6. Carmen
Chapter 6
Carmen
T hree days in, and I’m ready to bang my head against the iron bars of my cell.
They are perhaps the only remaining indicator that this room used to be a dungeon in the traditional sense. The stone walls are smooth and pale, washed clean of whatever history they once held.
I’ve fiddled with the wallpaper enough that it is torn at the edges where it meets the narrow bed in the corner. The bed's frame is made of iron, and the mattress is thin but not unbearable.
There’s also a small wooden table and chair placed against the back wall, and a single lamp glows softly on top of it, casting warm light that does little to soften the starkness of the space.
What would be lovely is if someone would give me something to do other than quietly lament my existence. Instead, I have to make do with pacing. Thirty steps to the back wall, fifty-two steps across, then back again.
The floor is cold beneath my bare feet—smooth tiles instead of rough stone—and the air smells faintly of lavender. The smell wafts through the door to a tiny adjoining bathroom, the sink and toilet cleaned each day.
But it’s the silence that gets to me. It’s heavy and unbroken, like the walls themselves are listening. There’s no window, no clock, nothing to mark the passing of time. Only the meals that appear three times daily remind me that I’m not suspended in a pocket of timelessness.
This is why whenever I hear the door creak open down the corridor, I’m practically buzzing with excitement at the prospect of some kind of human interaction.
The guard’s name is Pierre, and he pretends he doesn’t speak English. But one time, I made a joke about the thickness of the soup he was bringing me, and I caught him smiling.
Also, Dante spoke to him in English when I arrived.
But I’m not thinking about Dante.
“Well, hello, princess.”
Until he’s standing right there in front of me. Soup bowl in hand.
I wish the patronizing smirk on his face would somehow obscure how objectively attractive he is. It’s a frustrating reality that I’m slowly trying to come to terms with. At least he’s ugly on the inside, where it counts.
“Where is Pierre?” I say stubbornly.
“Am I not good enough for you?”
I make a show of looking him over. “Pierre is prettier to look at.”
Untrue. But it’s enough for Dante’s smirk to falter just a bit, which is a small victory.
“And here I was just trying to check in and make sure you were settling in all right,” Dante chastises as he slides the bowl through the grate.
“Finally remembered I existed?”
“How could I forget?” he quips back. “You’re the sole reason my mother has been meticulously torturing me these last few days. All of which could have been avoided if you’d only behaved yourself back in Brooklyn.”
I cross my arms, a deadpan expression on my face. “Oh, how awful for you.”
“I’d take the cell any day.”
“All right, let me out of here, and we can swap,” I reply brightly.
Dante pretends to consider this. “Tempting. But I do recall you threatening to kill me, and I’d rather not take those chances.”
“You called me a sexual deviant.”
“Oh, in that case, it’s all terribly justified then.”
I glare at him. At some point he got close enough to the bars to have pressed himself against them. Almost his entire head fits through the gap.
I wonder if I might be quick enough to wrap my hands around his neck before he can pull away.
“Why are you here?” I bite out instead.
“To see if you were in want of anything.”
There’s a moment when I merely blink at him. He can’t really expect any other response than: “I want to go home.”
“Ah, good. You haven’t gone insane yet,” he smiles cheerily as if this is somehow good news to him. “I was worried the lack of social interaction would melt your brain a bit.”
“Pierre has been very good to me.”
Dante takes a step back, reaching into his back pocket, and chucks something through the bars toward me. I awkwardly scramble to catch it before it can hit the floor. “But does Pierre bring you gifts of classic literature?”
I examine the title on the front of the small dictionary with alarm. “‘ Talk dirty like an Italian ’?” I read.
“I’m interested to see if you have it in you to curse out my mother in her native tongue next time.”
Flicking through the pages, I blanche at the lists of increasingly vulgar swear words and their Italian translations. “This isn’t what I would call classic literature.”
“What are you talking about? I studied that thing more extensively than Shakespeare,” he begins to back away, hands in his pockets. “Happy reading. Oh, and the highlighted ones are my favorites.”
* * *
The positive thing about my little book of Italian swears is that the next time Dante visits, I have a greeting readily prepared.
“ Ehi, testa di cazzo .”
Unfortunately, this seems to have the opposite of my intended effect.
Dante merely grins at me through the bars in a way that is infuriatingly disarming. “Did you just call me a ‘dickhead’?”
“Do you prefer, figlio di puttana ?”
He laughs at this, a warm sound that rumbles from his chest. “Son of a bitch. You really have it out for my mother.”
