“Nothing,” I assured.
Too quickly, too cheaply.
“Do I need to pull over this car and force you to tell me what’s causing that haunted look in your eye?” he demanded in the same voice he’d used when interrogating Umberto Arno in the basement. The voice of a ruthless capo.
“No,” I responded, almost mulishly, annoyed that he was so perceptive.
“Then tell me, now. And Lena, if you even think about lying to me or passing whatever it is off as non-trivial, I will not be responsible for my reaction, capisci?”
I sighed, but it released none of my tension. Mama’s words about telling Dante the truth and my own desire to communicate better with my loved ones forced me into a corner where I felt I had to tell him even though I was loathe to. I couldn’t look at him as I started to speak, my eyes pinned to the blurred scenery, the rose gold coin of the sun descending into the cerulean sea.
“When I was young, I was with a man named Christopher. He was my boyfriend, I guess you could say, because even when I was thirteen and everything really started between us, that’s what I called him. My boyfriend.” I never called anyone that again, after him. It was why Daniel had always been my partner, why I now thought of Dante as my man. Boyfriend had been tarnished all with so many other things in that man’s wake. “He was Seamus’s friend from the Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. We all grew up with him around the house and he was kind to us all. He took a special interest in me when I took English tutoring with him. He said he liked my mind and the way I looked, that my red hair reminded him of home.”
My sigh fogged up the window, obscuring the beauty beyond it.
Beside me, Dante emanated a dark, pulsating energy as if he was an imploding star about to transform into a black hole.
“We started to date secretly when I was thirteen, but we came out to my parents three years later. I wasn’t that young and it wasn’t that unheard of in Naples for such sixteen-year-old to have a relationship with an older man.” This was true. It was a staple of our culture, specifically of la mafia and its propensity for arranged marriages. “Seamus and Mama were happy for me.”
“He raped you,” Dante ground out, his voice savaged by fury.
I swallowed back the bile that rouse in my throat. “Not at first, not for a long time. He started to take a fancy to Giselle. I think he was pedophile really, and I was getting old for him by the time I turned eighteen. He started to see her secretly behind all of our backs. I guess he didn’t want me to be suspicious so he told me nasty things about her, how she was less than me, how she was always trying to make me out to be some troia. I was surprised when I found them together one day behind the house kissing in the shade of a Cyprus tree.”
I could still remember the hot knife of betrayal sliding into my back.
“It didn’t occur to me that Giselle wasn’t very willing. She was young and naïve, she didn’t know how to say no to him. Cosima found out somehow and sent Giselle to Paris to study so she was free of him.”
“But not you,” Dante concluded.
I shot him a look, noting how white his knuckles were around the wheel, how fast the car took each curving corner.
I didn’t tell him to slow down. The air was filled with an anger so hot it felt as if we had already wrecked the car, the frame on fire and filling rapidly with acrid smoke.
“Not me,” I agreed, staring down at my hands. “He asked Mama if I could move in with him and she agreed. He was still the love of my life, even though he’d wanted Giselle. I was so desperate for love and attention, I didn’t care I was second place. But he was angry after she left and he started to take that out on me. He used me for a few months, so hard I had bruises but always where only he could see.”
“How did you get away?” His teeth clipped as he snapped the words between them.
“He asked me to bring him a beer one day. Some imported English merda he brought with him everywhere. He’d already fucked me once that day, told me he was the only one who would ever love me, who would ever accept me for being the pathetic loner we both knew I was.”
I shrugged, but the words were an echo my mind never forgot.
“I guess something just clicked, I don’t even remember what I was thinking. I broke the beer bottle against the edge of the table and held it up to his neck. I told him I was leaving and if he followed, I’d tell Mama about how he hurt me. I’d tell the police. He threatened me, but I think he believed I’d come back at some point, that he’d succeeded in brain washing me.”
“You didn’t go back.”
“No. Two weeks later, Cosima told me she had the money to send Mama and I to America. I avoided him until then and then we just took off. I didn’t see him again for four years.”
“Where is he now?” he asked, his voice a silk ribbon, but lethal, a noose and a trap.
“Relax, Dante, he showed up in New York almost two years ago now looking for Giselle. I found them and beat him up pretty soundly.” I couldn’t help the smugness in my voice. “That’s why I’d been taking self-defence classes for years, just in case my wildest dreams came true and I ever got to face him again. He’s in jail now serving time for aggravated assault and stalking. He won’t get out for years.”
Silence descended between us.
It felt like I should say more, maybe apologise for keeping it from him, but my pride rebelled against the idea. I didn’t owe him every secret of my past, every mark and bruise I’d ever gotten relived just so I could share it with him.
The quiet was so thick it vibrated the space around us.
His breath was too slow, too controlled through his massive chest. The face I loved for his expressiveness, the creases cut into the skin beside his eyes and mouth that showed his thirty-five years beautifully had turned to unmarked stone.
“Dante, it was a long time ago,” I whispered into that clogged air. “You don’t have to be so angry for me. I’m fine.”
“Fine,” he spit, eyes darting to me with unrestrained fury. “You’re fine. Elena, you’ve been living like a fucking ascetic for years because this cazzo di merda robbed you of whatever joy you might have been able to scrounge up in your childhood. Is it his voice you hear in your head telling you that you’ll never be worthy of love? That you won’t ever be better than your sister, good enough to warrant true love and actual respect from a man?”
He was shaking, physically trembling with the force of his rage. I didn’t know what to do sitting there, watching him come apart at the seams with emotion stronger than I’d ever seen before.
“Jail isn’t enough for this brutto figlio di putanna,” he growled so harshly it must have hurt his throat. “He deserves to be killed slowly, death by a thousand fucking paper cuts. I’ll take his eyes and his balls, his finger nails then sections of the finger, knuckle by knuckle, finger by fucking finger. I’ll pour acid in his wounds until he can’t scream anymore and then, because he won’t need it ever again, I’ll rip out his goddamn motherfucking throat.”
“I don’t need you to do that,” I told him calmly, trying to use the coolness of my voice to offset the heat in his.
I wanted to soothe him, but there was no comforting a cornered beast and my history had done just that, caging him in bars of iron wrath.