Emilio Moretti sat in the back seat with Damiano. I was driving. This was before the big money hit, when Emilio was the only one who knew what the fuck he was doing. There was no Alfa Romeo. No big house. Just a beat-to-shit Lancia with more trunk space than seating.

  We were driving down a desolate road, not a damn thing in sight—only barren fields with abandoned machinery and broken barns. Potholes colonized by rabbits. Swampy marshes ate everything in reaching distance, even the puttering of an archaic engine. Bleak shit. The smell alone stayed with me for weeks when Emilio first took me out there.

  Damiano hadn’t had a first time yet, and he shook so hard he rocked the car.

  “Come on, Dami. Don’t worry.” Emilio clapped him on the shoulder. “Sing a song with me.”

  That was Emilio’s answer to everything—sing a song with me. Old folk shit from the toe of the boot that had enough Arabic tones to make you listen just to make sure you had the right song. His rich baritone filled cars and offices and parking garages and empty warehouses. He did it especially when nasty shit was about to happen and knew some of the guys had weaker stomachs, or it was their first time.

  That’s what you did. You’d sing a song with Emilio. You’d get the fucking job done.

  Dami, though, he was never around for the singing. He had made a name for himself by muscling his way through the gig, throwing around weight and weapons and hot-shit talk. He didn’t have to put weight behind his words. Threats were his specialty. We had others for the follow-through.

  Tonight—that night—there were no others. It was only Dami, Emilio, and me.

  He took a special shine to us, Emilio. Called us the sons he never had. The brothers he always longed for. He was taking care of Dami. Trying to soothe him. Sing with me. Pay attention to me instead. This way, Dami, this way.

  It didn’t work. Dami was too little a man with too many nerves. Emilio should have known better.

  I parked by our usual spot and we all met at the rear bumper. Emilio made some smartass remark about soap and how tight it was in the back seat.

  “You can drive home,” I said, pocketing the keys after I unlocked the trunk because I knew better.

  “She’s a good car.” Emilio patted me on the shoulder. “You’ll miss her when she’s gone.”

  “Unlikely.” I hoisted the lid of the trunk, its protesting creaks and groans eaten by the marshes.

  The guy tied and taped up scowled and thrashed against his restraints, but Emilio had taught me not to underestimate the value of a good knot. The more he squirmed, the tighter he made the restraints.

  When Emilio first hired me, I thought we’d talk about guns and territories and family hierarchy…but no. It was all ropes and knots, as if we were on a fucking sailboat.

  I dragged the guy out of the trunk and threw him on the ground. Reached in the deeper recesses of the trunk for a shovel and slammed it shut.

  Dami stood there like a guy about to revisit his lunch.

  “Dami.” Emilio pulled out his gun, and my buddy’s eyes got wider.

  I have to admit, I had a moment of worry. A guy never knew what another guy could get caught doing.

  But Emilio turned the gun around in his hand so it was on the bottom, and his fat gold ring with the inset of diamonds in the shape of a crown was on top—visible as a warning—and passed it to Dami. “Since you’re the one who got this sfigato where we could reach him, you get to do the honors.” He might as well have said, “Make me proud, son.”

  Even though Dami took the gun, I was thinking it was going to be a long fucking night.

  “We’re doing him a favor.” Emilio took the guy by the hair and jerked him to his knees. The fear in our captive’s eyes was palpable. “Either we do it fast or his boss is gonna do it slow.”

  Damiano wiped his face with one hand and pointed the gun with the other. The sfigato flinched because he knew this was it for him. Poor fucking guy. Didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to his mother.

  Right about then was when I started to wonder why I wasn’t shaking. Why I didn’t care. Why I just wanted to get the business done and move on. It wasn’t that the guy was a rapist. He had come to us with an opportunity because we paid better than the Tabonas—the family he’d pledged to. He was a stupid and careless soldier. Not worth killing except that it would put us—a soldier cell of the Cavallos—in a position to find a profitable peace. Emilio would rise to capo and give Dami and me a place we belonged, if only my friend would stop acting like such a fucking vergine.