And that low rumbling sound really is a problem.
Because the negative thing about my little book of Italian swears is that I’m now burdened with the knowledge of Dante’s favorite ways to talk dirty.
Sunshine yellow highlights over phrases like, il tuo corpo è un’opera d’arte —your body is a masterpiece, and Voglio assaggiarti tutta la notte —I want to taste you all night and Lo prendi così bene —you take it so well, have plagued me since his visit.
Imagining the words rumbling from his mouth sends a fresh wave of panic shooting through me every time.
And that is something I don’t want to examine too closely.
“You don’t sound that concerned.”
He shrugs. “It’s not like I need you to make a good impression with her.”
It’s at this point I realize Dante hasn’t brought me any soup. In fact, Pierre had dropped by what can only have been an hour ago, which means he’s likely here for the hell of it.
I tilt my head curiously. “But arming me with a dictionary of curses? Were you hoping I might, what, scandalize her enough so that she’d drop dead and do your dirty work for you?”
“Trust me, I’m not afraid of a bit of dirty work,” he winks. Flirtatious again.
He’s deflecting.
“You hate it here, don’t you?” I observe. “You dislike your mother. You thought my display when we arrived was amusing.”
The muscles of his jaw jump a little. “Enlightening, perhaps.”
“Why are you here?” I change tactics as the pieces fall into place.
“To check on you.”
“You checked on me yesterday after three days. There’s no need for you to be back so soon. Pierre tends to me well enough. He could have told you if anything had changed. Which means you must really truly hate it here.”
“Pray tell, how you made such an incredible leap?”
“You’ve come down here without any reason other than to torment me. Ergo, whatever is happening up there is somehow worse than talking to me down here.”
Dante’s mouth opens. Then, it closes again. Then there’s a soft little hum of discontent.
Bingo.
“Did you come down here to complain about how much your mommy is tormenting you?” I coo, batting my eyelashes slightly.
For a moment, I think he might fight back. But he’s too caught now, too proud. He storms off to the sound of my laughter.
* * *
“Okay. Fine. You’re right, she’s a nightmare, and there’s no one in this fucking castle that won’t regale her with my complaints as soon as they get the chance to fuck me over. So please, be a good little prisoner and listen to me before I actually go insane.”
Dante is breathless as he stands before the bars of my cell, eyes frenzied, anger rolling off his shoulders in waves.
I pretend to check my watch. “That was quicker than I thought.”
It’s not. It’s been two days and three meals since our last interaction. I hate the way it almost feels like a relief to see him again.
“She wants me to attend a ball. With actual dancing.” Dante begins to pace in front of the cell. “There’s a tailor coming this afternoon and everything.”
“You poor bastard,” I drone in Italian.
“I think I’d rather slice out my own eyeballs and feed them to myself.”
“Dickhead.”
“It’s like she’s doing all this on purpose to enact some kind of revenge plot over the fact that I left in the first place.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Yes, exactly.”
Dante carries on his tirade for at least an hour, giving me plenty of time to practice my ever-growing list of insults. At one point, he stops waxing lyrical about the dangers of ballroom dancing to correct my pronunciation so that I might insult him properly.
By the time he leaves, there’s an odd warmth in my chest that has been absent since I was able to pull one over on that Max guy back in Brooklyn.
As I stare up at the renovated dungeon ceiling from my bed, I turn over every new piece of information I’ve managed to extract from Dante’s ramblings, searching for anything that might help me in my escape.
His disdain for his mother. His anxiousness to be back in Brooklyn. Is there a reason he despises social gatherings? Does he have any allies here? Friends? Family beyond Evelina Grasso?
I fall asleep with questions that I ponder most of the following day. Some of the answers arrive sometime after my third meal, along with Dante and another tirade. This time, it’s about traveling to Modena to get things done.
Dante’s visits became a pattern in the following week. Each evening presents a fresh irritation for him to lament, sprinkled with just enough important information for me to pay attention.
Which is the only reason that I pay attention.
“Do you think we’re all destined to become our parents?”
Dante has taken to sitting on the floor with his back pressed against the bars. I’ve taken to mirroring him, slightly to the side. If I crane my neck to the left, I can make out his sharp profile.
“I think I’d look pretty ridiculous with a beard.”
The problem is, when Dante laughs, I stop thinking about paying attention for a moment. I just listen to the warmth of the tone, the freedom of it, the satisfaction of knowing that I caused it.
