Chapter 5 #4
Vincenzo’s closeness is making my skin prickle with fear, but I fight not to show it. What’s Vincenzo hoping for, that I’ll burst into tears and collapse at his feet? I’d dearly like to lose myself in a bout of hysterical crying, but he will not make me crumple up in fear.
After taking a steadying breath that doesn’t quite calm my nerves, I say with forced coolness, “You killed the Dervishis. Not me. You admitted that you didn’t need my help, or that knife. As for Pietro, he…”
Pain washes over me, sharp and sudden. I see Pietro’s gloating expression as he confessed to orchestrating Mom’s death. I feel the knife in my hand, the terrible resistance of his flesh as I stabbed him.
“He wasn’t a good man,” I finish.
“And my family?” Vincenzo demands through clenched teeth, and I can hear his barely leashed rage. “Did they deserve to be slaughtered at a party?”
In my mind’s eye I see the elegant Mrs. Vici bestowing me with a smile, with all her beautiful family gathered around her. Almost all her family. I think I would have liked her.
My throat thickens with grief for the woman I never got to know, and who was going to be my mother-in-law.
I could have shared happy milestones with her, like my wedding to her son.
A housewarming party when Vincenzo and I moved in together after our honeymoon.
Happy news about a pregnancy, if Vincenzo and I were blessed with a baby.
It would almost be like sharing the news with my own mother.
The future I’ll never have unfolds in my mind like a cruel dream. Sunday dinners, holidays, her teaching me family recipes, seeing her playing with her grandchildren. All the things I lost when Mom died, I could have found again with Lucia Vici.
Tears prickle my eyes, burning hot, and I struggle to hold them back so they’re not visible to the tightly-wound man looming over me.
The happiness that might have been mine to share with Mrs. Vici was taken from me in a hail of bullets, but I have no right to weep for Vincenzo’s mother when I’m the reason she’s dead.
“Nothing to say, doe?” he growls. “No trite words to explain why it’s not your fault my whole family was slaughtered?”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. What could I possibly say that would make any of this better?
The four walls are pressing in on me from all sides.
The blood is rushing in my ears, a roar that drowns out everything else.
I’m trapped in this room with a man who hates me.
His hostility rolls off him in waves, hot and suffocating and inescapable, but it can’t compare to how much I hate myself right now.
Vincenzo steps away from me abruptly, and I discover I can finally take a ragged breath, and then another. My legs are shaking so badly I’m not sure they’ll hold me up.
I watch him walk slowly around my room, picking up my things and putting them carelessly down again.
The elegant gold calligraphy pen that was a present from my mother on the last Christmas she was alive.
He turns it over in his fingers like it’s worthless.
A snow globe with a carousel horse that Nonna gave me for my ninth birthday.
He shakes it once, watches the glitter swirl, and then sets it down with a heavy thunk.
A silver brush with pale bristles and a long, shining handle that I bought for myself when I was eleven, because I saw beautiful women using them in old black-and-white movies, and I wanted to feel sophisticated and grown up.
He picks it up, and for a terrible moment I think he’s going to break it.
Frivolous, girlish, and useless items that look even more frivolous, girlish, and useless in Vincenzo’s big, scarred hands.
Killer’s hands. He puts each one down with a carelessness that tells me how ridiculous he thinks they are, and by extension, how ridiculous I am.
You thought you could be a Vici bride, he seems to say, his whole manner a sneer. You thought you could fit into my world?
His gaze lands on a photograph that’s resting on my dresser, and he goes completely still. He stares at it as if he’s been turned to stone mid-step.
I move around him cautiously, like he’s a wild animal, to see which photograph has caught his attention.
It’s a family portrait. Mom, Dad, Nonna, Cristiano, and me. All together. All smiling. The last Christmas we spent as a family before Nonna passed away suddenly the following March.
Mom is at the center with Nonna close to her left side. Her arm is around thirteen-year-old me on her right, and she’s beaming. A huge, gorgeous smile that makes her eyes light up. I’m smiling too, pressed against her side, safe and loved. Everyone’s always said I have my mom’s smile.
