“Gia!” Santino greets his cousin. “Come stai?”

  “Va bene assai!” Gia kisses his cheeks and hugs me. “I’ve been dying to see you ever since you got back!” Her English has already improved from when we met. “You have to tell me everything. Everything!”

  Gia gives me a knowing wink and my stomach takes a nose dive. Up until our last thirty minutes in the beach house, I would have joyfully turned our trip to Italy into savory gossip. The house, the food, the wine, the sex. All crushed with a few words from Siena Orolio. Now I’d be gossip of a different sort.

  “Come!” Gia grabs my hand and tucks it around her arm. “You’ll be so much more comfortable in the kitchen than out here with the horrible men.”

  I let her lead me deeper into the house. It’s smaller than Santino’s, but most are, and decorated with the same level of stuffy tradition. Ornate furniture, knickknacks, still life oil paintings. Lots of gold paint. But the farther in Gia drags me, the more the whole scene shifts. A room off to the side, the door ajar, looking refreshingly modern. Sleek white couches square off with a massive bean bag chair. In one side room, a TV the size of the pickup truck sits on a wall with every recognizable gaming console below it. Instead of heavenly miracles in oil and canvas, there are movie posters with busty women.

  “Oops!” Gia dances around me to snap the door shut. “Tavie’s room is such a mess.”

  With me on her arm, Gia sashays toward the upstairs kitchen, which is populated with women’s voices.

  “Violetta!” Paola catches us before we go in. “Gia, go.” She shoos her daughter into the kitchen, then when she’s out of earshot, Paola’s shoulders drop and she holds out her hands. “I am so sorry. What happened with Siena, it was… I didn’t expect it. I would never have brought her if I knew.”

  “Knew that I didn’t know?”

  She nods slowly, then gradually, the movement turns into the shake of a no. “I wouldn’t have brought her if I knew she would say things like that.”

  So she was aware of my ignorance that day, and she’s admitting it now.

  “Thank you for being honest,” I say.

  “If this makes you feel any better, Santino looks happier than I’ve ever seen him.” She puts her hand on her chest and taps her gold cross. “I swear it’s the truth.”

  “I believe you,” I say, but don’t mention the rest—that I wish he wasn’t happy.

  “You’re wearing it.” She taps the brooch with the Furies. “It suits you.”

  “Is this Santino’s new bride?” A woman’s voice comes from the other side of the archway leading to the kitchen. She’s in head-to-toe beige that matches her hair dye. “Guglielmo’s niece?”

  “Anette,” Paola says. “This is my husband’s sister. The woman of the house.”

  In a moment, I’m pulled in with the women. They smile and greet me. I recognize many of their faces from church and the pork store. From funerals and weddings. They’re the adults in my world, and only now have I graduated to live among them.

  “You look so tan!” Francine says. I scour the dark corners of my brain and remember her waiting outside St. Barnabas to walk her son, Aldo, home from school. “I hear you just got back from Amalfi!”

  “I did.”

  “How was it?” a young woman with meticulously ironed hair asks dreamily. A quick glance at her finger tells me she’s engaged. Her face is bright, open, expecting. Friendly.

  An old woman shelling peas breaks in with a thick accent. “It was her honeymoon. How do you think, Lucia?”

  Lucia blushes and turns her attention back to cutting slices of bread.

  “It was great.” I’d probably get more piqued interest if I said it was terrible, but a generic reaction is the correct prize for my generic words.

  “She married Santino DiLustro,” a woman says, and by the M shape of her hairline, I can see she’s the engaged girl’s mother. “You’ll be lucky to go to a Motel Six on what Lorenzo brings home.”

  Lucia sticks out her tongue and everyone laughs.

  They think my marriage is perfect. They think I’m lucky.

  What can I say? I was kidnapped and forced to marry? I didn’t get to choose my bouquet or dress?

  They either know already or they don’t, and if they know and don’t mention it, I shouldn’t.

  Across the kitchen, a little girl no more than six drops a heavy can of olive oil. Everything comes to a screeching halt. We all run to help mop it up, which saves me from having to defend my sham wedding.

