Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
F rom the car, I send texts and leave voicemails for Carlo and Bruno. I asked them about how the visit to Sky Table Resort was going, but more than anything else, I really wanted to talk and feel close with them.
Carlo calls me back.
“Carlo, are you back and hiding out in the old Dracula’s castle with Bruno?”
“I’m not hiding, micia and I’m not ‘with Bruno,’ not in the way you make that sound. Like we’re a faction or an opposition movement.”
“Then what are you?”
“We’re both still here at Sky Table Resort. We have much to do. And I’m staying out of the way while you and Alessio work out whatever it is that you have to work out.”
Carlo’s voice slips in my ear and wafts, swirling through my body like smoke. Images of him brush through my head, his velvety skin, scented with sandalwood and spice, his hot grip stirring me up. A pining ache starts up low in my core and I have to clear my throat.
We’re getting close to the house and I’m still jangling from the meeting.
Hearing Carlo’s voice makes me feel slinky and sexy. What he said has me on edge.
I need the gym and I need to sort my head out. I tell Carlo I’ll call him later.
Alessio and his father came into Bruno and Carlo’s lives late. I’m surprised and it’s hard for me to understand, how they see him as such a figure of leadership. I must have misread something in their dynamic.
All three of them were mafia sons from birth. That’s the one thing that they do all have in common. Maybe that means that their attachment to Alessio as their leader goes deeper than I thought.
Alessio and Bruno came from other families. Bruno by adoption and Alessio through marriage. Only Carlo was born a Fortuna.
What every mafia son wants is power, but next they crave structure. Stability. The Life is constant chaos. Conflict, shootings, vendettas. Warring and strife, everywhere. All the time.
In a world where family means everything, perhaps it’s no wonder they have a loyalty to the man who was presumed to be the heir.
My daddy schooled me in ways of the traditional mafia family. What I want is all three of them. When I realized that I needed them all, that my heart refused to choose anything less than all of them, it was a shock. It was hard for me to come to terms with that.
The thrill was almost too much to take. It terrified me, too, thinking what I would be up against. Not only having to deal with the world outside, what people would say. In the Life, we’re almost off-grid as far as the civilians are concerned. But it’s different here, in our own communities.
Being a mafia princess like I am means living in a blaze of spotlights. Nobody will ever speak openly about what you are doing, but you know that in the dark, behind your back, you can feel them sharing and comparing scraps of knowledge, chewing over them and devouring every tiny detail. Someone sees a door close and everyone dreams up a whole movie for whqt happened behind it.
How people gossip and all the things they say, you have to rise above all that, whatever happens. It can only matter if you let it matter.
What’s important to me is my life, my love, my three men. Damn. I get a knot in my gut just thinking about it. Does this mean that I can’t possibly have any one of them, without needing to win back all three? All three is what I want. It’s what I need.
But now I have no other choice. I need to get all three of them back at the same time.
All or nothing.
Back at the house, I head straight downstairs for the gym. As the house is on a slope, the front part of the basement has beautiful floor to ceiling windows and sliding doors. While the house is not finished, they currently give out onto views of piled lumber and sand, and stores of building materials. The glass can dim to one-way, but the contractors have already left for today so I let the sunshine pour in.
I drop my clothes on the floor as I cross the room and I pick up a pair of shorts, a loose tee and a vest from the shelves. Tension and nervous energy still course through me.
For forty minutes straight I run, almost flat out on the treadmill. Then I do a few reps of pull ups and crunches, and I pump the spin bike like I’m racing for my life.
Jumping from one to the other, I work free weights in between until I’m pretty well ready to drop. My body is tired, but inside I still feel like I’m on an electric grid.
My arms feel heavy and weary like they’re sandbagged, but I strap on boxing mitts and pummel the hanging bag until I can’t do it any more.
I’m too tired and out of breath to even sit. I take water bottle from the table-top fridge and pace around gasping, drinking, and pouring the bottle over my head. Then I get another bottle and do the same again until I flop down onto a bench.
I’m practically unable to move or co-ordinate for two or three minutes, but the flashing, jittery rage in my mind has not calmed or quietened down. Questions torment me and chase and spin my head with things I wish I’d said or done, things that have driven me mad, and a whole lot of other manias that I can’t do a damned thing about.
When I finally find the energy to run myself a bath, I take a bottle of cold champagne and a carton of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough in with me. I shower first, feeling wrung out from head to toe.
Then, as soon as I sink into the hot tub and I’m peeling the top off the ice cream, my phone rings from under my pile of gym clothes, right across the bathroom. I’m able to shout to get the AI to answer the call, but I can’t hear the voice from the little speaker.
From the sounds and the tone I think I recognize Carlo.
I try shouting across the room, “Carlo. Is that you?”
There’s a response but I can’t make out a word of it.
I shout again. “I’m in the bathtub. I can’t hear you. I’ll call you back in a minute.”
There’s more noise that I can’t decipher.
“Wait.” I can’t stand it. I haul myself up, out of the water and patter across the tiled floor. When I get to the phone, it’s hung up. The phone won’t recognize my wet fingerprint, and it can’t identify my wet face, so I have to give it my code with my slippery wet fingers to get it to unlock.
It was Carlo. I call him straight back. And I go straight to voicemail. He’s calling me. I get a FaceTime alert. I try to accept, but the phone keeps slipping in my hands.
When I’m finally able to accept the call, I’m holding the phone in both hands and it’s down by my pussy.
“Oh,” at last I can hear Carlo’s voice, at least. “Shock video sexting?” His laugh rattles the phone’s tinny speaker. “At least you’re wet for me, even if it’s only with sudsy bathwater.”
Looking at the little pic of my pale and bedraggled self in the corner of my screen, I am absolutely not looking my best. Carlo is a sight to make my heart jump, though. Especially with his face screwed up in a hysterical laugh.
His taught, lean body, cut and sinuous, flexing in just a pair of white shorts.
“Let me finish my bath and I’ll call you.”
“No, you look fantastic. I love to see you dripping wet. Seriously.” he protests, “You’re making me rock hard. At least let me stay and talk with you. I can join you for the bath.”
“I look like a drowned mutt.”
“You look like my beautiful queen.”
“Carlo.”
“It’s true. No matter what happens, there’s nothing I want to see more than you.”
Now I’m melting on the inside as well as the outside.
“Le me soak for twenty minutes and wash away the day I just had, then I’ll call you, okay?”
“Sounds rough.”
“I’ll tell you all about it. How’s Bruno?”
“We’ve been having our own kind of a rough time.”
“I bet.” News about the Sun-a-do will have gone straight to the resort.
“We’ve both got a lot to catch up on. Have a good soak. Don’t be too long. I wish I was there to rub you dry.”
“Then I wouldn’t be dry.”
“This business with Alessio and his uncle…”
“We’ll talk.”
“But it’s going to be alright, though. Isn’t it?”
Carlo is the youngest. Maybe the most emotionally brittle of the three. But he’s the one who, for some reason, I can never lie to.
“Lucia? Micia? ”
“Carlo.”
My heart pounds.
“That means ‘no,’ doesn’t it. ‘No,’ it’s not all going to be alright.”
“I don’t know.”
There’s a pause like a cold drop.
He says, “If you don’t know, then we really are fucked.”
“We’re not fucked. We’re never fucked. We’re not fucked until the fat lady comes.”
“I don’t see a fat lady.”
“See? We’re golden.”
“We’re the F-word.”
We hang up, even though I don’t want to and I know that he doesn’t.