Cristiano is sitting in front of us, handsome and fresh-faced at seventeen, though with hints of darkness showing in his eyes that are beginning to turn cold. It will be several more years before he’s sent away to Italy and Mom dies. Before Mom is murdered, I think with a painful wrench.
Dad is hovering at the back as though he’s been pushed to one side, or he doesn’t want to be there and he’s about to step out of the frame. He’s not smiling. It’s easy to focus on everyone else’s radiant faces and pretend he, with his glower, isn’t there at all.
It’s my most beloved family photo, and my most precious belonging, because there’s only one copy. Dad threw away or burned most of Mom’s things when she died. This photograph and a handful of others is all I have left of her.
As though in a trance, Vincenzo reaches for the frame with both hands. There’s a desolate expression in his eyes, a hollowness that makes him look haunted. It’s causing him physical pain to look upon my happy family portrait, so soon after he’s lost his.
“Vincenzo?” I touch his arm.
He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t even seem to notice I’m there.
Vincenzo’s breathing changes, becoming shallow and rapid. His pupils dilate. He’s staring at the photo like it’s the only thing in the world that exists for him.
His picks up the frame. The movement is mechanical, disconnected. Like he’s sleepwalking.
“Vincenzo, don’t—”
He rips the back off with violent force, but his face is blank. Empty. He pulls the photograph free and flings the rest to one side. The frame hits my bedroom wall with a crash. Glass shatters into a thousand glittering pieces.
For a moment, I think he just wants a closer look at the photograph.
Then he rips it in two, right through Mom’s smiling face.
I scream. Try to grab it from him, but his hands keep moving, ripping, destroying, while his face remains eerily expressionless.
“Stop!” I grab his wrists. “Please stop!”
His hands, killer’s hands, destructive hands, obliterate the paper rectangle in a matter of moments.
When the pieces are too small to go on ripping them, he opens his fingers and lets them go. The fragments flutter down like ash.
I drop to my knees, straining to catch the shreds as they fall, but there are too many, and they’re too small. They slip through my fingers no matter how desperately I try to catch them.
I collapse in a heap on the carpet, sobbing as I gather up all the pieces and try to put them back together.
A glimpse of Mom’s smile. A shred of Nonna’s arm.
A scarlet flash of my Christmas dress. Or is it Nonna’s skirt?
I can’t tell. Everything is jumbled and confused. The photograph is utterly destroyed.
My head slumps forward and I sob brokenly. She’s gone. Mom is gone all over again.
“Doe?” Vincenzo asks over my head. His voice sounds distant. Uncertain.
Like he’s just woken up from a trance.
The shattering glass and my screaming has brought Dad’s soldiers to my door. It flies open with a bang, and their eyes widen as they see me in a heap on the floor with Vincenzo standing over me. They hover at the threshold, guns drawn and aimed, shouting for Dad.
This is how Dad finds us a minute later when he storms into my room dressed only in striped pajama pants, an assassin standing over me, and my supposed bodyguards standing timidly at the threshold.
Dad stares from Vincenzo to me, something calculating flashing across his face. Then he whirls around and faces his soldiers.
“Useless fucking idiots! You’re supposed to keep intruders out of my house. Get out of my sight.”
They all slink away, heads down, leaving the three of us alone together.
Dad closes my door behind him and stares accusingly at Vincenzo, his hairy chest rising and falling with every furious breath he takes.
“You have come here in the night to defile my daughter. An insult I will not stand for. You have ruined her, and no other man will want her now. You will marry her, or I will put your head on a goddamn spike.”
Dad’s threatening Vincenzo to force him to marry me when that’s precisely what Vincenzo demanded from Dad nine days ago. But this doesn’t surprise me. When Dad’s not in control of a situation, he has to twist things to seem like he is. Make it sound like his idea. His decision.
I stare at the carpet and my torn heap of happy memories, no longer caring what happens to me. Marry Vincenzo, don’t marry him. Live or die. The outcome will be the same. More misery, only under a different man’s roof.
There was a time before I lost my innocence when I believed in happy endings, but I’m no longer that na?ve, stupid child. That girl died in a golden ballroom, covered in other people’s blood.