  “It’s all right, sweet.” A gentle nonna kneels beside the girl, limbs creaking, and wipes away her tears. “It’s too many acts in a comedy in here.”

  I smile.

  “Do you speak?” Lucia asks, suddenly at my elbow.

  I jump from surprise. “Sorry, what?”

  “Italian.”

  “Forgot after years of disuse.” I shake my head with a guilty smile. “You know how it goes.”

  She points toward the little girl. “You laughed at Fare troppi atti nella in commedia.”

  Right. I’m not supposed to understand that. “I was thinking of something else.”

  “I bet you were.” Lucia’s mother winks at me.

  Standing in that kitchen, the fullness in my heart pushes it into complicated shapes. This is not my family, yet this is my family. I don’t know these women, yet they’re my people.

  Once the floor is cleaned, I pick up a job seeding peppers.

  “I can’t believe Re Santino’s cock will stay tamed,” someone murmurs in Italian loudly enough for me to hear it.

  I’m sure they don’t intend for me to understand, so I keep my eyes down. Everything runs very still. Slowly, I turn to see who spoke and find Lucia’s mother with her head lowered, talking to another woman with dyed black hair who’s trying not to laugh.

  “Santino is a whoremaker,” Black Dye replies, looking at me as she fills a pot with water. I pretend to smile and go back to the peppers. “That poor girl. Does she know everyone else knows?”

  I work to keep my face even and nonplussed, but inside, everything feels as if it’s dying.

  They think I’m a whore? Of course they do. Elettra got shaken into butter and told in no uncertain terms that an attraction to a whoremaker turns a girl into a whore.

  My face is hot, my heart races, and I need to get out of the kitchen before everything inside my rib cage explodes. I don’t know if I need to cry or scream, but whatever I do, I won’t do it in this kitchen.

  “I-I’ll be right back,” I say to no one and walk numbly in search of a bathroom where I can get behind a closed door.

  The house is tight with people. By the time I find a bathroom, my brain is churning mush and all I want to do is vomit.

  Everyone knows. Everyone knows. Everyone knows.

  Lucia didn’t want to know about my wedding; she wanted it confirmed I was stolen and forced. Everyone knows, and I’m definitely going to vomit.

  The bathroom door flies open, and I almost fall into the guy leaving it. I jump back and find myself staring up at the scarred mouth of Damiano Orolio. He carries himself like a typical Secondo Vasto gangster. He doesn’t look like the kind of guy Santino would have around. Too brazen, too cocky, too built like a locomotive.

  He looks me up and down in a way no man has dared since I stepped foot into the world as Santino DiLustro’s wife.

  “Excuse me,” I finally manage.

  He pushes past me with a look of supreme entitlement. I slip inside the bathroom, lock the door, and slide to the floor with my back to the cabinets, trying to still the internal churn.

  I am a queen.

  I am a queen.

  What do queens do when they’ve encased themselves in a stony majesty and still get stabbed in the back?

  I kneel at the porcelain altar to hurl, but I do it like royalty.

  “Ciao, Damiano!” A man on the other side of the door sounds as though he’s hit the wine hard and it’s hitting him back. “I’m fuckin’ starving.”

  “You drink too much.” It must be Damiano who answers.

  The rest is muddled in murmurs. They’ve moved down the hall. Since my stomach seems to have settled on its own, I put my ear up to the door.

  “… parades her in here like some damn race horse…”

  “… looks just like the…”

  “… those the rings?”

  My breath dies in my throat as I look at my hand. The rings. Rosetta’s diamond.

  “… engravers…”

  “… Theresa says…”

  “… she Enzo Rubino’s …?”

  Their voices fade into the white noise of the house, and they’re gone. I drink a paper cup of water. Santino’s fascination with my rings and under what circumstances I am allowed to take them off may be more intense than I think is reasonable. But he’s my husband, and he’s from the other side. He’s possessive.

  But how many random guys ever talk about a woman’s wedding rings?

  None of them, that’s the answer. No Italian mafioso is going to gossip about diamonds unless he’s fencing them.

