With my family in Torre Cavallo and our rivals either dead or shifted to our side, I thought we were done, but Santino always knew better. I have a sense of his rhythms now. The way his attention shifts too slowly because a doubt holds him up.
“Tell me,” I say in the dark of night when we’re both supposed to be sleeping. The moonlight glints off his eyes when he opens them, and though his doubts pump the brakes on his reply, they do not stop him.
“Dario Lucari,” he says. “He sent a message today about our deal.”
“He didn’t exactly live up to his end.”
“He only promised to help with Marco.”
“Being an asshole, and trying to steal the crown, puts him in the negative.” I get up on my elbow and lay my hand on Santino’s bare chest. Our men weren’t an abstraction to me any more. They have names and families. “He owes us, and we shouldn’t send him anyone until he pays up.”
“Don’t get drunk with power, Forzetta.” This is not a reprimand or instruction. It’s a warning, and he’s right. For the moment, he knows the rules better than I do. He’s my partner but he’s also my mentor.
“How can we trust him with our guys?” I push over him, arms straight, one leg over his hips. “They’re our family. You’re sending them to fight what you’ve basically described as a mega-mafia family—”
“It’s not a superhero movie. They can be beaten if he says they can.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
He takes my face in his hands and draws me closer.
“We cannot say no without causing another problem, and a problem like that? We don’t want it. Trust me. If he beats the Colonia and comes for us with their power and their men, we may win, but we will lose all of our normal.”
With a tick of his attention out the window, he indicates all of our world, from mountain to river and back again.
Our normal. I don’t want to lose it after a few days of earning it.
I get up on my knees and straddle him. Neither of us is pretending to sleep now.
“What if we just send him the dumb ones?”
He laughs, then quiets, considering the curves of my body. I’m a little sore from his attention a few hours before but not too sore for another go.
“And what if…” I pause, wiggling against him. “After we send Dario his payment, you and I take the honeymoon we never had.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“What if we just got in the car and drove?”
In the time it takes a heart to beat, Santino goes from tenderness to dominance, rolling me over and pinning me to the mattress.
“This again?” Santino kisses my neck and chest, his lips working down my breasts and belly with the urgency of his mind. “Just drive west until we’re eating fried chicken and saluting football?”
“Just be away and do nothing but try to make babies. And try and try and…” The next try falls into a gasp as he kisses between my legs, soothing the soreness into soft warmth.
“There’s no trying, Violetta. Only doing.” With that, he makes me come with my arms outstretched and a cry from the depths of my pleasure.
“Let’s do it then. We drive into the sunset and come back good and knocked up.”
“I like this plan. Now open your legs.” He pushes my knees apart and up before I can comply, leaning on my bent legs so he can drive inside me. “We start tonight,” he says when he’s so deep our minds connect. He moves slow, always mindful of when I may be sore from an earlier fuck. His eyes close and his head turns. I know him now. He’s close.
“Violetta,” he whispers. “You are everything.”
“Santino,” I reply as his motions arouse me as if he just hadn’t given me an orgasm. “Take me.”
I don’t clarify whether I’m asking for him to take my body or take me away into the sunset because I don’t have to.
To our soldiers, Santino explains the mission, its dangers and benefits, then asks for volunteers. The half dozen men required step forward, including Vito, and Remo, who wants to see New York. Surprisingly—and privately—Gennaro offers to go.
And then, after we send them east, Santino and I slip away for the honeymoon we never had. We get in the Alfa and drive west.
I don’t know what I expected, but I have never seen anything like my country.
It is truly vast. Santino retracts the roof as we cross through the southern tip of Indiana, and the immensity of the sky, its clarity, its everywhereness creates a vacuum so powerful, I fear I’ll be sucked upward and into it—a tiny speck of a woman, lost forever. I grab his hand to keep me on the earth, even as the ground moves under me.
“You all right?” he asks, shouting over the wind.
I’m overwhelmed by the size of the world, the limits of my knowledge, the inconsequential impact of my body and mind.
“I’m fine.” I squeeze his hand.
We’ve passed through Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, avoiding cities in favor of the open road and unbroken horizon line. I am in a new world, away from the natural boundaries of mountains and river. Unenclosed. Limitless. Free, yet humbled into amazement. The sown fields go on endlessly, barely taming a few inches of soil depth. Houses are built low and wide as if they respect the sky too much to challenge it. I understand why indigenous people revered the majesty of the heavens and the regenerating life of the earth. Every single thing a person could observe around them was a miracle, worthy of its own prayer.
“You’re doing that thing again.” He takes his hand off the wheel to make a circle with his three fingers to define what I’m doing.
“What thing?”
He tsks. “Come on. This.” He waves in my direction, as if that explains what he sees.
Santino can be lazy and would rather use a gesture or a vocal tone when words fail, which lead to assumptions, which can lead to misunderstandings. I want to know exactly what he means.
“I’m quiet?”
“You’re closing your eyes with your eyes open.”
I love him so much. He has all the words he needs.
“Doesn’t it all overwhelm you?” Now it’s my turn to gesture toward the vastness I cannot describe.
He scoffs. “The only thing that overwhelms me is you.”
“Wait until we have our fourth child.”
“Did we say four?” he asks. “Is that all?”
I have to look at him for a few seconds to be sure he’s joking, and even then, I’m not one hundred percent convinced.
“We need to have an Armando and a Camilla,” I say.
“I want a Tavie.” He puts his arm behind my seat, and I lean into him. “He was a good kid.”
“That’s three.”
“As long as I fuck you enough to have ten children,” he shrugs. “How many is up to you.”
I turn my face upwards, pressing my nose into his scruff. He smells of the wind and the widening horizon line. He’s the road narrowing to a point in the distance, farther and farther with every mile under the tires.
He’s Secondo Vasto. Our forever home. Our normal.
I take a deep breath of him, drawing in the sweet scent of freedom.
LA FINE
Thank you for going on this journey with me.
Take a deep breath, and read on, because though Santino and Violetta have found their happily ever after, Dario has some work to do.
Yes. My next dark mafia series belongs to the dangerous, shadowy figure of Dario Lucari. His first book is called Take Me .
Sarah’s kidnapped on her wedding day, held by a man who wants vengeance on her father, married to him against her will, and thrust into a world of betrayal, lies, and deviance she’s lived in her entire life…but never known.
All she has to do to escape is destroy everything she’s ever loved, and love a man she must destroy.
Take Me is available everywhere.