“We’re all speaking when it’s business.”

  “Of course. Gia’s life is just business.”

  “You broke the flowers, and you are mine. So I broke them. I cut off the deal, and now I have to stop Damiano from going back to his father and inciting a war over it.”

  “A war? Over this?” That doesn’t make any sense. A single arranged marriage shouldn’t be the difference between peace and war. “Does this have anything to do with what you told me last night? About the crown?”

  “It has everything to do with it.”

  At this point, I could say none of this is my fault because I didn’t know then what I know now. If he’d been more forthright, maybe I would have behaved differently. Maybe. But what’s the difference?

  “What’s going to happen to Gia?” I ask.

  “That’s up to her father.” He shrugs and leans back. “The man raised me. I know his way. He’ll punish whoever has the least power.”

  “How?” I whisper, as if the most powerless person—who’s in my bed with cucumbers over her eyes—might hear me.

  “By sending her home, where he’ll find someone else.”

  “Has he considered not gambling?”

  Santino ignores me, because to him and every other man in this town, Marco isn’t the problem as long as Gia’s the solution.

  “She’ll get used to being home again,” he says. “Don’t expect her to come back.”

  He lets those words fall heavy into my lap.

  Shit. Shit-shit-shit.

  “This is the way it is,” he continues. “You cannot change it. Even if I let you. You cannot.”

  I caused this. I destroyed those flowers because I was pissed off, because I was trying to change a system that nearly ruined me, and in the process, I may have ruined Gia.

  “I wasn’t… I didn’t know! I thought I was helping.”

  “I need you to promise me something,” he says with a cartoonishly fake layer of patience.

  “What?” I won’t agree to anything until I’ve thought about it, but I need to shut up to hear.

  “You need to stop trying to fix the world.”

  “I can’t—”

  “And.” He holds up his hand to stop me, so I clap my mouth shut until he finishes, because once he does, he’s getting a piece of my mind. “And I’m going to trust you. I’m going to trust your nose is out of everyone’s business, and you’re going to leave things alone and prove to me you won’t make another mess like this.”

  My arms are crossed so tightly, my forearms hurt. My jaw aches from clenching it shut. I have a twitch in my left eye that squeezes the sunlit corner of my vision, making Santino’s face go from dark to light and back again in a rhythm.

  I start to answer, but he presses his fingers to my lips. “Don’t. Don’t tell me my trust will be betrayed, because it won’t be. You will do the right thing. You. Will.”

  As soon as he removes them, he stands, and I look up at features obscured in shadow, blocking the light of the sun.

  “What about the war?” I ask.

  “If I can’t stop it, I know how to fight it. But it’ll happen fast.”

  “How fast?”

  “It may have started already, so…” He takes me by the chin. “I’m going to trust you.” He drops his hand. “Don’t surprise me.”

  He walks away, touching my shoulder as he goes, trusting me so much he doesn’t even look over his shoulder to make sure I won’t stab him in the back.

  17

  SANTINO

  My wife’s temper tantrum in my uncle’s front yard may get her exactly what she wants—an end to Damiano’s ‘mbasciata with Marco.

  Gia will be sent home and Violetta will miss her. Gia will live. My wife might not be so lucky.

  I’ve been playing a game of chicken with death my entire life. Staring it down in the face, telling it to play by my rules. It’s a game people lose by having something to tether them to life. No one rested in the rooms of my heart, so I feared nothing and no one.

  Violetta turned the tables, and even still… I love her more than I fear her.

  Santino DiLustro, you are a fucking sucker. A babbeo. You’ve sold your heart to this woman.

  I was destined to spend my days looking Death in the face, and I was always destined to love Violetta.

  When weighed against love, death is light as a feather.

  The Mercedes slides to a slow, comfortable stop outside the nightclub. Gennaro’s been here for a couple of hours already, making sure it’s safe. He opens my door and damp night air floods in.

