I gave him my body and my pleasure. I let him rule over me, and I let myself love being ruled by him, opening the fingers that had clenched around my own desires—relaxing into an unturned palm to show him the shards of ancient clay, fired in my false freedoms, broken in my protective fist, and I said, Take it. Take it all.
Like a man making a wish over his birthday candles, he blew the shards and dust away, leaving me with nothing to hold. He took nothing for himself because he didn’t want what I had as much as he wanted me to offer it all to him.
I understand why he’d bring her here to marry her since she wasn’t quite eighteen.
Santino DiLustro had been engaged to my sister, Rosetta, long before I was ever in the picture. He didn’t want me. He didn’t desire me. He wanted my sister, my beautiful sister, who had been stolen from me once when he took her to a festering misery of a country, and again when he let her die ruined and alone—wearing the same ring he won’t let me take off.
I turn the stone toward my palm so I don’t have to see the way the sun hits it, and I eat my tasteless toast.
I am a woman of precious stone and solid honor, and when I pushed him away our first night back, screaming those three words—la tua bella la tua bella—his lack of violence or threats spoke volumes. He knows he fucked up.
Good.
He knows I hate him.
Even better.
I don’t know the thickness of the line I’m walking, or what I’ll do in the moment before he does something violent enough to push him to reach for a cigarette. And that danger has its own buzz of electricity. I’ll say la tua bella as long as it fucks him up, even if it fucks me up.
I want him to hurt. I want him to struggle.
I want him gone.
I can’t wish him dead. Death is too good for him. And all this wanting and wishing does nothing. I have neither money nor friends. I have no choice but to make him as miserable as I am.
“Violetta,” he says, and I realize the unchewed toast is putty in my mouth.
“La tua bella?” I say with a lilt that could mean, “yes, dear?” or “how can I help you?”
When the women gossiped that he was a whoremaker, they weren’t talking about Loretta. They were talking about Rosetta.
“Please don’t do this anymore,” he asks softly from the other side of a stone wall of silence.
Did he woo her, I wonder? I’m Forzetta, but she was la tua bella. Did he bring her flowers and trinkets to show he was thinking about her? When the debt came due, did he ask for her hand and think he was getting the better of the deal? How does he like the interest on the loan now that he’s stuck with me?
Did he steal me the way he did because he didn’t really want me?
Was she taken like I was, by surprise and against her will? Did she sleep in the same dollhouse room, overlooking the pool he slices into every day? Did she spend the first nights huddled in the same corner, wishing her life was over?
I remember she was excited to go to Italy, and I was jealous that she got to go. Did he meet her there? Did he steal her there? Did he drop on her like a surprise? Or did he afford Rosetta a loving kindness he’s never extended to me—cherishing one sister and abusing the other?
The more corporeal questions practically ask themselves.
Did they share the same room? Was she willing to open her heart and so much more to him as soon as he took her? Was he gentle with her? Or did he rough her up like he did with me? Did he stick those powerful thumbs up her ass and bring her to gasping orgasms?
Did we really ever share the same man?
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can’t stop hurting.
I thought I could change things. I thought I could carve my own path.
I was wrong.
I’m the same trapped, scared girl I was in the wedding chapel. How it is possible to go from so blissfully happy to terrified all over again?
The answer sits before me, wrapped in a custom suit and brooding eyes.
Santino.
This is all his fault. All of this. Anger scorches a trail through me, hot and sharp, leaving blackened, smoking dust from heart to mind to toes. He could have saved her. Siena said he wasn’t there when Rosetta died, leaving her with strangers, instead of safe with me and the Zs.
Of all his sins, this last one should be the one he burns in hell for.
I may not have the power to escape this nightmare, but I have the power to live it on my own terms. He can no longer just take what he wants.
“You will talk to me,” he states like a cold fact.
Is that all he wants? Me to talk to him?
Well, I had a speech class where I did nothing but talk, and his demand that I talk to him opens up new opportunities to confuse and hurt him.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” I say, slowly at first as I dig deep into my eleventh-grade curriculum. “That all men are created equal, that they are—”
“Wait,” he says. “Slow down.”
“Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable—”
“Violetta.” He leans forward. “What are you saying?”
Of course he doesn’t recognize the Declaration of Independence. In context, it’s outside his experience. The real problem however, is that the content exists outside the context of his will.
“Unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights—”
“I speak four languages,” he hisses. “Not this gibberish.”
“Bummer.”
“What does it mean?” He growls, thrusting himself in my direction, as if he wants to insert himself down my throat.
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means you must return the first thing by giving me the second, or the third will never happen for either of us.”
He doesn’t get it, and he wants to. I can see it in his face. He’s trying to break it down and find some clear course of action in my words that doesn’t involve him letting me go.
“It means,” I continue, “go fuck yourself.” I enunciate each word in English. Fuck him and his Italian. That world already chewed me up and spat me out. It’s not getting back in through my mouth.
“There are things you don’t understand,” he says.
“Because no one tells me anything.”
“That’s the way it is.”
“What part of ‘go fuck yourself’ do you need translated?”
“I am protecting you.”
“You. Are. Killing. Me!” My shout scrapes the walls of my throat, louder than I intend, weaker than I want. The wall around me doesn’t even shake, and neither does Santino DiLustro.
When I clench my fingers into a fist, the diamond indents the tender skin of my palm. It belonged to Rosetta first.
Is it bad luck to wear someone else’s ring? Did I miss that particular superstition? It wasn’t passed down through a family as an expression of eternal love. This ring claimed a woman—one woman—as his bride. For the other, it is a locked metal cuff.
Jumping up, I pull off the engagement ring and nesting wedding band and throw them onto the table in front of him. They skid and slide over the edge. He catches them.
“Did you force her? Did she know she had no choice?” I croak with a voice unused to new words. “Because Zio and Zia sent her to Italy. They took her shopping before she left. I went with them. They never mentioned dressing up to meet her husband. They never mentioned you at all.”