive. Crawl inside him and rest inside his skin. Consume the soul he thinks he’s sold to hell, because it is desirable—a prize worthy of eternity—and mine is a devil’s caress.

  Everything has a price.

  “What about the next woman who’s sold?” I ask, pulling away only slightly. He’s trying to kiss me, but I’m not having it. “Will you bless it?”

  “Ask me later.”

  “Now,” I demand, then soften it so he doesn’t get defensive. “Please.”

  “I told you I don’t like this game.”

  “I have one last card to play.” I move his hand to my backside and give him the coy smile of an innocent. “Are you all in?”

  “I have been punto tutto from the beginning.” He grinds into my soft center. “I will end it, and I may be killed for it.”

  “You won’t be.”

  With my legs wrapped around him and his hands under my bottom, he carries me up the steps to his room, where he lays me on the bed and removes my clothes piece by piece, touch by touch, kiss by kiss, until we’re a combined beast of writhing limbs and grappling hands. His lips make a line from my throat to my breasts and belly before he buries his face between my legs, licking me with the full width of his fluttering tongue and su
cking gently on my nub until I’m so lit up, I could set the city on fire.

  “More,” I breathe, clutching his hair.

  He flicks and strokes my opening, then moves his mouth there, softening the edge, then moves lower and hitches my hips off the mattress to reach even lower and—

  “Oh.”

  His tongue ventures into unexpected places, startling me. I push him away, but Santino captures my hands in his own and gently runs his tongue along my asshole. It steals the air in my lungs, and two strokes of his tongue later, I’m putty in his hands. Every flick ignites something deep within me, an urge and an itch I didn’t know existed. His grunts deepen and I feel his body thrust against the bed. The act of licking my ass is turning him on, and suddenly things click together.

  “Santi,” I whisper.

  “Say yes or no now.” He gets up. “This won’t wait.” He presses his thumb against the tight wetness of my asshole.

  “No,” I say, and he removes his thumb, looking at me over the curves of my breasts. “No, I don’t want an annulment.”

  He blinks as if he needs a moment to take in the timing and substance of the answer.

  “I know your heart,” I add. “I know you want to free Gia, and you’ll do everything you can. I know how hard that is for you, but it makes me want to stay with you, whether you succeed or not.”

  He gets up on his knees and wipes his mouth with his wrist, towering between my spread legs. The heavy hardness jutting from his pelvis is both a threat and a promise. His command and dominance has muscled past whatever vulnerability he showed downstairs.

  “You ask a lot of me, Forzetta.” Lifting my legs, he takes my ass cheeks in his rough hands and spreads them. “Too much for a wife who hasn’t given me everything I want.”

  A hot chill runs down my spine and settles where his attention pierces me.

  “What do you want?” I ask. I know what he wants, but he has to say it.

  Each of his thumbs rests on my asshole, spreading it, opening me to a new type of desire.

  “I want to fuck this tight little hole.”

  “You want to hurt me,” I say.

  He smirks and lays his finger on my lips. I part them so he can rest it on my tongue.