“Stay down,” I command, then throw her down because there’s another gunshot, and I don’t have a moment to wait for her to get out of the way of whatever’s coming.

  Following the edges of the room, I go to the front of the house. From the bottom of the window, I see a trail of smoke, but no Tavie. Aiming above where he could be standing, I shoot the window. I lean out the jamb to find a car speeding away and Tavie lying on the ground with a lit cigarette still between two fingers.

  “Fuck!” I climb out and crouch by him.

  His eyes are open, and his breaths come in short hic-hic sounds. Calling his name will do nothing, but I do it anyway because he’s focused on me, yet looking past me. The front door opens, and light streams over the hole in his chest.

  “Puh-puh.” A bubble of blood forms between his lips and stays there because he can’t get out another syllable. He’s trying though. Damn this kid, he’s trying. He’s living with a weight on his heart, and in a few seconds, he’ll die with that weight unlifted.

  “Don’t worry, Tavie.”

  “Dun-duh.” The bubble pops.

  “I won’t. I won’t do it. I’ll figure something out. Do you hear?”

  “Aa.”

  I don’t know what that sound means, but it is the last one Octavio Polito will ever make. The cigarette drops from his fingers.

  Loretta comes out and stands over us.

  “Are there more?” I ask, closing my cousin’s eyes.

  “Just the three.” She steps on the smoldering butt. “It’s starting, isn’t it? The war for the crown?”

  “Yes.” I take out my handkerchief. Emilio tried to protect his daughters from this exact war, but he only delayed it and moved it over an ocean. I cover Tavie’s face. “Riposi in pace.”

  I light up a cigarette. I have the feeling I’m going to need to buy a pallet of cartons before this is over.

  “How did they know I was coming?”

  “They didn’t,” she says. “They’re everywhere. Like roaches. Waiting where they think you’ll show up.”

  They’ll be at Mille Luce. And my own damn house. And Anette and Angelo’s. And it’s confirmation that they’ve set themselves up with Violetta’s aunt and uncle.

  “Pack a bag.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  “You bought this house to keep me,” she says. “You’ve told me where to go and where to work. You brought death to my door. Maybe I want to make my own decision.”

  Fuck this crazy fucking woman for not moving.

  “Please. For the sake of every libretto writer in the world. Basta.” My shout echoes off the side of the mountain, but she does not move. “My wife needs you.”

  Done hesitating, she goes for her fucking bag.

  10

  VIOLETTA

  The bleeding tapers off. The pain subsides. I curl into the hot water bottle and sleep for twenty-five hours, only getting up twice for the bathroom like a zombie.

  The spark inside me was snuffed, along with the hope that Santino and I could ever melt into the world’s background and just be together with this child.

  Tears don’t come when I try to cry it out. Instead, my stomach growls like an angry cat. I need to eat. Opening the closet out of sheer curiosity and optimism, I find my clothes have been moved here. The dresser drawers are full of my things. It’s as if my life’s been transported whole cloth from Santino’s house to my newly claimed family fortress in the mountains.

  I shower, line my underpants, and—because I can’t bear the thought of being constricted or even seen—I put on a black tank top and loose pants.

  My left eyelid is brushed with a web of broken purple veins and hangs lower than the right. Matching semicircles hover inside a sickly yellow corona.

  The wound reminds me of what I’ve gone through. Santino is alive, but the rest of it really happened. I was kidnapped, drugged, treated like an object with temporary value, and only saved by a miracle. The life seeded in me wasn’t so lucky. I’ll never know for sure if it was the drugs or the stress or if I would have lost it anyway, but what does it matter?

  They were careless and disrespectful with my family and me.

  That one broken eye squints to see something it can’t when all the light gets in. A shadow behind me and before me. A darkness that’s not anger with Damiano and Gia. I do not feel a fiery rage at the thought of them taking everything from me for the sake of an ancient artifact. What I feel is stretched—as if some internal organ has expanded and hardened, or an intangible that I carried inside me has found its shape. It’s a feeling given form, and it’s the colors of the bruise—purple and yellow—mixed to mud, fired to solid ice, and left to harden in the cracks of my heart.

  When Santino saw me in my Z’s hallway, I was a child. He saw something I thought was the woman inside me. It wasn’t. He saw this calcifying mass of darkness in its shadow form. It fills in my broken places, holding me together, making a shell over the grief and despair.

  Now I can say to my reflection what I’ve been too sick and afraid to think.

  “They’re all going to die for this.”

  Celia smells like basil and rosemary, and it’s comforting that no matter how much I change, some things in the world stay the same. In the middle of our embrace, my stomach logs another complaint.

  “Let me get you something,” she says.

  “Just toast, if you can. Where is he?” I ask, sitting in the little kitchen nook.

  I don’t have to say his name. The pronoun is enough. I need to know how he’s planning to kill the people who destroyed my pregnancy. Even if they didn’t mean it and I miscarried from stress or the opioids. Even if what they almost got away with had nothing to do with the actual bleeding, it’s their fault. I want a list of the plans, the timing, and the amount of pain he will inflict. I want veto power on anything too merciful.

