“I have no ill will toward you.”
“Yeah. Sure. I know. It’s fine. But see, I gotta tell you. Man to man.” He puts his elbows on the table and clears his throat. “I miss it. Being inside, you know? With a… kinda… family, I guess. Not as payment so much, but so just saying… in good faith, I can get some of that back. Here. Me and you.”
“You want to work with me?”
“Yeah.” He shrugs a little as if he wasn’t ready to answer a direct question but might as well, since I asked. “And maybe I can climb the ladder, then… some time… we can be like it used to be, on the other side. On a personal level. You’re in charge and I can be… once I prove myself… like a right-hand guy.”
Back home, Damiano and I were partners and equals. That’s what he wants, and if I were the same man as I was then, I’d give it to him. I’d embrace the past and make it the future. But right now, I don’t trust him on either side of the ocean.
“If I say no?”
He throws himself back in his chair, arms out, palms up, as if my answer renders him innocent of any consequences. “Like you said. Marco’s got holes in his pockets. He’s a bad investment.”
“He is.”
“So that’s a no?”
“I’ll bless you cashing him out. Not the repayment schedule.”
“Bene.” He nods with a rueful press of his lips—like a parent who didn’t want to have to punish his child but now has no choice.
“Is there a problem, Dami?” I stand.
“No, no.”
“You sure?”
“I was just remembering that day.” He backs toward the door. “In the hospital with Emilio. Just us and that fucking consigliere. Nazario Coraggio. When he gave you Rosetta, and he gave me—”
“What about it?”
“Who knows why he did it, besides us?”
“And Franco Tabona?”
“He knew shit.” He shakes his head and tsks. “I never told him. I never told anyone. Tabona went after your wife to get to you. Man, if he knew? Shit. It woulda changed the math real quick. But it was fun watching you wipe them out.”
I should have killed Damiano the first time he implied my wife was a target, but he’s still Cosimo Orolio’s son, and I rule a small, peaceful corner of the world. Cosimo would have sent a hundred men from Naples. The resulting war would have raged for a day—maybe two—before he crushed us.
When Emilio died, I was nineteen and officially, I was no more important than a loyal soldier. Cosimo filled the vacuum without shedding a drop of blood, but he couldn’t maintain the scope of Emilio’s territory, because no one believed he could. Within six months, his boundaries were as tight as a fist, but about as small—without America, and I was sidelined within his organization.
I was worried about the Tabonas. This was a misdirection of myself.
“Doesn’t matter the reason,” I say. “Franco Tabona sends men for my wife, Franco Tabona gets wiped out. That math never changes.”
Loretta watches us from the kitchen, arms crossed like a big sister letting her brothers fight it out.
“You think I told them,” Damiano says, “but I didn’t. If any of them knew? What would they do with her?”
We both know exactly what would be done with Violetta if everyone knew the nature of my promise to her father.
“After they take what you married her for? They gonna just kill her or take a day to give everyone a dip in her sauce?”
I’m standing before he’s even finished, hands on the table, leaning in his face. “Don’t talk about her ever again.”
Loretta comes outside with a bowl of fresh ice she knows we don’t need. She’s there to make sure whatever happens is witnessed.
“I kept the secret,” he says, seeming unafraid. “Even kept it from my own father. And you won’t even offer me a taste of friendship.”
Loretta puts the bowl on the table. I sit back and jerk my chin toward her in a dismissive motion. Damiano flicks his wrist at her. She goes inside.
“You stole what was given to me.” He jabs his thumb to his chest. “For once, I was first in line and you stepped over me.”
“The crown wasn’t meant for you.”
“Violetta was given to me.”
“She was always mine.”
“You took her.” Damiano pounds the table. “Ripped bread out of my mouth. I come here and ask for crumbs in return for saving your uncle, and you won’t even give me that.”
I cannot discuss who owns Violetta for another moment, because there’s more than a promise to a dying man at stake here. Damiano’s either baiting me to take out his eye, which would start a war, or he’s sincere and is willing to start a war over his version of the truth.
“My friendship can’t be bought,” I say, standing slowly, ready to leave.
“And my silence hasn’t been paid for.” He drops two cubes of ice in his glass.
“You want a war, Dami? You don’t remember the last one well enough?”
“You owe me.” He pours himself more sambuca. “All this time, not telling every capo in the four corners how to get at the treasure he gave you. Peace ain’t cheap, and the note’s gonna come due before her birthday.”
“Enjoy your sambuca.”
I leave him there and give Loretta a quick goodbye before tearing down the hill.
The way home is deceptively less treacherous.
2
VIOLETTA
The mountains shudder when Santino speaks.
“Vai.”
He holds his paper between us, asking nothing else of me for now. I’m hungry and he can fuck himself, so I sit down to breakfast.
“Buongiorno.” His greeting rolls off his tongue like marmalade dripping off burned toast.
I’d like to know where he’s been spending so many of his hours, but since Italy, I’ve only said three words to him, over and over. It’s losing its power, and at this point, it’s more of a habit I’m revving up to break.
“La tua bella.” In our new language, this can be loosely translated as “go to hell.”
The bread in front of me looks like a crumbling bathroom tile.
Santino’s not exactly cowed by my anger, but he isn’t trying to break me. Either he understands what he did to me, or he doesn’t care. No matter how disrespectful I am, nothing makes him tell me what happened with Rosetta.
Did he love her?
Did he ever love me?
Does it matter?
Yet I’ve been too angry to ask directly. I’m starting to think my three-word strategy is backfiring.
“You should go out today,” he says from behind his newspaper. “Do some shopping.”
Me, doing anything he suggests, is self-harm. Disobedience is a reflex, not a choice, but it’s a choice I would make even if I thought about it.
When I started my most recent semester at college, I had no idea I would end up married to the most powerful mobster in Secondo Vasto, living in his dollhouse, helplessly and carelessly ripped apart in body and mind. In a beachside bedroom on the shore of the Amalfi coast, I finally let myself believe my husband had chosen me. That when he took me from my family, it was as much for love as honor; as much about what he was owed for my father’s debts as what he would have wanted anyway. A desire no less intense for being poorly expressed and cruelly implemented.