My eyes clicked closed slowly like a stuttering camera shutter.
There was something there.
He doesn’t care about her like that anymore.
My breath caught in my throat and solidified, choking me. There was wet in my eyes and horror painted onto every inch of my face when I looked between Cosima and Dante.
His face was set in stone, giving away nothing.
Which was how I knew.
Dante had an animated face, a mobile mouth and depthless eyes that usually gave away his emotions.
He’d shut down because once, however long ago, maybe even still, he’d been in love with my sister.
There was an ear-splitting, earth rumbling sound in my ears as a crater opened in my chest and my failing heart fell into my stomach.
“You loved her?” I whispered so quietly, he had to read my lips.
“No, never like this.” He tugged me closer by the hand, gripping my chin tightly in the other so his ink dark eyes were all I could see. They were filled with a frenzied passion, so intense they burned. “Once, maybe, I thought of more, but never ever came of it. Cosima was always in love Alexander. And now I know how sciocco I was because the way I love you makes the possibility of ever having loved someone else or ever loving anyone else again impossible.” He wrenched the hand he still possessed onto his chest over his heart. “You own me, Elena. You and only you.”
Tears burned the backs of my eyes, but they didn’t fall. I calmly wrenched my hand from his grip and backed away.
Was it impossible to find a man who hadn’t loved one of my sisters first?
Was I always destined to be second choice?
Bitterness swamped me, blackening the edges of my vision and suddenly, even in the balmy Neapolitan winter air, I was cold through to my bones.
I moved away faster, seeing the tension in Dante’s muscles threatening to come after me. I couldn’t bear the thought. Just looking at him, his big handsome face, his beautiful, rough-tipped hands and ruddy mouth, made my brain sabotage every memory we made by picturing it with his first choice.
With Cosima.
My eyes closed as I fought the sob rising like a meteorite in my throat.
“Elena,” Cosima called. I opened my lids to find her standing, coming toward me, her beautiful face patterned with horror. “Trust me, cara mia, Dante and I were never in love. We were never meant to be. This is not an issue.”
Not an issue.
Finally, wet broke free of my lids and rolled down my cheeks, dripping off my chin and the tip of my nose.
“I’ve never been the first choice,” I croaked. “And I won’t settle anymore for second place. I need some space. Don’t follow me, Dante.”
He was opening his mouth when I spun on my heel and darted into the house. By the time he realized I was leaving the property, I was already in the Lambo peeling down the driveway, my capo a fading statue in the rearview mirror.
Fourteen
Elena
I went to church.
The Cathedral of Naples was much grander than the small edifice we attended as children, but I’d navigated blindly into downtown Naples after leaving Villa Rose and something made me stop at the grand opulent structure dedicated to a God I didn’t believe in. It might have had something to do with the fact it was named Duomo di San Gennaro, dedicated to the same Saint Dante and I had celebrated what seemed like a lifetime ago in New York his first night of house arrest.
I was grateful to be wearing a linen shirt and black cigarette pants instead of one of the skin-baring dresses Dante had bought me, because Italians still took modesty in the house of the Lord incredibly seriously. As it was, no one stopped me from entering the Duomo.
It was quiet, fewer than a handful of people milling inside. Lunch time was meant to be spent with family or friends over wine in a piazza or the family home, but a few dedicated worshippers dotted the pews, rosary beads in their hands.
The click of my heels echoed off the marble floors and rebounded against the gilt painted Baroque ceiling, through the purloined archways bracketing the main chapel. No one watched me as I made my way to the main altar and slid into a wooden pew in the first row.
It had been years since I went to church, but my body knew how to fold itself to my knees on the provided cushions, hands clasping, head bowed. I wished I had beads to move through my fingers, counting my sins and as well as my blessing like some religious abacus. Better yet, I wished I had Dante’s cross, the silver heavy and poignant in my hands.
I had nothing to grasp but my own turmoil.
Seamus was dead because I’d killed him.
Killed a man.
Killed my own father.
Cosima was my half-sister because Mama had fallen in love with a Camorra capo and irrevocably changed our lives in doing so.
Would we have been protected from the mafia as much as we had been without that relationship? Would Cosima have ever been sold into sexual slavery without it, though?
Dante had loved her once. Of course, he had, almost every man I’d ever known had fallen in love with Cosima at one point or another. She was everything I wasn’t, likeable and loving, passionate and sensual, gorgeous and wise.
At some point in their shared history, he’d thought himself in love with her.
Like Christopher and Daniel with Giselle.
I was just the second-string sister.
The past was a knotted rope, tangled in my hands. I wanted to carefully unwind it so I could begin to understand why the decisions of others had seemingly landed our family, landed me, in this particular situation.
If I could understand it, maybe I wouldn’t be so hurt by the past.
But I knew even as I sat there until my knees ached and my skin grew cold and clammy from the air conditioning that I wouldn’t be able to decipher this the way I could the law or the constitution.
Human beings made messy choices based on instinct and the base urge to sin.
I didn’t know what it was like for Mama, raising two young girls without the help of a husband who increasingly didn’t return home at night or even the next morning. I didn’t know how it might have felt to have Amadeo Salvatore, so powerful and magnetic take an interest in her, perhaps show her how a man should treat a woman, if only for a handful of nights.
But then, didn’t I?
That was exactly how I felt about Dante. How he’d seduced me away from myself and into something better.
Only, I’d had the courage to follow my capo into the dark when Mama had not.
The idea that Dante had wanted my sister romantically felt like a slap to the face of that courage. Was there something in me that reminded him or her the way it had with Christopher and Giselle? Was he using me to make her jealous? Was he wishing every day that I was someone else?
My head fell, chin to my chest, the weight of my chaotic thoughts to heavy too hold up anymore. Dante’s lyrically accented words echoed in the cavern of my reeling mind.
Io sono con te.
I am with you.
Elena, you don’t realize this yet, but I see you, I know you, and I’m undone by you.
Sono pazzo di te. I’m crazy about you.
Only you, Elena. Only with you do I like fucking you, marking you, owning you with my body and my cum. Mine to fuck. Mine to cherish. Mine to love.
It is a privilege to know you intimately. It is an honor to know you and I won’t ever take that for granted.