  “Around.” Celia sets about making the toast on a cast-iron skillet—old school—while I wonder where exactly “around” is in this compound. “It’s been a little hectic around here.” She touches a corner of bread and snaps her arm back, shaking her hand from the heat. “Men coming and going. And one woman.”

  She picks up a butter knife and waves it toward the back doors, where rows of tables are being set up. A woman in a green dress unfolds chairs.

  Loretta.

  “What is she doing here?”

  “There are fifty men here.” Celia shrugs and slides the toast onto a plate. “I can’t do everything myself.”

  Santino brought Loretta to help? I don’t know what to make of his choices. I find it hard to believe she doesn’t still desire him the way any normal woman would. If he thinks he’s going to live in some backward paradise where the husband keeps a wife and a mistress under the same house, he has something coming.

  Loretta slides open the door and enters the kitchen, seeing me right away. “You’re up!”

  When she double kisses me, I stay stiff and unresponsive.

  “Ah, your eye,” she says with concern.

  “You should have seen it when they brought her,” Celia interjects.

  “You put ice?”

  “Yes,” I say coldly. “It’s fine.”

  “I heard what happened,” she says with a glance at my belly. “I’m so sorry.”

  She can go fling herself off the side of this goddamn mountain. She’s lying. She’s glad. I can see her face clearly…and I’m wrong.

  She’s not a liar. I’m lying to myself.

  She doesn’t look disingenuous at all. She’s a woman giving sincere condolences, and I’m a child looking for trouble.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “You’ll try again. You go to the doctor. Get cleaned up. All done.”

  “You have experience.” I hear myself getting sour again, suspecting she lost Santino’s child. It’s too intimate with him. Too much like stealing something from me. My insides are tearing themselves into pieces.

  “I was engaged to Elio Sala,” she says, relieving me of images and ideas I cannot bear to hold. “Santino’s cousin. And since I was older, no one expected there to be blood on the wedding sheets.” She shrugs. “Anyway. Our baby didn’t make it, and neither did he.”

  “Is that the Elio who…?” Celia stops herself and redirects. “From the baseball field?”

  My memory is triggered but still vague. A little boy and his father were early for Little League pitching tryouts and were warming up his arm. When he kicked away the dirt behind the rubber, he came in contact with Elio’s buried head.

  Loretta sighs, and that’s the answer. Same guy.

  “Elio was a mechanic. Santino said he was the best he ever had. Elio could marry a Toyota to a Honda and make it look like a Cadillac. I thought, what will the babies look like when he marries me?” Loretta pauses while Celia chuckles. “I found out I was pregnant, and he said, ‘Let’s get married tomorrow.’ So I bought a white dress on Flora, went home, and waited. He was working late, and I didn’t find out until the next day. Saturday. When the boy… You know what happened.” She takes a deep breath, knitting her brow and shaking her head. “Carlo Tabona wanted him to work in their chop shop. Offered everything. He refused, but he thought even being asked was disloyal. So he didn’t tell Santino or anyone. He left himself with no protection.”

  Her voice cracks. She doesn’t have to say she loved him. It’s obvious his death left a hole in her life my husband never filled.

  Celia puts her hand on Loretta’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” I say, hand on her opposite arm.

  “Well,” she says. “The Tabona family was smaller after that. The king ran through them like a disease.”

  It will be hard to trust anyone after Gia’s betrayal, but Loretta may deserve the benefit of the doubt.

  Zia used to say, Dagli amici mi guardi Iddio, che dai nemici mi guardo io.

  God protects me from my friends, I protect myself from my enemies.

  There’s no instruction on how to discern between the two. That’s up to me. If I’m going to stand beside a king, I have to keep his entire domain in view.

  With that thought, I feel him near and turn toward the back lawn. He’s standing in the morning breeze, talking to a man who is slightly taller, with the same regal bearing. He’s not Santino, the ruler of my heart, but—just in bearing alone—he’s closer to an equal than anyone I’ve seen in my husband’s presence.

  Santino sees me watching him through the glass, finishes his conversation, and walks toward me. I drift away from Loretta and Celia to open the door.

  “My violet,” he says, leaning in for a kiss.

  The way his lips touch my ear, then the side of my neck right now is something I won’t let another woman have as long as I live.

  My feelings are intensely private, but there are people everywhere. I feel as if we’re in the middle of a piazza. The source of my irritation is back in the house. So I pull him away from the main house to a quiet spot between two buildings on the opposite side of the lawn.

  “We have no time to fuck,” he says. “And we probably shouldn’t, so soon after…” Mr. Tough Guy’s unable to say the word miscarriage. God, I fucking love this caveman.

  “I don’t…” I pause, because when I lay my hands on his chest and feel the muscles there, every neuron in my brain reroutes the current to feeling how hard and substantial he is. “I just… I want you to know that I’m not some jealous little girl. You’re mine. Always. If you ever even thought about another woman…”

  “Why would I?” He takes my wrists and keeps my hands close to his heart.

  “You’d spontaneously combust. Poof. Go up in flames.”

  He raises an eyebrow and fails at taming a smirk. Let him laugh. I have things to say.

