Chapter Twenty-Three Larissa
Chapter Twenty-Three
LARISSA
FROM THE VERY beginning, mankind has seen fit to recount the stories of wars and heroes of the past. Cave markings and ancient manuscripts filled with stories of warriors before Christ. Others keeping detailed accounts of conquerors and their empires, which reigned for centuries.
Histories told and retold, some including exaggerations of impossible feats, others ringing of facts and truth, but all of battles fought for the notion of good versus evil.
Though who was good and who embodied that evil often depends on the bias and perception of the storyteller.
Other stories are fables passed down to generations—of creatures that go bump in the night, feeding on the souls of those who stray. Tales that include various bogeymen, as well as their lighter counterparts, like fairy godmothers.
But when it comes to the true history and nature of Tula DiGiovanni, I doubt any storyteller has ever gotten it right—or ever will. And it’s all by her design. A truth I started to become privy to on my first night at her villa.
After years of hearing about her cutthroat act to claim her throne and the endless stories that followed, the distant cousin I expected to meet was far from the donna I collided with.
The stories about her varied during the years I grew up.
In some of them, and as reported by many, she has been viewed as fair and noted as kind.
While several others warned of her wrath.
That anyone who dared to cross her, family or not, never survived it.
Which is why I was thankful I had my heartbreak to distract me from my nerves the day I was deposited on her doorstep.
Eyes swollen, my baggage included few clothes and my newly broken heart.
Upon my brief inspection from the back of the SUV, her fortress looked a lot like I imagined any grandiose Italian villa on an olive grove would.
More a Tuscan sanctuary, better suited for the Good Witch of Luca rather than a volatile donna.
Though I gathered little of the interior when I arrived, face-planting on the mattress just after.
Awoken hours later by a sharp knock, followed by a muffled, clipped order to be ready in twenty minutes.
Clearing my crusted eyes, I sit up on the mattress, knowing my face is a splotched mess. Cheeks visibly swollen in my periphery, the small amount of rest having done little to conceal my bloodletting.
Sitting at the end of the bed, I take in my surroundings. The grove’s grounds were stunning from the car, but I gathered little, keeping my red-rimmed eyes down and hidden from the man glancing back in the rearview. A man who introduced himself as Tommaso, one of Tula’s captains.
Among the other centuries-old furnishings, the iron brass bed gives the room a softer old-world charm.
The floors consist of aged stone, masoned and erected at the same time as the walls.
One painted pale peach, housing a painting I know costs as much as a Ferrari.
These walls guard generations of secrets they’ll harbor as long as they stand.
It’s then that I notice a lightning bug skittering along one of two large windowpanes to the right of my bed.
Curious, I follow its trail to the summoning window.
Unfastening the brass latch, I push both panes open and am instantly transported by the view that greets me.
My eyes land first on the gaslit lamps burning on each side of the doors which outline the rest of the U-shaped villa.
The courtyard is filled with rows of blooming hedges and bushes.
Mossy vines stretch across boulders and nearby statues, while other blooms hang from large trellises.
Scattered trees take their own space, branches laden with ripening fruit.
Even with the mix of chaos, the courtyard is meticulously manicured and breathtaking.
With my first inhale, mixed scents waft into my nose, bringing tears to my eyes because of their meaning—freedom.
Though Ciro’s gardens are just as grand, the scent of those blooms has always failed to reach me or bring a similar comfort. As if they, too, sense the evil thriving under his roof, refusing to take part.
Within another few deep inhales, I feel a slight shift inside. A brief illusion of safety that tells me I’m far out of his reach, at least physically.
This liberation—as temporary as it may be—remains mine until I’m called home.
It’s the instinctive chill that follows, and the faint but ingrained sound of his whip, that remind me that my time here is borrowed.
A smile I can’t quite summon threatens as I remind myself of the time, and of exactly whose company I’m about to be in.
Eighteen minutes later, my face washed but looking sadly worse for wear, I’m being escorted down one of several corridors, a slight chill from the stone seeping into my sandal-clad feet.
