4. Ariana
4
ARIANA
I’ve disappeared off the face of the Earth. My team will never find me in this dungeon where Franco has left me to die. They will have given up by now.
I don’t know whether it’s night or day anymore. The only way to guess is by the noises infiltrating the layers between me and the outside world. They’re not much to go on.
A chair scraping in anger. Something crashing to the floor with such force, even I hear it. And then, there’s the men who come to clean up my prison cell and leave me some food, but there’s no set time for that. Sometimes, I’m so hungry by the time they come, for all I know, a whole day could’ve passed.
One is always holding a machine gun trained on me. The other does his thing while I’m too stunned to do more than blink, as my eyes need to adjust. There’s no way out. I’ve felt my way around the space, looking for cracks in the cold stone walls, searching for a weakness in the bolted wooden door. There’s nothing.
I’m rotting away like some medieval peasant who stole bread. Only one difference here: I know exactly how long I’ve been in here. Franco Fiore makes sure to keep count so I can be grateful for spending my last days like this, at his mercy.
He’s been here four times, but each visit has been such a painful ordeal, I have nightmares. I dread his return, the mere thought making my heartbeat spike, fear paralyzing my limbs. Even now, I’m unable to unfurl from where I’m curled up in a ball. I know how this ends. How else? There’s going to be that moment when his scalpel digs too deep and when he finally slaughters me by skinning me alive.
I’ve tried to detach from this situation and meditate myself into a state of calm, but I lapse. More and more often. I’ve always imagined if I get caught by the Mafia, they’d kill me kindly with a bullet to the head. Or anything else that would do the trick in minutes. Not this slow, starving uncertainty, death row in the dark, with no set execution date.
My ears home in on the noises that vibrate through the building. From far above, someone is descending to this dungeon. I still, overly conscious of every little sound. Metal against metal, scraping, slamming. Keys forced into locks, twisting as if it’s a chicken’s neck, breaking. Steps. I’ve counted them. Twenty-five down to this cellar.
Voices. I start to quiver uncontrollably. Franco . Not again? Not so soon? He was here yesterday, and I’m still raw.
By the time he has banged open the wooden door, I’ve all but pissed myself in fear. Light blazes into the space, and I cower away. I’m slowly going blind in this dark existence.
“ Piccola ragazza .”
His little girl. If only I were never born.
I should defy him and show no fear, but it’s become hard. I should fight, but it’s been nineteen days since I’ve been locked up here, and without enough food, I’m losing muscle mass. I’m weak. In the beginning, they tied me up, leaving me on this mattress for days, until I withered and all the fight drained out of me.
“Ariana,” Franco says again as he comes closer. “Come now, look at me.”
I squint in his direction, taking in the two looming male figures etched out in the torchlight Franco points to my chest. By the door, a henchman with a machine gun is on standby.
“And you call that a prize?” the other man says. It’s a new voice. He hasn’t been here before. “Fuck, just look at her. And the stench?—”
“Nothing a good scrub can’t fix, Vincenzo.” Franco comes up to me, harshly takes my jaw in his hand, and forces me to look up at him. “To think I planned to marry her at some point.”
“Trust me, Gigi will be a much better fuck than this hag.”
Both men smirk as Franco shoots this Vincenzo a glance. Gloating. He’s gloating, showing Vincenzo his prize .
“Why are we wasting time here, Franco? You took over from Randazzo. It’s been a month, and nobody has contested your rule. Once you’re married to Gigi, you’ll have access to all the money you’ll ever need.”
I can’t hear my own thoughts over the rush of adrenaline through my veins, over my heartbeats that hammer in my temples. My eyes hurt, but at least Franco isn’t shining the torch in my face.
I peer up at him, trying to make sense of the words. Vincenzo . Franco is marrying Gigi . My thoughts tick over, one by one. I’ve studied every last known Mafia family in Italy. Vincenzo is such a common name, but there’s only one Gigi I know of. Gigi Trapani. Vincenzo Trapani. And there’s the youngest one, Carla Trapani, still a girl. Maybe not. She must be finishing school this year.
Franco lets go of my jaw, and I don’t make a sound. He retaliates too quickly with his fists.
“You say you guarantee me access to your family’s millions, Vincenzo, but until I’ve seen the physical stacks of gold, the diamonds?—”
Vincenzo pulls a packet of cigarettes from his jacket’s inner pocket and holds one out for Franco.
“Don Trapani will bend to your rule, Franco,” Vincenzo says as he searches for a lighter. “You’ll see tomorrow night. We just need to be there early enough to make sure he understands his new position. He won’t stand in the way of you marrying Gigi. I’ll make sure of it.”
God help Don Trapani. And Gigi. As a woman, I already weep for her. From here, I can’t do anything to help her. I’ve done nothing to help anybody or stop that auction from happening the night Franco came for me. Where are all those women now? Mere girls drugged into slavery?
