Page 8 of Carnal Wagers

Maeve

So? How was the big day? Everything you’d hoped it would be?

The waiter dropped off my glass of rosé, with a standing order to keep them coming. I picked up the glass, took a selfie with it, and sent it along with the caption: “Table for one. What more is there to say?”

Maeve

Sorry, babe. You deserve better.

“Yep, I think so too,” I muttered to myself, then downed that glass of wine like it was a glass of water in the desert.

If I wanted things to be different, it was up to me. No one else was going to stand up for me if I didn’t do it myself. Just as it had always been.

My phone rang as a second full glass of wine materialized in my hand, and the waiter swiped the empty one away. Perfect. That one went down my gullet too. Come on, empty belly, work for me here, I pleaded. The needed buzz wasn’t spreading nearly fast enough. I glanced down at the caller ID and answered.

“Was I being too quiet?” I asked Maeve in English.

She was real in a way that didn’t exist in either the criminal underworld or the upper class. She never cared how others saw her, always preferring a comfortable pair of overalls and tennis shoes instead of a skirt and heels. She always gave me her version of the god’s-honest truth, as she liked to say, and never held back. She didn’t hide behind financial or political machinations, and she never tried to schmooze me for what my family and business could get her.

“Figured you needed to talk.”

I was a sucker for the way her Boston accent tweaked the vowels in English. No matter how I tried, I had yet to successfully reproduce it.

“You know me best.”

“How much have you had to drink already?”

“Not nearly enough for this conversation.”

“I’m guessing he’s not with you.”

“Ha, he couldn’t bolt away fast enough.”

“Are we happy about this?”

“Oh yeah, because he’s such a dreamboat. Exactly what I wanted out of a husband.”

“You know what, good riddance. I’ve heard his family is a bunch of literal psychopaths. There are even rumors going around that they kill off their wives and girlfriends.”

I laughed, finally getting my buzz on with my third, no, fourth glass of chilled wine in hand, ready for consumption. That wasn’t damaging information. Rumors always clung to people in the underworld. If only she knew about the number of men my dad laid to rest in the Mediterranean Sea or the number of hits my brother, Adrien, and his partner-in-crime, Erel, killed off, ever since they opened their business. She knew enough to keep quiet, but not nearly enough to get scared off.

Four years ago, we met during our respective holidays in Croatia. She’d paddled out of the authorized swimming zone at the Skradinski Buk waterfalls, tried climbing onto an algae-infested rock, slipped, and slammed her head on the way back down. There were dozens of people nearby, but I was the only one to rush to reach her, drag her unconscious body to the rocky shoreline, and perform CPR until she purged a fountain from her lungs. We then bonded over being kicked out of the national park by rangers and fined enough to feed a small island, followed by drinking our way through the bars in the nearby town over our petty problems.

I’d been escaping the pointless redundancy my life had become, always wanting but never getting my father’s approval—the latest being his condemnation of the perfumery I’d just opened. Maeve had been avoiding her mother, who’d been hassling her to adhere to the family traditions, regardless of her wishes. The rest was history.

I shook my head and mashed the numb tips of my lips together. “I doubt that’s the real story.”

“Did he say something to you?”

“Like what? I don’t think he said…” I counted on my fingers. “…more than three dozen words to me. At most.”

“I mean, was he a dick? That why you’re alone? I’ll be churning a fresh batch of cement this afternoon, for the new construction site we just broke ground on. Want me to make some nice boots and take him for a swim in the Boston Harbor? I’d do it for you, babe.”

“You read that in a mafia how-to?”

“If it works.”

I chortled a sigh and waved the comment away. “Do not pull out the big guns just yet. He just lost his wife. I knew not to expect much. I’ll get over it.”