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“Being a problem was never my style,” I whisper hollowly, glaring into the dark at something more than the world just flashing by.
“Oh, you were a problem. Just not ours. And the more grief you caused your daddy, the better for the rest of us.”
“Stop it,” I whisper. I don’t want to hear about it anymore. Is that my reputation among mafia men? The daughter who wasn’t fit for the family? The one who couldn’t stomach it? “I told you I put all that behind me, I’m not going to relive it now. I got out of there, and I’m not—”
My eyes turn to the road ahead of us.
I am going back there, whether I like it or not.
I thought I made it out.
I finally have a life. Friends. I went to art school; I have my work hung in prestigious galleries. The fact that my father only nurtured my talent to launder his money on expensive art pieces, well—it only diminished my pride in my work a little.
“I always wondered how he fucked up on you so badly,” Salvatore continues, conversationally, pulling out and unraveling my deepest insecurities with the most casual, emotionless statements. “He had twenty years to turn you into one of us.”
“He tried,” I mutter.
Salvatore looks me over, and I know exactly what he sees—he failed.
From the time I was just a little girl, when I couldn’t get more impressionable, more vulnerable. He tried to toughen me up. He tried everything, everything in his power to get me to be like him. My soft heart was treated like a disease, a defect. Something that needed treatment and correction.
When he blamed my mother for it, he took her from me, too. I was only eight. She overdosed by the time I was twelve.
None of it helped me become his perfect ruthless little princess. Sometimes I fantasize about how much easier my life could have been if I had just been cruel. If I had that in me.
We smoke in silence for a while, two strangers with nothing more to say to each other. A light rain falls, drumming its fingers on the hood of the car. We ride along in a nightmare that feels like a dream.
I’m surprised that I’m not very afraid. Maybe it’s the alcohol, or maybe I’ve run out of emotions for the day, my spirit running on empty. I dread the chaos that will come of this, and I regret ever stepping foot in that club tonight, but I don’t fear him the way I should.
I think I’m more scared of myself than I am of him.
I wonder what my father will do when he finds out. Will Salvatore care if he doesn’t come after me? If he just abandons me here with him? Do I only appeal to the madman because he knows he shouldn’t have me? What happens to me then?
I block out the frantic swirl of my thoughts.
My father will fix this. He’ll come save me, somehow. He’s no hero, he’s not even a good man, but he’s still my father. He won’t just leave me; his pride won’t allow it. All I have to do is survive long enough for that to happen.
“You don’t have anything out there to miss, do you?” He asks suddenly, his keen question blooming in the dark.
The words are like a switchblade, quick and unexpected, slipping between my ribs and plucking right at my heart. It only hurts because it’s true. I don’t answer him. I just watch the world outside flicker by like old, washed-out film. The silence is enough.
“Good,” he says, the pleasure rumbling in his deep voice. His fingers knot in my hair, pulling my scalp taut to draw my eyes up to his—just enough that it almost aches. We stare into each other’s faces, burning in each other’s heat. My anger meets his ice. “With me, there’s no room for anything else.”
It’s not true.
I had everything. For the first time, I had normalcy. I didn’t have my father’s money or his power anymore, but I also didn’t have his shadow looming over me. I had a little apartment, a career, and a handful of normal friends—
I fight tears as Salvatore Mori takes them all from me, kissing me for the first time in the smoky back seat of the car. I have no desire to kiss him back, but that doesn’t matter—not with him. He kisses me as though he’s claiming my soul.
The car continues through the city, and my old life fades in the rearview mirror.
4
Contessa
When I was a little girl, my father would take out dusty photo albums and spread their pictures across our long dining table. To my generation, a picture you can hold in your hands is a novelty, and at seven, I was obsessed with the images as if they were a puzzle I could rearrange and piece together. It was our family history, laid out in polaroids and laminated newspaper clippings. With them, my father told me the story of our legacy, the way the Loveras moved up through the world. In those faded images, the trajectory of our wealth was clear—grainy photos taken in the back of butcher shops one decade, smiling in front of an apartment complex the next. A faded wedding photo at a lodge. Mugshots. Children playing on the sprawling lawns of mansion houses. And funerals. So many black dresses and umbrellas.
Today, my father lives in a penthouse, the top level of a skyscraper apartment building, where he can finally look down on the world that built him up.