  I hadn’t killed anyone either. I decided I just might shake too, because before I worried about hell, I had to believe I had a soul to burn.

  “You won’t be green after this,” Emilio promised Dami. “After your first, it’s like riding a bike. It’s new. New shit is scary. But it’s a whole damn lot easier once you get up and going. Once you’re ready for it, know what to expect. You understand?”

  Dami nodded, but it was clear he couldn’t do it. Emilio was getting bored. The sfigato tied up before us laughed from behind the duct tape. Not just any close-mouthed chuckle, but a laugh of derision. Like if we were going to kill him, he was going to get an insult in and Dami was so out of sorts, the guy with a gun to his head was telling him to get on with it.

  So Emilio nodded in my direction and I knew what to do. I laid my hand over Dami’s and waited for him to loosen his grip on the gun. He didn’t. He knew that if I did his job, it wouldn’t look good.

  “You’re shaking,” I said loud enough for Emilio to hear. “Did you eat? You sick or something?”

  I’d known Dami so long, I could tell he understood what I was saying was not what I meant.

  “Just a little agita.” His grip relaxed. “I don’t wanna miss is all.”

  “You get the next one.”

  My friend let go of the gun and I took it, swung my arm around, and popped the sfigato right in the face. A spray of blood blew out the back of his head, and he wavered on his knees as if falling one way or the other was the difference between heaven and hell, and God and the devil were fighting over his soul. He dropped to the left. Another win for the devil.

  Easiest kill I ever had. Didn’t even think about it. Just handed Emilio his gun.

  Then I started digging, because I was a kid—a nobody—and that was what nobodies did.

  “You understand I need men under me who do what I tell them?” Emilio got in Damiano’s face. “These people aren’t your friends. You’re not responsible to them or their fucking immortal souls, and if you’re worried about your own, go join the priesthood.”

  Emilio snapped toward me and put out his hand. I knew to stop digging, but as soon as I leaned on my shovel, I got this feeling I had only had once before. The bathroom in my building had two sinks. The one on the right had water that sometimes came out brown. The other had an exposed wire for the overhead light touching the pipe. The electric water didn’t hurt, but if I touched the flow right out of the faucet, it shook the nerves of my hands to the bone.

  When I stopped shoveling, my whole body felt like that. All I wanted was a cigarette, so I lit one up.

  “I think it was the capicola.” Dami held up his hand. “I’m still shaking.”

  I glanced over as I tossed aside a shovelful. He wasn’t shaking. Not really. Anyone could see he was faking it.

  “Santi.” Emilio reached toward me and snapped his fingers before opening his palm. “Give me that.” Emilio took the shovel from me. “Make yourself useful.” He tossed it to Dami, who caught it as if digging was what he was meant to do. Then Emilio plucked the cigarette from my fingers and held it up by the filter.

  “What happens when you finish this?”

  “I smoke another?”

  “No, stronzo.” He slapped me in the back of the head then wedged my cigarette between his lips. “You flick it. I watch you. Eh? I see you flick the filter. And who cares, right? But you see you’re at a murder scene or no? Your spit”—he took another drag—“and now my spit’s all over it. You leave this lying around, it’s not just you that’s getting put away.”

  “Okay,” I said as he handed it back by the filter.

  “It’s not just your ass. It’s all of ours.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Listen.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “You got the brains for a real future, but you don’t have the experience to know all the shit that goes wrong. I need you to think of the worst that can happen. Just because we got the police in our pocket’s no excuse to be careless. This sets a fire”—he pointed at my cigarette—“and you bring attention to a dead body. Best case? It don’t, but you leave evidence behind for some puffi. Then it won’t matter how much I believe in you.” He pantomimed flicking my butt-shaped life into the trees. “You set yourself and all of us on fire.”

  He was right in a thousand ways.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking the lit smoke, looking Emilio in the eyes.