Franco tosses the torch to the mattress, and it rolls, comes to a standstill, and beams onto the stone wall, leaving half my body lit up but my face in the dark. I bite down on my jaw, fear already choking me because I know what men like these do with cigarettes.
Franco pulls a lighter from his pocket and toys with it. Each time he flicks it into flame, a tremor zaps up my spine.
Vincenzo nods to him, and as Franco holds the flame to his cigarette, he mutters between drags, “Does she even talk, or have you cut out her tongue?”
“I dunno. When I first met her, she used to be a real chatterbox. As a kid, you know,” Franco says as he lights his own cigarette.
I was a kid once. A girl, innocent and pure, with an easy laugh.
A thin ribbon of smoke finally reaches my nose. At least that part of me is still working a hundred percent.
“They always seem to become really quiet around me after our first introductions,” Franco says after another deep puff.
Both men smirk, and I bite down on my lip, sealing my mouth as tight as I can. Nothing is beyond Franco Fiore.
I watch the men’s quiet movements as they smoke in silence, the two cigarette tips glowing in the dark, almost hypnotic. They’re waiting…for what? To hear me plead for my life? Probably. They’d like that. Assholes.
“Nineteen days, Ariana,” Franco says eventually. “And now, we’re at a crossroads.”
“Fuck,” Vincenzo says with a laugh. “So long? You’re such a fucking psycho.”
“That I am,” Franco says, his eyes blazing into mine.
“Just kill her already. There’ll be nobody to contest you. No surprises out of the middle of nowhere.”
Franco just grunts then passes Vincenzo his cigarette, which has almost burned to the end. “Hold this.”
He pulls his own packet from his pocket and lights another two cigarettes and then leans into me.
“This is what’s going to happen, Ariana. Tomorrow is Friday, and we’ll be in Lake Como. This weekend, I’m marrying Gigi Trapani. Once I have the Trapani fortune in hand, you’ll really be obsolete. For old time’s sake, you get to live a couple more days until I’ve sealed the deal.”
I swallow down the nausea that comes with his cigarette breath in my face, at his creepy closeness and the very threat he poses.
Money . Franco’s quiet obsession. Money and power at all costs. Ambition is one thing. Ambition is planned, calculated, acted on with precision. Ambition, anybody can respect. Greed, on the other hand, is another beast altogether. Greed makes people do stupid things.
Marrying Gigi Trapani for her money sounds like a sudden, greedy move, unless he disposes of her, too, which is probably his long-term plan. Here’s the problem, though—you don’t kill the daughter of one of the oldest Mafia families in Italy without retaliation. Unless he wipes out the whole Trapani family including Vincenzo in one go. But these two appear to be more than Mafioso messing around—they look like they’re best friends. Friends who share everything. Ambition, money, women…. I can’t wait for all of this to go sour.
Greed is going to be Franco Fiore’s downfall, and I already feel cheated. First, someone kills Randazzo and denies me the pleasure of doing so myself. Now, I’m going to be dead before Franco Fiore meets his match. It will serve him right to find a knife in his neck one morning, compliments of Don Trapani. No chance in hell Don Trapani would allow his son to match his daughter with this psycho.
Franco’s next action is so swift, I hardly have time to breathe. He fists me by the hair, and I yelp in pain as he twists the dirty strands tight. I reach up for his hands, but it only exposes a sliver of skin between my panties and T-shirt.
“Until then—” he whispers, his sickly breath ghosting my skin as he traps my legs with one of his, “—and to save myself some time, let’s count together. This is for today. And Friday.”
I gasp as he kills the glowing tips of the two fresh cigarettes on my body, the sound strangling somewhere between my throat and my lips, the burn too intense for me to keep completely quiet. I want to push him away, but Vincenzo holds me in place, his hand circling my wrists where I’m yanking at Franco’s grip on my hair.
Franco holds out his hand for his other cigarette which Vincenzo passes to him. “Saturday.”
I hiss at the sudden and intense burn, right next to the other ones which still glow with pain.
“And Sunday.”
The fourth and final cigarette burn. Tears seep from my eyes as my chest heaves with sobs I contain in a death grip in my throat. I will not cry openly. I will not let go in front of these men.
“Seems she’s lost her voice. No nagging,” Vincenzo says as he lets go of my hands. He picks up the torch, shining the light on my side. “Good job, Franco.”
They smirk at each other, and I could vomit except the only thing that will come up is bile.
“Not my best work, but she’s been a good canvas to play on.”
Franco lets go of my hair and steps away, and before I can even orientate myself, the men are gone. I’m hulled in darkness again, slowly trying to calm down with each sound that bangs farther and farther away.
Time slips past as I let the pain, the radiating, pulsing burning take over, and I just exist there in the dark, forcing myself to breathe slow and deeply. I reach for the latest addition of the art Franco has created on my skin. I’m hurting everywhere he’s been. It will be over soon.
By Monday, I’ll be dead.