I giggle to myself and tie the brooch around my neck with a summer scarf, when the doorbell rings. As ridiculous as the scarf looks, I leave it in place to see who’s at the door.

  When I see Paola out the little window grate, I’m glad I have on the brooch. She can help me figure out how to wear it, or maybe the woman she’s with, who’s a little older than I am and far more stylish.

  I clack the locks open and swing open the door.

  “Ciao, Zia Paola!” I cry and give her a double kiss.

  “Violetta,” she says. “I’m sorry to bother you. This is Siena—”

  “I had to meet you right away!” She takes my hands in hers and looks me up and down as if she hasn’t seen me since I was a baby and wants to assess my prodigious growth. “When I heard you were here, I just ran to Paola and—”

  “Insisted,” Paola interrupts dryly.

  “That’s great,” I say, wrangling my Italian into a usable shape. “Come in.”

  I step out of the way and let them in as Santino saunters down the stairs, fixing his cuff, as if surprise guests are part of our culture, which they more or less are.

  He obviously doesn’t think anything of it, and neither do I.

  “Santi,” Siena says, one hand out. “Marriage is good for you. I can see how happy she’s keeping you.”

  “Siena,” he says at the foot of the stairs. They exchange a double kiss, then he does the same with his aunt.

  For a moment, I’m a little stumped about my next move. Then I remember I’m the lady of the house. I ask our guests if they’d prefer the patio or the living room, and they choose the patio. Once they’re seated on the shady side, I have to remind myself of my next move.

  “Caffé?” I ask. I’m going to grab some cookies and lemon soda anyway, but coffee needs to be requested.

  Paola and Santi decline, but Siena’s into an espresso. I pop off to the kitchen with a bounce in my step.

  Starting the espresso before arranging the cookies on a platter, I think this is kind of great. I could really learn to like having people over, running a kitchen, being in charge of my own little fiefdom.

  Outside, they’re chatting amicably. Santino’s phone rings and he dodges away to answer, leaving Paola and Siena alone. As he passes me, I hear the word Dami and wonder if it’s the same Damiano who threw oranges at his window, but I can’t ask because he’s gone in a blink.

  Damn him and his business. I can hurry the cookies and cold drinks, but I can’t rush the coffee. I load the tray with biscotti and glasses for the pitcher of lemon soda and start out, when I hear an urgent psst. Santino’s leaning in the entrance from the living room with his hand over the phone.

  “Wait for me,” he says before shaking his head and walking away in frustration over whatever’s happening on the call.

  Is he serious? I’m supposed to stare at the espresso pot for another seven minutes while we have guests waiting alone? No self-respecting Italian matriarch would let that go on, whether her husband told her to or not. He can reign over his territory, but I reign over the house. He knows that. Besides, what could be the problem? If Siena’s allergic to almonds or doesn’t like anise, she can just pick another biscotti.

  So with Santino striding urgently to the other side of the house, I take the tray outside.

  “Ah, here she is,” Siena says. “I was telling Paola I love how you’re wearing this.” She touches her throat, and I remember my attempts with the carved brooch.

  “Oh.” I laugh and pour out the lemon soda, making light of the aesthetic difficulties. “It’s so beautiful I can’t let it sit in a drawer.”

  Paola makes a short tsk before drinking. I’m not sure what she’s trying to say, but that particular sound from one of us means something more than nothing. It’s a warning or a reminder to shut up. It’s disappointment and sometimes irritation. It’s all context, and I feel like I don’t have enough of that to interpret the intention.

  “It’s really unique,” Siena says. “The first time I saw it, I thought only a really beautiful woman could pull it off.”

  “Siena’s thinking of moving to the States,” Paola changes the subject. “What do you think?”

  “Um…” I’m still trying to figure out where Siena would have seen the brooch before, then decide it doesn’t matter. “Yeah. It’s a great idea. I can show you around.”

  “My English is terrible.”

  “Everyone speaks Italian in Secondo Vasto.” I’m falling right back into the generous hostess role I gave myself ten minutes ago, and I’m pretty happy here. “Oh,” I cry, bolting up. “The espresso!”

  I can smell the scorched coffee before I even get into the kitchen, where the moka pot’s shaking against the burner.

  Liking the role of Queen of the Casa doesn’t make me good at it.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Siena says, coming inside. “The soda’s fine.”

  “No, no.” I dump the grounds. “I have to do it right.”

  She leans on the counter by the open doors and slips a slim pewter case from her pocket.

  “You seem happy.” She snaps open the case to reveal a row of cigarettes. “One for you?” she asks, holding it out.

  “No, thanks.”

  “You’re handling the change well.” She hinges one cigarette out and closes the case.