  Maybe it’s because they know I’m wearing a dead girl’s promises.

  I pull the nesting wedding and engagement rings off and look inside, where an engraver would leave a mark. It’s just a serial number or something. Fuck this. I put them back on, cursing.

  Fuck Santino for putting me in this position. I head for the front door and blessed fresh air, but I knock into Gia and almost send the bread she’s carrying to the floor.

  “I’m sorry!” I manage to catch a loaf before it falls.

  “Can you set these out?” She’s obviously totally overwhelmed. “I’m supposed to get the wine, but the glasses are all wrong, so I have to fix them before—”

  “I have it.” I take the bread. “Shoo.”

  “You’re a lifesaver.”

  She’s off to fix the glasses. I set the bread on the long table. On the other side of the room is a hallway. I hear men’s voices rising and falling in a way that suggests formality, like something serious is taking place.

  Nothing’s more serious than how much I want to go home, and the only way out is with Santino. I follow the voices down the hall, betting he’s there. I’ll claim I’m not feeling well. Between what I overheard in the kitchen and the stench of cigar smoke coming from the room to the right, I can vomit on request.

  “Violetta’s a special case.” I freeze when I hear my name in Santino’s voice, and I flatten myself against the wall. “The ‘mbasciata was blessed by her father.”

  I know that word. ‘Mbasciata is an arranged marriage.

  There’s a window opposite the arched opening, revealing the room in the reflection. Santino sits with three men—Marco, Damiano, and Angelo. All are smoking cigars and drinking iced, amber liquid. Other men stand in the corners, present but not participating, their movements dictated by hierarchy and choreographed by generations of tradition. I try to catch Santino’s eye in the reflection, and as if he can hear my needs, he sees me, but motions, quite clearly, that I am to leave.

  I’m about to give him merry hell in front of all of his merry fucking friends, who all clearly know about my sister so intimately they can recognize the goddamn rings on my fingers, when I hear Gia’s name tucked in a blanket of Italian.

  I can’t explain it, but something is harrowingly, hauntingly familiar about what’s going on. It’s like déjà vu, or the way you remember a dream, or a memory—not of something the eyes witnessed, but an event described and constructed in the mind, which the mind filed as if it actually happened. The way they all stand. The solemnity of their voices with an undercurrent of excitement, almost.

  A transaction is taking place, and though I never saw such a thing, I recognize it.

  My stomach bottoms out and I do the only thing I can think to do—eavesdrop, breathing in baby spurts and praying none of the women feel the need to personally call the men for dinner.

  “I was there,” Damiano says. “You cut out a step. Twice.”

  “This is a problem for you?” Santino’s tone is a dare to the scarred man I met outside the bathroom.

  “No. But I never heard of a capo refusing if the father agreed.”

  “And the father agrees.” Marco tips his glass toward Damiano.

  Wait. Marco is the father? That makes his daughter the bride.

  Gia.

  Holy shit. They’re selling Gia.

  I clench my fists. The palms are already wet.

  “But did you consult me about this deal?” Santino asks Marco. “No. Did you ask me to find a good match on this side? No. Did you ask me about Damiano? What kind of man he is? No. You did not. Anyone else in the four corners of my territory offering a bride in payment without coming to me first would wake up spitting their lungs. But you think you can get away with it because you’re my uncle?”

  “You’re denying him?” Damiano asks.

  “Have I refused you, Dami?” Santino’s gone from threatening to patronizing in under a minute. “Have I even asked you why you’re paying this debt from under your father’s nose? Eh?”

  “No.”

  “No.” Santino gets up and walks around the room, pacing the circumference of the table as the men wait. He stands in the archway, facing the window.

  Our eyes meet in the reflection. He rubs his chin then flicks his hand again, shooing me away.

  I hold up my middle finger.

  He turns to face the table. “I did not refuse my blessing, but you forget why the blessing is necessary in the first place. It’s my job to ask questions.”

  “She’s not with child,” Marco assures them. “She’s pure. Clean. Nothing.”

  “She works for me,” Santino says. “I’m better aware than you of what she’s doing all day. I question why you”—he looks at Damiano—“don’t want to tell her.”

