Little Miss Mafia (The Salvatore Empire #1)

1. Bella

Bella

“You must be Vittorio's girl. He should be the proudest man in Chicago."

Margaret Halloran keeps her hand on my forearm a beat longer than the compliment needs, the way people do when they want something they haven’t said out loud yet.

I give her the smile I was raised to give.

It costs me nothing. I’ve been walked into rooms like this since before I could spell my name, and I learned the warmth the way other girls learned piano.

“He’d deny it,” I say. “My father takes credit for everything except me.”

She laughs, bright and rehearsed, and a server slides past with a tray of champagne I’ve been holding and not drinking for an hour.

The gallery on Michigan Avenue is full of people who’ll tell their friends tomorrow that they were here. The lilies on every surface have started to brown at the edges. Nobody has noticed but me. I notice things. It’s the one talent no one in my family has ever found a use for.

There’s one of my father’s men by the coat check, in a suit that cost more than anything on the walls.

Tonight it’s Gianni, who has bad knees and a daughter at DePaul and a gun under the left side of that beautiful jacket.

He’s been near me my whole life, him or one of the others, close enough to take a bullet and far enough that I learned early not to wave.

I am twenty-two years old and I have never once been alone in a room.

You stop noticing it the way you stop hearing a refrigerator, until a night runs long and you find yourself counting the exits out of boredom and feeling, underneath, the old soft animal comfort of being guarded.

I’ll think about that comfort a great deal in the weeks to come. What it was worth. Who paid for it.

My father wanted me here tonight. Vittorio Moretti doesn’t ask; he arranges, and then informs you of the arrangement over breakfast. Wear the gray, he said this morning, not looking up from his paper.

The Hallorans matter this year. Be charming.

So I’m wearing the gray silk and I’m being charming and I keep turning the small diamond studs in my ears, my mother’s, the way I do when a night runs long and I want to go home.

He is a man other men lower their voices around.

I have watched made capos go pale when he sets down a fork.

I have also watched him weep, exactly once, at my mother’s grave, and then drive me for gelato afterward and pretend neither of us had seen the other cry.

He is both of those men, and he has never once let me meet the first one on purpose.

The Halloran woman is your generation, he told me this morning, as if I have a generation, as if I’m a person with peers and a life of my own and not a thing he keeps polished behind glass and takes out when it suits him to look like a family man.

“And what is it you do, Isabella?” Margaret asks. “Your father is so private.”

“I finished my degree in May. Art history.”

“How lovely. And now?”

It’s a fair question. I’ve been asking it of myself since May. “Now I’m decorative at parties,” I say, light enough that she takes it for a joke and laughs again.

What I don’t tell her is that I could walk her across this floor and tell her exactly what she’s been ignoring all night.

The big canvas the gallery is pretending is the reason we’re all here is a forgery, or near enough that I’d stake my degree on it: the craquelure—the web of fine surface cracks—is wrong, too regular, the fine map of cracks you get from a heat lamp instead of a hundred years.

I know it the way I know which fork and which men to avoid, uselessly and expensively.

Four years learning to see what’s real underneath what’s presented, and the only thing anyone will ever let me do with it is make pleasant conversation at parties thrown to wash other people’s money through other people’s art.

Margaret has no idea she’s standing next to the only child of the most dangerous man in Chicago, a child who has never once been allowed to know a dangerous thing about him.

I know the house in the Gold Coast. I know the restaurant on Taylor, the men who stand by its doors and never eat.

Which rooms go quiet when I walk in, and which to stay out of.

That’s the whole of my education in my family: twenty-two years of learning exactly where I’m not allowed to stand.

Here is the thing none of them know, because none of them has thought to ask.

I’m good at this. Not the smiling, the seeing.

Put me in a room like this and I can tell you who’s afraid of whom, whose marriage is a treaty and whose is a siege, which of these soft rich people would sell the rest for a better table.

I learned it watching my father work a room the way other fathers teach their daughters to swim, by being walked in and left to manage.

He built me a mind like his and then locked it in a beautiful house and called the lock protection.

Most nights I can almost forgive him for it.

Tonight I’m tired, and the lilies are dying where no one will look, and I want, with a low and hopeless wanting I would never say out loud, to be something more than the most decorative thing Vittorio Moretti owns.

My phone goes off in my clutch. Not the polite hum of a text. The long pull of a call.

I excuse myself with a touch to Margaret’s arm, the mirror of what she did to me, and move toward the tall windows where the noise thins out. Then I look at the screen.

Nico.

He’s been my father’s captain since before I was born.

He stood up at my First Communion. The man does not call me.

Word comes down through the house, or through one of the soldiers, and whatever he has to say reaches me filtered and softened like everything else in my life.

Seeing his name does something to the back of my neck before I have a reason for it.

“Nico.”

“Isabella.” One word, and the floor tilts a half-inch under the gray silk. His voice is wrong. Nico’s voice is never wrong. “Where are you?”

“The gallery. The Halloran thing, you know where I am, you sent the car.” A laugh starts up in me and dies. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m coming to you. Stay inside. Don’t leave with anyone, I don’t care who.”

“Nico.”

“Isabella.”

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

There’s a silence on the line with something bad moving under it. In the background, a car door, his breath, a city going by too fast. “Not on the phone,” he says. “Forty minutes. Less. Stay where the lights are.”

He hangs up before I can make him say it.

Across the room, Gianni has his phone to his ear.

He makes a point of not looking at me, which is how I know I’m the only thing he’s been told to watch.