  “Santino,” he says. “All good.”

  “Grazie.” I give him the keys to park it.

  A line of kids my wife’s age line up against the wall, faces changing color with the flashing neon sign above. !!Laser-Topia!! To prove the point, lines of laser lights dance around it. I find the crowds, the noise, and the lights vulgar, but the kids love it, it’s safe, and it’s more neutral than Mille Luci.

  I fix my cuffs, nod to the bouncer who removes the velvet rope, and walk inside with nothing more than a raised hand of recognition from the woman behind the plexiglass and another security guard.

  It’s not like the nightclub in Vasto where Emilio’s crew did his business after dark. Éternité was an old-world oasis in the middle of a city that seemed to be forgetting the past. Big bands, slicked-back hair, three-piece suits. Our way of life was preserved there. The tourists who found it thought it was quaint, and we let them believe it, because it gave us a cover for a business that was not quaint at all.

  “Santino.” A familiar voice comes from behind me as I’m about to enter the loudest part of the club. The woman it came from wears a dress that could be red or white—it’s hard to tell with the color of the lights—with a crossover at the neck that hides what it’s legally required to hide and no more.

  “Loretta.” I kiss her cheek, and she doesn’t encourage me to linger like she used to or look at me with an unspoken offer on her face. There was a time I would have pushed her through the first door I could find and fucked her like an animal behind it, but no more. I never had to tell her that was over when I married Violetta, and she never had to confirm.

  “Tommy’s waiting for you.” She’s the manager here. I got her the job as a way to keep her occupied when I wasn’t fucking her, and it turned into a passion. A woman needs something to do before she marries and has children.

  “Good.” I wait for her to take me to him, but she doesn’t.

  Her brows knit. I know this expression. It’s worry, but not the kind for the future consequences of today’s hardship. No. This is immediate concern that something will happen on today’s clock. “What’s going on, Santi?”

  She never got into my business and doesn’t expect a detailed answer. Not from me. I can’t speak for what Damiano tells her.

  “Cosa?” I ask.

  “Everyone’s carrying.”

  “So?” There’s nothing strange about that. The only thing strange is her worry that anyone’s going to shoot up the place.

  “Re Santino finally rolled his ass in here!” Tommy, the club’s owner and Loretta’s boss, interrupts in a white suit and black shirt. “They was going to start without you.”

  “No, they weren’t.” I smile and put a heavy hand on his shoulder. The man has irritated me for most of my adult life, but he knows where his bread is buttered, the customers love him, and he’s terrified of me, so I haven’t bought the club from under him.

  “Loretta,” Tommy says, “Mikey needs rolls of quarters. I’ll take care of the capo di capo here.”

  She nods to him, then once to me, and I read her like the newspaper. She’s telling me to be careful.

  I will be.

  Past the doors, the space stinks of sweat and alcohol. The air’s cut with the promised lasers, and the music isn’t more than a beat and a warble. At a back table, Damiano jabs a cigar between his teeth. A woman in a green dress leans over his shoulder and lights it. When she stands, I recognize her as his niece, Theresa Rubino, from Green Springs. The girl whose cunt stink was on Roman’s tongue before I replaced it with the taste of blood.

  She waves to me timidly and goes back to the bar with her friends.

  “Sit, sit.” Tommy indicates my chair. “You having the usual?”

  “Sure.”

  Two men stand in the corners with their hands folded above their dicks. Gennaro is one, but the other… I don’t know. Damiano’s guy apparently.

  He shouldn’t need protection here. Not from me.

  Damiano and I shake hands, and I sit.

  “You going to introduce me to your friend.”

  “Oh, sure.” He waves the man over, speaking Italian. “Lucio, this is Santino, the capo of this shithole town.”

  I shake the man’s hand and hold him long enough to look him in the face.

  “You’re from the other side,” I say in English.

  He just smiles.

  “I saw you peeking out of the closet when I was fucking your mother in the ass,” I add.