  They were shaped just like Violetta’s. Just like now, in my rearview mirror, wide and full of emotions I don’t have anymore.

  This isn’t about protecting her the way I couldn’t protect Damiano or Emilio. It’s about something more important—and more impossible.

  I will never be able to contain this woman.

  I am going to lose her.

  I am going to fail at protecting her.

  My life will be meaningless.

  Nothing to look forward to.

  Nothing to fight for.

  I’d fear emptying into a shell of a man, but I already am.

  16

  VIOLETTA

  His diamond crown ring taps on the steering wheel. From the back of the Alfa, I meet his eyes in the rearview. I’m numb, broken, and terrified from the short hairs of my arms standing on end, to the liquifying marrow in my bones. What just happened keeps rolling through my thoughts like slices of brain coming through an MRI. Every time I close my eyes, I see brain and blood explode in front of me.

  Now that the adrenaline has worn off, everything hurts. Hurt is such a pitiful, terrible, tiny little word that sounds infantile next to its actual definition. My body is a three and a half on the Pain Assessment Tool. My knees and elbows are scraped with road rash and bleeding through the sleeves of this terrible dress. My hands and arms are torn up from broken glass, with more cuts and bruises on my legs. My head aches. Every bump in the road jostles everything and I feel like one of Zia’s sewing boxes—loose and jumbled.

  Emotionally though? I’m at an eleven.

  I try to even my breaths and keep from totally losing my shit again, but everything feels as if it’s about to splinter apart and break. What the fuck happened? How is this my life? Two weeks ago, I was studying for a final exam with my best friend and planning a trip to Greece and today I nearly died on a very expensive street.

  This can’t be my life. I don’t give a shit where I was born or what’s expected of me, this can’t be my destiny.

  “You’re safe,” Santino says, stopping for a light. “You can stop quivering.”

  It’s not a command or an insult, but tender permission.

  I ran away. He and I could have been killed. At least one person’s dead for sure, probably two, and I realize his voice is steady and he’s not trembling at all.

  I still have splattered brain matter on my leg and instead of removing it, I’m noting how different it looks from medical specimens in a lab, and how much the same. What’s going on with my husband is bad enough, what’s happening with me is a whole new level of what-the-fuckery.

  He lights up another cigarette. The smell stings my nostrils and the nicotine goes right to my blood.

  “What the fuck just happened?” I manage to ask without throwing up—a feat I’m immensely proud of.

  “Watch your mouth, Forzetta.”

  Forzetta? Forza means power. I know that much. But Forzetta sounds like a cute nonsense word paired with an infantilizing order.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I made it up to say strength in a small package.”

  “No, I mean watch my mouth?” I spit out a bitter, angry laugh. “Two men just forced me into a car and tried to drive away with me. And you want me to watch my mouth?”

  He doesn’t say anything as I fume and laugh and mutter, “Un-fucking-believable” fifteen times like a crazy person…and Dio, do I ever feel like a crazy person.

  “Who were those guys?” I ask, no, demand to know. “What did they want? How can you just drive off without calling the police?”

  Never mind that I absolutely do not want to call the police. Half of them are probably on his payroll. That’s not the point.

  Actually, it is.

  If he has guys on the inside, he could call and have them clean up his mess. Instead, he just left it bleeding onto the streets. He didn’t care about who saw. He didn’t care what happened. He didn’t even seem to mind that he was shot at.

  Santino exhales a plume of smoke. “That’s a lot of questions,” he says as I cough and swat away the smoke. “Which first?”

  This man, this animal, literally turns on his blinker. Like Citizen of the Year.

  I sneer at him but mull over his question. He seldom offers information and I need every answer I can get. I should probably ask him to take me to a hospital first, but I already know how that would go. “The one I asked first. What the fuck just happened?”

  We slow to a stop at a red light. He turns around to look me up and down, and I can see the dislike curling in his scraped lips. Oh, yes, King Santino, I fucking said fuck again.

  He mulls something over, more visibly than I recall seeing before, and whatever it is, he decides to let it go.