The villa itself is vast, with a slightly labyrinthine nature.
The entrance to each hallway arched in stone, becoming increasingly inviting the farther we go.
The air in the house growing ripe with the smell of pungent spices and baked bread as night noises trickle through the billowing curtains.
Mixed sounds from distant rooms register as we clear a broader doorway—the light scrape of a chair, the faint clink of bottle against glass.
I pause when a church bell sounds, noting the number of chimes—nine.
Tommaso hurries his steps as the last bell echoes through the villa, and I obediently follow until we reach the foot of a great room. It’s then that I catch sight of the myth I’ve heard stories of my whole adult life.
Far less formidable than I expected her to look, Tula sits alone at a dining table fit for twenty.
Her surroundings regal, consisting primarily of dark wood, velvet, and gold.
As I draw near, I notice the table she’s perched at has seen a lot of life.
Though beautifully aged, it’s marred by wine-glass rings and etched with deep scratches.
It’s the woman sitting at the head of the table who steals the rest of my attention. Small in stature—more so than I imagined—and incredibly beautiful, at first glance, she looks utterly harmless.
All notions of that vanish as she takes me in and her expression morphs.
Her eyes drill into me after a thorough sweep of my face, my dress, my fucking soul.
The look in them tells me that every mythical creature, good and evil, exists, and that I should believe every word ever spoken about the donna as she fragments me with her withering reception. Her greeting rattles me to my core.
“We might not do things in all the ways of the past here, but a DiGiovanni woman, especially one meant to become donna,” she scoffs, “is to preserve and persevere under all circumstances, at all fucking times.” She shakes her head in contempt.
“And you come to me like this?” She dismisses me with a fast, irritated flick of her hand.
“Leave my fucking sight until you can come back to me without a trace of that heartbreak, and don’t you dare let me catch sight of you again until it’s gone. ”
Staring through the top of the tent as noise ensues just outside, I replay that night—from my seventeenth summer—as if it were yesterday.
By the time Tula was finished, I had already taken two terrified steps back and was shrinking in my skin.
Just after, I fled to my bedroom, spending the night thoroughly shaken by her wrath and the utterly terrifying hell in her eyes.
In hindsight, I remain thankful for the bloodletting she forced upon me to cleanse myself.
To become a blank slate, a clean canvas.
The broad strokes of the days, months, and years I spent with her after that night forever altering me.
Shaping me into the woman I am now, while erasing all traces of the girl who grew up among other girls who were continually taught they were born to serve.
Poisoned to believe their value lay between their legs, their mouths better served to boost and soothe a man’s ego, or provide his pleasure.
Conditioned to believe that their opinions and worth were only what the men in their lives deemed them to be.
Fuck that.
For my mentor, Hollywood’s assumptions about the mafia, the stereotyped images of mobsters in suits slicing garlic thin with razor blades while humming Frank Sinatra, no longer exist. DiGiovanni rule rebukes this image and has since Tula began her reign.
The ways of old made men becoming more fairy tale and fable with each year that passes, because Tula made it so.
A woman so hellbent on erasing mafia myth, she used her birthright along with her husband’s station to take down the former don and claim his throne.
A mentor I desperately needed at precisely that time and that turning point in my life, just after realizing there is no white knight.
Tula further driving that truth home with her first words the day I approached her without any traces of heartbreak.
“If you want to be saved, you better search a mirror.”
It was during my time with her that I adopted a truth I had already discovered—no one is coming.
A core piece of knowledge I’d already learned one too many times.
All glimmers of hanging onto anything else fading with every lesson.
A personal maxim that I have since wholeheartedly embraced, having sworn off white horses and fairy godmothers and instead inserting myself into every role.
Sadly, my current predicament couldn’t be fixed by reflection alone. It was only with Tula’s blessing that I sought out help. Help by way of a bastard just as volatile as my mentor. Help which is, at the moment, obnoxiously banging pans outside our tent—in summons.