  I’m flattered she even notices, but even more than that, she’s open to hearing about what I’d consider my success.

  “Thanks,” I say. “It was hard at first.”

  “Oh, I’d imagine.” With the scratch and pop of a plastic lighter, she lights her cigarette. “Situation being what it is.”

  “Yeah.” I should say something about being raised American, but I take a moment to figure out how to couch it while I refill the espresso pot.

  “I was with Rosetta when she died,” Siena says as if this isn’t shocking at all, and she’s about to say more, but I need to backtrack about four words.

  “What?”

  She exhales, looking at me as if trying to discern what I want to know about.

  “I know.” She waves her hand as if the cigarette smoke is anger I’ve directed at her. “I was also pissed he wasn’t with her when she passed.”

  “He—?”

  “He’s so traditional.”

  The way she cocks her chin in a random, upward direction, but somewhere within the house, coupled with the intonation of the word he that implies both disdain for this one thing, and a respect she’s supposed to exhibit in front of me, implies a specificity that I can’t ignore. I’m trying to unravel what, exactly, I’m misunderstanding, but she continues.

  “Of course, he’d never be in the room when—”

  “Wait a second,” I interrupt because anything she says will clear up my bewilderment, and right now, I don’t want clarity. “I think you’re confused.”

  “A lot of us were, you know. I mean, I guess I understand why he’d bring her here to marry her since she wasn’t quite eighteen. But why not wait? Then, of course, we found—”

  “Violetta,” Santino’s voice cuts off Siena. He’s in the doorway, phone in hand as if he just cut the call, Zia Paola behind him, out of breath as if she’d run like hell to get him.

  “Santino,” I barely whisper.

  “Wife. We have to go.”

  “Santino.” I say it again as if his name can sweep away everything I’m afraid to know about him.

  “We were just talking about Rosetta.” Siena flicks her ashes outside and crosses her arms in a faux-casual power stance. “Remember what you called her?” She directs her words to Santino. “La. Mia. Bella.” She draws out the last three words—my beautiful one—articulating each piece of the possessive with a little venom and a lot of sugar, as if mocking his name for her.

  “Siena,” Paola scolds. “Basta.”

  Siena stamps her cigarette out in a potted plant. I don’t know why that’s the moment I wake up to how clear it is and how much that confuses me. Maybe it’s the definitiveness of the gesture. Maybe I feel like the cigarette, or the dirt, or maybe it’s the way it indicated that not only was the smoke over, and not only the conversation, but the blindness that allowed me to be happy.

  “We should go,” Paola says to Siena.

  “No,” I bark.

  I want Siena to stay. Explain how I misunderstood, elongating the difference between what she said and what she meant so I can twist it into knots. She’ll laugh at how stupid I am to think this thing…this ridiculous thing I should be blushing over, because Santino’s my husband, and I’m his wife.

  For better or for worse.

  For richer or poorer.

  In sisters and in health.

  “Tell me, were they married?”

  Siena shrugs, maybe realizing the danger of her situation, then turns away, maybe deciding she doesn’t care.

  “She has to go,” Santino says more to Paola than to me, and I know I’m right. I’m crazy and I’m making things up in my head but also…I’m right.

  “Not quite,” Siena confirms. “But that ring?”

  “Siena Orolio, I will kill you,” Santino growls, ready to spring, but the woman I just met has decided to ruin my life, and nothing my husband says will change it.

  “She wore it?” I ask. My hands shake. I’m cold. Not just a chill, but extremity-numb with a heartbeat as shallow and fast as a bird’s, because I know the answer.

  “Yes.” The affirmation is gentle, as if she’s sorry she started down this path, but not because of Santino’s threats. She pities me.

  “Don’t you listen to her!”

  My husband’s demands are shouted down a tunnel that runs the length of the Atlantic Ocean, to home. I want to run down it, alone into the quiet dark, but I can’t. My brain’s occupied with what Rosetta was doing in Italy when she died, and how, when Santino came to Zio’s house that first time I saw him in the hallway, he’d come for Rosetta.

  I’d wondered why the king would accept the lesser sister who wasn’t as beautiful. I’d wondered why my father hadn’t sold the oldest daughter first, but I’d wondered the wrong thing.

  I should have wondered how I could fall in love with a liar who took what he got when he’d lost what he wanted.

  My feelings for him stink of pathetic gratitude.

  “Forzetta,” he says with his deep fucking voice as he touches my arm with his perfect fucking hand, and tries to show me how there’s an explanation for all of this with his gorgeous fucking face but he can just get the fuck off me.

  I know now what I refused to know then.

  I’m second.

  I love him and he can never love me.

  I’m a consolation prize.

  He loved Rosetta first.

  MAFIA KING

  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.