  “You’re my wife.” He turns around.

  What, no bait for all my fucks? That was what he decided to let go?

  “That makes you a target,” he continues, smoking his cigarette low in his seat like a man waiting for the light to change. “Makes you valuable to people who want what’s mine.”

  Everything, literally everything, he just said makes me angry. Everything it implies, but won’t state. All the things that are over my head, but I know exist. All of his business is apparently now in my lap and I never, not ever, asked for this shit.

  Me, the girl whose parents were gunned down in the street. Me, the girl whose older sister couldn’t survive to see me into adulthood.

  This is the absolutely antithesis of the life I wanted to live.

  “What people?” I ask more softly because rage is exhausting. “Who were they?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  Enraged, I scrape the brain matter from my leg and throw it at him. It sticks to his jacket. He plucks it off and tosses it out the window as though it’s a snot he flicked in the wrong direction. As though brain matter on his expensive Italian suit is another day in the office.

  “I’m covered in blood and brain. You think I don’t need to know what the fuck is going on?”

  His jaw sets, annoyance twitching through the taut muscle. He’s so fucking beautiful in conflict I almost forget I want him to hate me enough to set me free because I’m not worth the risk.

  “No. You do not need to know.” He takes a long pause and stares me down in the mirror again. “For your protection.”

  “Because I’m so safe now?” I have enough breath to say the rest in one long sentence. “I have blood and bruises and cuts and scrapes and probably a nice concussion because this is the safest I’ve ever been—thank God King Fucking Santino is here!”

  “Your mouth is going to get you in trouble.”

  “You knew they were there,” I say. “You knew.”

  How could he not? The car was ready. He had his gun out as if he was expecting it.

  “Was I bait?” I added.

  “You watch too many movies.” Eye contact in the mirror. He thinks this is funny, then he doesn’t, and he continues. “From now on, you’ll have a man with you when you leave the house.”

  I’m beyond tired of men.

  We slow to another light.

  He turns around again, this time with a look of genuine concern. Like a real person. “I’m sorry this happened to you. It won’t happen again.”

  I’m an exposed nerve. Raw, dirtied, angry. His change in tone, his attempt to meet my gaze like a real man instead of a murderous devil, leaves me feeling guilty for a crime that’s not even against the law.

  I don’t like his answers and I feel achingly, terrifyingly vulnerable and exposed. He won’t tell me who those people are. He won’t tell me why they’re after me. He won’t tell me whose brain and blood are on my clothes or why his passenger-side window was shot out. Just looking at it makes me nauseated. It’s a projector screen that replays what happened over and over and over again.

  Santino moved like a predator, the king of the land, who was ready to eat the heart of anyone who crossed into his territory. It appears I’m inside his purview—a queen to protect or meat for the taking.

  All I want to do is curl back up into a ball and cry. I want to cry for a solid week. No food, no water, no sustenance. I could survive on sleep and my tears. I can feel that in my soul. Yet, again, I hold it all in because Santino doesn’t deserve my tears. He doesn’t deserve to see me hurt or weak, and I don’t want compassion from a sophisticated killer. Not after seeing him get into a gunfight and drive away as though it was nothing.

  I will never be able to close my eyes and unsee this afternoon’s events. Never again.

  I’m supposed to save lives. The Hippocratic oath is my personal mantra. Being a nurse means committing my life to the betterment and healing of others. Instead, those men were maimed—were killed—because I chose to run.

  The longer I stay around Santino, the worse it’s going to get.

  “You’ll be all right.”

  There are tiny fragments of humanity in the statement. Like he doesn’t just know I’ll be okay. He hopes for it as well.

  I don’t want his good wishes unless he offers them fully. I’m sick of subtext.

  “You think?”

  He’s quiet again as we drive. He seems to be one of those guys who thinks about what he says before he says it. It’s refreshing to be around, if I’m ever being totally objective, because my zio and zia cultivated a house where people just spout off without regard for the person they’re talking to.