Two more men I didn’t place earlier have settled near the doors, easy, unhurried, the way they move when something has gone very wrong and they don’t want a room of civilians to feel it happen.

The machine that has surrounded me my whole life is tightening, quietly, by inches, and I’m the only one at this party who can feel the walls coming in.

I stand at the window with the phone warm against my jaw and the party going on behind me like a film with the sound turned down.

Across the glass, Michigan Avenue keeps moving.

Somewhere out there my father is having a worse night than I am.

I just don’t know yet how much worse, and I won’t let myself guess, because guessing makes it real, and I have spent my whole life being kept on the safe side of real.

I set the champagne down on a passing tray. Back in the room, the party keeps its volume up, warm and oblivious.

· · ·

The car ride is forty minutes I will never get back and never quite remember.

Gianni drives. No one speaks. I watch the city slide past in the window; the same city that was charming an hour ago, and I keep my hands folded in my lap.

I don’t ask, because asking is the last wall, and once it comes down, there’s nothing on the other side but the thing itself.

We pull up to an emergency entrance with its red letters burning, and the doors part, and the cold comes in, and I understand we are not here for anyone who can be visited.

The hospital corridor is too bright and too cold, and the floor has just been mopped. A yellow sign warns me, in two languages, that it’s wet.

Nico is already there. So are four of my father’s men, in a loose line down the hall, hands folded, faces set to the blank they wear at funerals and weddings both.

They straighten when they see me. One of them, Sal, who used to carry me on his shoulders at the lake house, won’t bring his eyes up off the floor.

That’s when I know. Before the doctor, before Nico crosses to me, before anyone says a word I can hold against them later. Sal not looking at me tells me everything the phone wouldn’t.

“Isabella.” Nico takes both my hands. His are shaking. I have known this man my entire life, and I have never once seen his hands do anything he didn’t tell them to. “Your father is gone. They couldn’t do anything. He was gone before the ambulance arrived.”

A doctor materializes at my elbow and says a time out loud, a number with a colon in it, the minute my father stopped.

I don’t catch the rest. The words go in and don’t land anywhere.

I keep my eyes on Nico because Nico is the only solid thing in the hallway and I have the sudden animal certainty that if I look away, he’ll go too.

I’ve imagined this. Every child of a man like my father imagines it, the way you press a bruise to check that it still hurts.

In the imagining, there’s always a warning, a bad feeling, a phone I half expect to ring.

There was no warning. Four hours ago he stood in our kitchen and told me to wear the gray and not embarrass him, and I rolled my eyes where he could see me do it, a small permitted rebellion, the only kind I’ve ever been allowed.

That is the last thing I gave my father.

An eye-roll over breakfast. I’m going to want it back for the rest of my life.

I’m going to want to reach into this morning and trade it for anything—a word, my hand over his.

And I won’t be able to, because he is a time with a colon in it now, and a table at Carmine’s that no one will ever set again.

“Where?” I say. My voice comes out level. I notice it the way you notice a stranger’s.

“Isabella—”

“Where, Nico?”

He doesn’t want to. I watch him decide to give it to me anyway, because he’s known me long enough to know I’ll find out, and the finding will be worse.

“Outside Carmine’s. On Taylor.” A breath.

“Two shots. He never made it through the door. It was fast, Isabella. I need you to hear that part. It was fast.”

Carmine’s. My father has eaten Sunday lunch at Carmine’s for as long as I’ve been alive. There’s a table in the back they keep for him. I have sat at it in a velvet dress with my feet not reaching the floor.

I think of him there, napkin tucked into his collar, ordering for the whole room because he always ordered for the whole room, the one place on earth where Vittorio Moretti let himself be loved out loud and didn’t trouble to hide it.

Somebody walked up to that on a public sidewalk and put two bullets in him like he was a line in someone’s book to be crossed through.

He ran this city for thirty years. He died eight feet from a door he never reached, in the dark, alone, while I was forty minutes away holding a glass I never drank and being charming.

No tears come. I keep waiting for them the way you wait for a stair in the dark, braced for the drop, and they don’t. What comes instead is the cold. It starts somewhere under the diamond studs and works down, and my hands, when I look at them, are perfectly still.

People say grief is hot, that it burns. Mine arrives cold, and orderly, like something being installed in me by a careful hand.

I’ll learn later that this is the first time I ever meet the part of myself my father spent twenty-two years making certain I would never need.

Tonight I only know that the screaming I’m supposed to be doing isn’t coming, and in the place where it should be there’s a clarity so clean it frightens the one person in this hall still watching my face.

Nico has seen this stillness before. I can tell by the way he holds my hands a little tighter, the way you’d hold someone you’ve just realized you no longer entirely recognize.

“Okay,” I say.

Nico’s face does something complicated. “Okay,” he repeats, careful, like he’s testing the word for cracks.

“What happens now?” I’m not asking about the body. I’m not asking about the funeral, or my aunts, or the phone calls. He hears the difference. Of course he does. He helped raise me on the safe side of every door in this family, and he’s the one, in the end, who has to open one.

He looks down the hall at the four men who would, every one of them, step in front of a bullet for the daughter of Vittorio Moretti and never tell her why. Then he looks back at me.

“The Commission has been notified,” he says. “You need to come with me. Now.”

Behind him, through the doors, the car is already running. Sal finally lifts his head and meets my eyes, and whatever he sees in mine makes him reach for the door handle before Nico says a word.

“Where?” I ask.

“You’ll see when we get there.”