  Lucio keeps smiling, then glances at Damiano.

  “You’re a fucking dick,” Damiano says to me. I let the man’s hand go. “He’s one of my dad’s guys. On loan.”

  I have to reassess this entire situation. Cosimo sent a guy for his son, who he’s barely on speaking terms with. For what? To protect him? To spy on him? Both?

  Or to start planning the coming war?

  “Sit down, would you?” Damiano says to me, then switches to Italian for Lucio. “Back it up.”

  The man moves back to his dark corner. As a young woman offers me a cigar, and I refuse, Damiano leans back and makes a show of checking out her ass, and with a shake of his hand, declares it gorgeous.

  “How old are you?” I ask him.

  “Old enough to tap that.” He watches her leave as if he’s some kind of ravenous animal. I don’t know this cigar girl and I don’t care, but who is this guy trying to marry my cousin?

  “You’ll have more respect for Gia.”

  “That your way of getting to the point?”

  “I’m not interested in hanging around”—I indicate the club, the noise, the flashing lights—“this.”

  “You’re such an old man.” He rolls his cigar on the edge of the ashtray. “All right. So fine. Get to the point. The flowers.”

  Damiano leans back and crosses his arms, cigar between two fingers, with the face of a guy who’s been wronged and insulted over and over. He reminds me of a shark. If you don’t provoke a shark, they don’t bite. But if you do, and the shark thinks they can get away with it, you’ll bleed into the sea.

  “You think I want to talk about flowers?” I ask as if I don’t know what he means.

  “You got something to say to me, Santino? You think I’m not good enough to marry into your family? Just say it.”

  “So Lucio over here can go back to Cosimo and tell him?”

  “No, so I can send a fucking carrier pigeon. If I wanted my father to know, I’d pick up this thing here. It’s called a phone. What the fuck is going on with your wife? I thought she was mouthy, but knocking shit over?”

  I know when I’m being provoked, even slightly, and talking about my wife like this is incitement. He wants me to lose my temper so he has the upper hand… not tonight, but tomorrow and the next day, when he tells everyone I’m too weak to think before I act.

  “As far as you’re concerned, it was the wind,” I say. “And if you back out, you’ve insulted me, my uncle, and my cousin.”

  “My money’s where it belongs.” He jabs his finger against the table so hard the knuckle bends. “I already bought a ring. A new one.”

  He knows how my wedding went and that Violetta’s ring was Rosetta’s first. Another thing I regret.

  “So there’s a deal. Unless you want out. Do you want out, Dami? I could get in your way if you do, but I won’t.”

  For my wife’s sake, I hope he wants out. I’ll protect that decision from his own father and Gia’s. He taps his cigar, curls his mouth, looks around as if the answer’s written in lasers.

  “What’s your problem?” I ask.

  “Violetta was supposed to be mine.”

  The possibility of this doesn’t scare me. She was never his. She was born to be mine.

  “You were too slow, and Emilio meant for me to marry a daughter first. You were there.”

  “You shoulda come to me,” he says.

  “And if you had a problem, you should have brought it to Il Blocco.”

  “No one knows where the fuck Corragio is!” He slams his hand on the table, breaking his cigar. “I was going through the channels the right way, and you…” He flings the cigar pieces into the ashtray. “You just dropped in like a fucking ghost and took her.”

  “She’s mine. This is the end of it. She knocks down a vase of roses, kicks it, flings it into the sky, it’s my business.”

  “I could tell them,” he says in a low growl. “All of them. One word that she’s inheriting the crown and every gray-haired old capo and every soldier with four whiskers on his chin is coming for you.”

  “But you won’t.” I stand. This is over. “Not in front of your father.” I nod toward Lucio. “He’ll kill you for letting someone else in line before him.”

  Damiano’s up like a shot. “And he’ll kill you for what you did to me.”

