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.
Santino’s barking orders to his men. I only hear they are to “get down there,” and “secure the block,” before he’s outside, finishing the instructions, leaving me alone with Vito.
I take out the scissors.
“I hope you don’t like this jacket too much.” I’m cutting it before he confirms I can.
The bullet grazed the muscle and left on the other side, missing the cephalic vein. Thank God it isn’t inside him. I have no idea how to remove it.
“Is this the only injury?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He cringes when I lift his arm to check his side.
“My uncle always said one day he’d need that Beretta,” I say to distract him, stuffing more gauze under his hand. “It’s been in the basement since forever. Pressure.”
“It works like new.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“He didn’t want to hurt nobody.”
I scoff. Maybe he didn’t. He’s an uncle by marriage. But Zia Madeline is my father’s sister. She probably wants blood, and I wouldn’t blame her.
My thoughts are interrupted when Santino storms back in.
“Get back down there and finish the job, Vito.”
“He isn’t going anywhere,” I say distractedly.
“They ain’t coming with me,” Vito protests. “Two days ago, they opened the door for the neighbor, and Joey and Willie Tabona busted into the house. They been eating their food and watching their TV since.”
“Until today,” Santino sneers.
“Good thing Carmine and I came slow. Joey and Willie came out to check us over, and the Beretta started popping from upstairs. Gave us a moment to take them down…but now? That door don’t open. We tried.”
“Wait.” I stop the patient from talking further, because it’s already clear that besides Tabona soldiers, Zio Guglielmo was involved. Keeping pressure on Vito’s arm, I turn to my husband, whose body language is mid-action. “I told you I wanted to go get them.”
“And I said it would be done.”
“You could have told me.” I look away and pluck up a roll of tape.
“If I wanted you to know, I would have.”
He’s not going to change. Not today. Not preparing to attack the Vasto Quarry, where as kids, we got chased from climbable stacks of uncut Yule marble. Santino is who he is. It may take a lifetime to teach him that he shouldn’t make decisions without me.
“They’ll trust me,” I say, ripping away a length of tape. “If I go, he’ll put the Beretta away, and they’ll come.”
“You’re not going anywhere. The whole town’s infested.”
“Our enemies have the crown.” I pat the tape across the bandage. “I’m not worth anything to them anymore.”
“You’re worth something to me.”
He’s right, and he knows it. The argument is over. I can be leveraged as motivation for surrender or consequence for an attack. But they have to catch me first. Not needing me to admit what’s obvious to him, Santino goes outside to talk to the shadow man who stood over Marco a few hours ago.
Finished with the bandage, I stand. “Stay off it,” I say to Vito.
“Sure.” He stands with a smile that acknowledges what we both know. He has no choice in the matter. “They seem like good people, your aunt and uncle.”
“They are.”
He goes outside, running to the tall building where the men sleep. Probably getting a shirt that’s not cut to shreds.
The couple who raised us are good people. They did everything for us. They made my sister and me their own. If I thanked them with every breath I have for the rest of my life and died with thanks on my lips, it would not be enough.
I go outside and find Santino at the side of the house, by the outside door to the basement, with a man whose back is to me, talking, talking, talking. I’ll die of starvation waiting for a polite moment to speak.
“Excuse us,” I cut in.
“Forzetta,” Santino says firmly.
But I don’t look at him. I’m locked on the dangerous blue eyes of his companion. He’s the one from the room with Marco. In the light, he’s harder and even colder, and the shadows don’t hide the way the tops of his ears end in a straight line, as if God stopped printing them out before he was finished. The man is bristling—holding back some kind of energy that’s not necessarily risky to me personally. I get the sense he’s used to releasing that energy by ruling over a faraway kingdom.
“This is Dario Lucari,” Santino continues. “Business associate from New York. Dario, this is my wife. Violetta.”
My name is more than a name. It’s a warning that I’m off-limits.
“From last night,” Dario says with a hint of a snarl, as if he’s still mad about the interruption. “You didn’t have to bother. We were going to get what we needed out of him.”
“But I got it quicker.” I turn to Santino, who’s directing a narrowed eye at Dario as if he’s trying to decide whether or not he likes where this conversation is going. I put my hand on his arm. “Please, five minutes.”
“Bene,” he says, pulling me away. “I’ll correct how he spoke to you.”
“Whatever,” I say. “He’s irrelevant. I have to get my Z’s.”
“No.”
“You can come with me. They know I love you. They’ll trust you,” I plead, but make no headway. He’s still stone-faced. I hold his lapels as if that will keep him still. “When we came, they weren’t ready for us. He built a bed for me, and I wouldn’t sleep on it for months. I thought it would break some kind of spell, and I wouldn’t be safe again.” I speak so fast I’m breathless. I have so much to get in before he’s pulled away. “And I wouldn’t let him pick me up. Not for the first year. Then I did, and he threw out his back. For weeks, he was on the living room floor, on the phone with his foremen and clients. He told them he spent his whole life moving lumber and brick, but this little girl…” I press a hand to my chest. “This little patatina had a spirit heavy enough to break him.”
“Okay,” Santino says.
“Okay we can go?”
“I’ll go.”
“No,” I say. “Take me. Don’t leave me here waiting for you.”
“Do I have to lock you in a tower?”
“There isn’t a tower in the world that will keep me away from you.”
“You mean there isn’t one that will keep you safe.” He looks away from me, then back, changing the light on his face so I can see the dark rings of exhaustion under his eyes. “One trip.”
“There and back. Done.”
We kiss on it, and I believe him.