  “He doesn’t want to get her hopes up,” Marco says.

  Santino doesn’t move his attention from Damiano. “I didn’t ask you, uncle.”

  Marco jabs his cigar in his mouth. I’m surprised by how little power Gia’s father seems to have at this table.

  “Maybe I’m turning American,” Damiano says. “I want to get to know her a little first.”

  “You don’t trust she’s what her father says?”

  “Sure, I do. But I don’t want to end up with a mouthy fishwife.” He looks Santino up and down, and though the reflection isn’t sharp enough to reveal every detail, I can tell it’s a bold, insolent stare. “It happens to the best of us.”

  Santino’s pause weighs four tons. It’s a knife cutting through time, splitting it and filling it with dark unknowns no one is willing to uncover with an interruption. I don’t know how he does it, but I hold my breath until he speaks.

  “Did you want to say something about my wife?” he says.

  “Please…” Marco squeaks, wringing his hands.

  “No?” Santino says. “Yes? Say it plain, for Gia’s sake… so I can cut your dick off before the deal is done.”

  “Do it!” a younger voice chimes in. Brash. Angry. One of the men standing in the shadows comes forward—Gia’s brother, Tavie. My God, he’s watching these talks? He’s hardly a damn man.

  “Mi dispiace,” Damiano apologizes, stroking his hair back so everyone can see he’s not dismissing his own apology with horned fingers.

  “And your bride’s father,” Santino says.

  “Forgive me, Mister Polito. I am sure Gia was raised correctly.”

  Marco hmphs with a nod, as if the half-hearted apology is powerful enough to erase an offense to his daughter.

  Oh, my sweet Gia is trapped from all sides.

  “My wife’s name won’t cross your lips again,” my husband says.

  “Of course.” Damiano turns to exhale a cone of cigar smoke. I see his full face in the reflection. He looks past me as if I don’t even exist, straightens his hair, and turns back to the room.

  “Do you bless the ‘mbasciata?” Marco asks.

  Santino is the only thing standing between Gia and the horror I went through.

  He doesn’t answer right away. For the first time in what feels like an aching eternity, I don’t despise my husband. Then he speaks.

  “Here are the terms. Damiano Orolio. You have one night, chaperoned, to decide if she’s a match for you. You decide yes, you wire the money to Cosimo. Marco…” Santino turns toward his uncle. “You tell Gia as soon as the debt is clear, and you tell her why.”

  “But, Santi…” Marco objects.

  “You look your shame in the face, Marco Polito, and you tell her.” Santino turns back to Damiano. “If you decide no, the deal is off.” He steps close to Dami and mutters, “Don’t talk to me about a repayment schedule like the first one you came to me with. Understand?”

  “Yeah.” Damiano looks away, as if regretful, but in the window, he glows with vengeance. “But looks like we’re gonna be family anyway.”

  Santino takes a deep breath. Holds it. Clenches and unclenches his fists.

  “Finish drawing the papers,” Santino says. “This ‘mbasciata has my blessing. My cousin gets hurt”—he points at Damiano, then Marco—“I’ll skin both of you like rabbits.”

  I slide my back to the wall and close my eyes. All of them are animals, Santino included. Well, fuck him and fuck that. I’ll just walk home. Maybe I’ll take Gia with me and we can run away together.

  I slink down the hall and around the corner before daring a look back. Damiano’s the first out of the room, and I see him full in the face.

  He’s hulking—as tall as Santino and as wide as the doorframe. A deadness slicks his huge, brown eyes, and when they land on me, I remember that he doesn’t like me. I’m a fishwife. A harridan. A threat.

  In the marrow of my bones, I am afraid.

  Then Santino’s voice rises from the walls, the windows, the mighty air of America itself.

  “Coniglio!”

  Damiano freezes when Santino calls him a rabbit, but though Damiano’s still for a moment, he does not turn around. His dead eyes are on me as the man who rules us both lays down the law.

  “Caveat emptor. You better be sure you like what you’ve bought before you bring it home. I’ve blessed the marriage, but not your life.”