Over my head, Vincenzo is breathing hard, and I see his hand curl into a fist. I wonder distantly if that fist is for me. I assume he likes to hurt women when he’s angry, just like Dad.
The seconds tick by in silence.
I don’t look up. I can’t. If I look at him now, I’ll see satisfaction in his eyes. Pleasure that I’m breaking, and I won’t give him that.
Vincenzo rips open the balcony door, jumps up and clings to something above, and then disappears over the edge into the night. This must be the route he took into my bedroom to avoid the soldiers in the garden. I hear a few faint noises that might be the whisper of rope, and then he’s gone.
Like he was never here at all. Except for the shattered glass, the torn photograph, and the hole in my heart.
“Stop sniveling,” Dad snaps, his words cracking over me like a whip.
Reaching down, he seizes me under my arm with bruising fingers and hauls me to my feet. The pieces of photograph flutter from my hands, scattering across the carpet.
I stand with my head bowed as Dad paces up and down.
“That Vici bastard is obsessed with you. God knows why, but I saw it in his eyes the other night when he kissed you. It was plain as day tonight.”
I don’t know how Dad thinks he saw obsession from Vincenzo tonight. I witnessed rage and destruction, and hatred for the Montonis that runs soul deep.
Dad rubs his hands together, the eagle signet ring glinting on his pinkie finger. “This is good, Adora. This is useful to us. Through this engagement, and as we plan your wedding, you will be able to get close to him. You can save this family.”
There’s a feverish look in his eyes, a manic gleam that I recognize. It’s the same look he gets when he’s planning something particularly vicious. He’s already anticipating a Montoni triumph.
“When he lets his guard down, you will strike.”
I wipe the tears from my cheeks and manage to ask in a strangled voice, “Strike?”
Dad stares at me like I’m an idiot for not immediately understanding his brilliant plan.
“Yes, girl. Strike. Lull him into believing you’re completely in love with him, and then kill him. Stab him. Shoot him. Put explosives under his car seat. I don’t care how you do it, as long as that man ends up dead. Because if we don’t kill him, he will kill us.”
He grabs my chin, forcing me to look at him.
“If you play your part right, Vincenzo will never suspect his smiling, adoring bride of treachery.”
I don’t answer, unable to summon up the strength, and Dad’s lip curls in disgust.
“Are these methods too much for your weak woman’s stomach? Wait here.”
Dad strides out of my room, his footsteps heavy and purposeful.
I stand there staring at the shattered glass. At the torn pieces of Mom’s face. My hands are already stained with blood. How much more blood will they soak in before this is over?
Dad returns a few minutes later. He holds up a small bottle made of dark glass that contains what looks like white powder.
“Potassium cyanide. Poison is a woman’s weapon. Devious and deadly, just like your sex.”
He seizes my hand, pries my fingers open, then forces the vial into my hand.
“Take it, Adora.”
I stare at it resting in my palm. The glass is smooth and dark. A little bottle of death that I’m supposed to use to kill a man after winning his trust.
Wind through my open balcony door scatters little pieces of my photograph across my feet. I shiver, and my fingers close around the vial automatically, listening without protest as Dad orders me to become a cold-blooded murderer.
“Do you understand?” Dad demands.
I nod, or I think I do. I feel my head move.
“Say it.”
“I understand.” My voice sounds hollow and colorless.
“Good girl.” Dad pats my cheek. “Make me proud, Adora. Do it for your family.”
He leaves, closing the door behind him.
I stand there for a long time, staring at nothing.
Eventually, my legs give out, and I sink back down to the floor.
I begin gathering the photograph pieces with trembling fingers.
I try to fit them together, but there are too many pieces.
I can’t remember who goes where. I can’t even remember what the whole picture looked like anymore.
If I manage to put all the pieces back together, I won’t recognize the girl in the photograph with her beautiful, hopeful smile.
A sob builds inside me, but I’m too desolate to let it out. So I just sit there in the dark, surrounded by broken glass and broken memories, holding poison in one hand and pieces of my mother in the other.