  With his wide eyes and set shoulders, I can tell Damiano wants to hit me, and I wish I could let him try, but our business isn’t done.

  “He may end my life,” I say. “But we both know he won’t lift his little finger for your sake.”

  Before he can utter another threat, I leave. It’s the greatest favor I’ve ever done for him.

  My wife waits for me in the bedroom like a child on Christmas morning, kneeling in the middle of our bed, nipples hardened to dark points in the white silk nightgown.

  “Where’s Gia?” I ask, taking off my jacket.

  “Her mother called. She went home.”

  “Bene.”

  “They said you met with Damiano.”

  “Did they?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He will let go of your insult.”

  Her mouth drops and her eyes open wide, but she collects herself a second later. “So what’s our next move?”

  Our. Violetta wants us to be a team now. Wants to play the game now. Wants to enter into my world.

  “There is no next move. That isn’t our business.” I take off my shirt and fold it neatly over the desk chair. “Our business is on that bed.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Zitta,” I hush her. “There’s nothing in it for him anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Can she sense the half-truth? Is she nosing around what I’m leaving out? Or does she just want enough assurance that she can relax now?

  “It means pull up your nightgown and show me where to leave my come next.”

  Her throat ripples when she swallows, and she grabs a handful of nightgown and stops. “Are you sure about Damiano?”

  If I tell her that—from what I can see—there’s nothing in the marriage for him, she’ll ask if that means the wedding is off or not. When I say I don’t know yet, she’ll push harder and something will break.

  “I am sure.” I unbuckle my belt and snap it from the loops. “I told you to show me your body.”

  Satisfied, she pulls her nightgown up to her neck and displays her gorgeous tits, her belly, her cunt. All I can do is stare and pull the gown over her head.

  I slap the pillow. “Put your head here.”

  She obeys as the last of my clothes drop to the floor, and I jerk her legs up and apart, exposing her soft pink invitation and the tighter promise below.

  She puts her hands between her legs. “What should be your reward for ending Gia’s wedding?”

  She’s being coy and cute, but I don’t like it.

  “No,” I say sternly and get off the bed. “This game… you do not play.”

  “What game?”

  “You don’t open your legs as a reward.” I get my belt from the floor and use it to tie her wrists to the headboard. “You open them because you want to.” Pushing her legs back open again, I position myself between them and slide myself along her cunt. “You still want me to fuck you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Voglio che mi scopi…” She deliberates every word of the request to fuck her, then stops, thinks, and adds a word. “Difficile?”

  “Do you mean ‘hard,’ Forzetta?” I can’t wait for confirmation, but push inside so hard she cries out. “You say it like this. Scopami.” I lick my thumb and press it to her clit. Her eyes flutter closed as I make circles.

  “Scopa—” she elongates an aah of pleasure.

  “Scopami. Di. Brutto. Say it.”

  I thrust for each word and toy with her endlessly. As soon as I see her getting close, I demand she speak again.

  “Yes,” she replies breathlessly.

  I can go all night, watching her will drain away into desperate submission. I press harder against her nub. “What do you want?”

  “To come.”

  “Italiano,” I demand. “Say it perfectly.”

  I want her to fuck it up as much as I want her to get it right.

  “Scopami di brutto, mio Re.”

  “Good girl,” I say, and I mean it. She is good. Better than good. “You will now have the longest orgasm ever had by anyone.”

  Deep as I can go inside her, I circle her clit harder and faster, until the dark world locked within her bursts open. She is silent and explosive all at once. Full and glorious. When her body slowly folds in on itself and expands again, I know she’s at the height of her pleasure, and I release into her, erasing every doubt I’ve ever had about this woman.

  As I roll off her, I let myself believe the problem is solved. She’ll be how she’s supposed to be. She’ll do what’s expected of her and no more, and at the same time, I’m aware this is a lie. I have not taken her completely. I will never quiet her doubts. And I fear she will never fully turn into a wife.