  “Don’t make me explain the science of it,” I continue. “It’s got to do with the friction created when you rub your dick against the natural order of things. Okay? So I’m not worried about Loretta, per se.”

  “If you want her to go,” he whispers close, “I’ll send her away. I want you to be happy.”

  My husband’s face is soft for me, but I see the hardness of a man who has had to make difficult decisions, and the regal indifference he will exhibit when he sends Loretta away.

  “No,” I say. “It’s fine. She’s all right. But there’s history, and I don’t want it to come up in conversation. I don’t want to hear about how much you liked tasting fica or how rough you were or any shit like that, because I won’t take it out on her. I’ll take it out on you.”

  For a moment, I worry that I’ve overstepped into a serious threat, but he smiles.

  “You make me weak. I’m standing here, ready to promise my woman anything and everything to not take her jealousy out on me. Without a single detail from your lips, I find myself afraid you’ll take your love away. Who would I be then, my violet? Without you loving me, who am I?”

  Before I can explain that’s not what I had in mind, he spins me around and—gently but firmly—pushes my back against the wall with my hands over my head. My body is stretched before him, and like an animal, he runs his nose along the edge of my jaw to inhale my scent.

  “So I need to know,” he continues. “how will you abuse me if you’re unhappy, my violet?”

  “I’ll come into bed naked and suck your dick.”

  “This is not much of a punishment.”

  “I’m not done.”

  He kisses me over and over and says, “Go ahead then.”

  “I’ll take it, but I won’t swallow. So when I kiss you, I can wash your filthy mouth out with your own cum.”

  He keeps his grip on me when he laughs, but lets go when he kisses me, still smiling as he wraps his arms around me so tightly I’m lifted from the ground.

  “Violetta,” he says into my shoulder, rocking me back and forth as he repeats my name. “I didn’t imagine a woman like you existed.” He pulls away, brushing my hair from my face with tender urgency. “You won’t ever hear a word about the past. I will treat your heart with care… as if it’s fragile, when it’s not. And I’ll love it as if it’s my own, because it is.”

  We kiss again, and the world falls away. We are a normal couple worrying about normal things, a mortgage, a birthday party, who’s doing the dishes tonight. It’s as if there’s no crown, no war… nothing but us.

  “Come,” Santino says after a one minute eternity has passed. “Let’s get you to the doctor.”

  11

  SANTINO

  I park the Alfa Romeo near a field with rows of white tents and signs pointing students toward the first letter of their last name. Registration day at the university. If her life had gone to plan, Violetta would be here with a list of classes, but she stopped asking about it, so I stopped promising it.

  She’d be pregnant, but that stopped too.

  Everything stops for this war.

  In the waiting room of the student clinic, a girl with a nose ring and her mother try not to stare at me with loathing, but can’t help themselves. They know I end what other people begin.

  “I don’t think they like me,” I murmur to Violetta.

  She picks up a magazine, flips through it, and holds it up to hide our faces. “They think you gave me the black eye.”

  “Cosa?” I ask her what, but I am not as surprised as offended. I need to explain to every one of them that I do not, will not, cannot ever harm this woman.

  “Violetta?” a nurse calls from the desk.

  My wife stands. I stand with her.

  “You can go ahead and sit down, sir,” she says with a smile so fake it looks painted on. If this woman had been born on the other side of the river, she’d be one of those wives knocking around her husband’s business, exacting revenge for petty slights against her children. I remember why I don’t like crossing the bridge at all.

  In Secondo Vasto, I am king.

  Around here, I’m a diseased fruit on a healthy tree.

  “Where is she going?”

  “We’ll have her back in a jiff.” She winks at me, acknowledging that she knows who I am and what I’ve done.

  My skin gets hot. Blood flows to the bruise in my chest, making the pain pound with the hammer of my heart.

  She doesn’t know the half of it.

  They’re separating us to ask questions about me. About us. About the bruise on her face and the blood afterward. How dare she try to separate us so they can convince my Violetta that I’m her enemy. How dare they pretend to understand what my wife’s been through or put her in the position to have to relive it by explaining. This clinic is owed nothing but the number on the bottom of the bill. They are not owed her story.

  “Santino,” Violetta says, putting her hand over mine. “On the way in, I saw a vending machine with fruit in it. I’m kind of hungry.”

  She’s giving me a way out of the office that won’t injure my ego.

  This is meant to soothe me, but leaving her alone in that room has nothing to do with my manhood. I don’t need to save face. My Forzetta needs me, and if I leave, I can’t be here for her.

  “I have it,” Violetta adds. “Trust me.”

  I trust her. She does have it. This is her world. She doesn’t need protection here any more than I need to be treated like a plate tipping over the edge of a shelf.

  “Bene.” I pick up her hand and kiss it. “I’ll be outside when you’re ready.”

  “Then we go get what’s ours.”

  I nod quickly to the nurse and leave before I tell her what I think of her suspicions.

  The vending machines stand sentry on either side of the elevators. Anette has a bowl of waxed fruit in the dining room that looks exactly like what’s in the machine. The apples and oranges are perfect, brightly-colored, huge. The one banana left is more green than yellow because Americans would rather eat an unripe fruit than see a single brown spot.