It’s a similar feeling that has begun to arise every time the door down the corridor opens for the fourth time every day. The warmth of settling into a routine with someone who seems just as trapped as I am.
There’s an odd sense of camaraderie in it.
“If anyone could pull it off, I would think you could,” Dante replies with a half smile.
He’s quieter and softer today. He came earlier and stayed far longer than he usually does.
Something’s clearly bothering him. But I don’t care to ask.
Only…
For the sake of my quest to gather information…
“What’s up with you today?”
His head turns to look at me. “Who said there was anything wrong?”
“You’ve not corrected my pronunciation once.”
“Well, you’re getting surprisingly good.”
I bite at my lower lip, considering how far I can push him. With a sigh, I lean back against the bars and close my eyes. “For the record, I don’t care. It’s just this is the only real conversation I get all day, and it sucks when you’re all mopey.”
“I’m sorry, princess. I’ll do my best to be happier for you.” The sarcasm doesn’t seem to bite as hard as it used to.
“Much appreciated.”
He sighs good-naturedly, and we sit in silence for a moment. I know better than to push him when he’s like this, and eventually, my patience is rewarded.
“My mother wants me married.”
“Congratulations.”
“Could you go back to insulting me in Italian?”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Thanks,” the smile sticks around a little longer this time. I ignore the satisfaction fluttering in my stomach. “That’s why she wants me at this ball tomorrow. To find a wife.”
Suddenly, several of his previous tirades make an awful lot more sense.
“You don’t want to get married?” I hedge.
“I’d like to fall in love,” he reasons back. “Eventually, I mean. Marriage seems like an impossible thing to me without it. But I doubt any of my mother’s bachelorettes have any real interest in me beyond the family name.”
“Don’t forget the castle.”
“And the castle.”
There’s an oddly comfortable silence between us, and I realize with a start that he’s trusted me with something vulnerable. It, bizarrely, makes me want to offer something back.
“I get it,” I say quietly, weighing my words, unsure how to share the burden of them, until I remember that’s all Dante has been doing to me this last week. “It’s not like I have any choice in who I marry, either.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see him looking toward me. “Do you know who it will be yet?”
I shake my head. “I mean, I know his name. But they were in the middle of negotiations when this asshole decided to break into my panic room and fly me to Italy.”
Dante reaches through the bars to nudge my shoulder playfully. He’s been doing that more and more. Casual touches here and there. Painfully short.
It’s the lack of general human contact that makes me crave it and think about it when I’m alone. I drag my fingers over the patch of skin in reverence.
Maybe I am going insane after all.
“Can I ask you something?” Dante says unexpectedly.
“I’m not telling you his name.”
“I insist that you don’t. Ever.” There’s an odd strain in his voice that disappears once he clears his throat. “You said back in Brooklyn…are you really a virgin?”
“You dickhead. ”
Dante groans. “I’m not flirting with you. I promise I’m just curious.”
And God, do I hate the small part of me that wishes that he was.
And I feel oddly trapped in this conversation now, worried that he might leave if I don’t tell him, terrified of what he might say if I do.
And I don’t owe him anything. And I hate him so much. And he smells like amber and relief from suffocating silence and rumbling laughter that pours out from his chest.
“It’s a tradition, okay?” I blurt out far louder than I meant to. “The debutant is a prize for the Cartel’s greatest ally. My mother was one, too. It’s not…unusual for me. It’s just a promise of purity and an act of respect for my future husband.”
“So you’ve never…”
“ Dante.”
His mouth snaps shut. His eyes a little wide.
I suddenly realize I’ve never used his name before.
The silence is suddenly less comfortable, charged with something I’m too scared to name. But it’s over almost as soon as it begins. Dante’s eyes flash dangerously, breaking the spell.
“The Cartel’s greatest ally is Hernando Lacruz.”
I school my face into a neutral expression. “He is.”
“He’s fifty-eight.”
“He is.”
“ Carmen.”
“I thought you didn’t want to know his name?”
There’s a shuffle next to me, and I almost regret pushing back so hard, because now Dante will leave, and I’ll have to ruminate on this conversation for the next twenty-four hours.
I don’t bother getting up. I just listen to the sound of his footsteps approaching the door, trying desperately not to fall too far into self-pity before he’s actually gone.
But he pauses, lingering on the threshold.
“For what it’s worth, you don’t deserve that.”
I laugh bitterly. “But I deserve to be your prisoner?”
The door closes behind him with an almighty thud.