3. Kylie
— ? —
Kylie
The famiglia dinner happened once a month, like clockwork.
Donna Rosa presided over it like a queen holding court, which, in a sense, she was.
The capos and their wives gathered in the dining room of the main brownstone, the one that had belonged to Giovanni’s father and his father before that, and they ate and drank and pretended they weren’t all calculating their positions while passing the antipasto.
I’d been doing this for five years now, three married, two engaged, and I could navigate the politics with my eyes closed.
Tonight, though, something felt different.
I noticed it the moment we walked through the door. The way conversations paused and restarted a beat too late. The way eyes slid toward me and then away, like I was a car accident they didn’t want to be caught staring at.
Giovanni had his hand on the small of my back, the automatic gesture he did in public, the one that meant she’s mine and this is the don’s wife and absolutely nothing personal at all.
I let him guide me through the room, nodding at the people I was supposed to nod at, smiling at the people I was supposed to smile at, being ornamental in all the ways I’d learned to be.
Then we reached the dining room, and I understood.
Bianca was sitting in my chair.
The donna’s seat. To the right of the don’s place at the head of the table, where Giovanni’s wife had sat for three generations of Ferraro marriages. The seat I’d claimed the first time I attended one of these dinners, nervous and young and trying so hard to project a confidence I didn’t feel.
She looked up when we entered, and her expression was perfect. Surprise. Apology. The faintest hint of embarrassment.
“Oh.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “I’m so sorry - I didn’t realize the seating was fixed. When I came in, no one was here yet, and I just assumed…” She trailed off, let the sentence hang like a question mark.
Giovanni frowned. Not at Bianca, at the situation, the way he frowned at any social complication that interrupted the efficient flow of his evening. He gestured to the seat on his other side, the one that should have been empty or occupied by Dante.
“Kylie, you can-”
“The donna sits to your right.” My voice stayed calm. Calm and cold and nothing like the rage boiling in my chest. “That’s how it’s always been.”
A beat of silence. I felt the room watching, all those capos and wives who’d been pretending they didn’t see, suddenly unable to look away.
Bianca stood gracefully. “Of course. I’m still learning all the traditions. Kylie, please.” She gestured to the chair like she was offering me a gift, like my own seat at my own table was something she had the power to give.
I sat. Giovanni sat. Bianca moved to an open spot three chairs down, and the dinner proceeded as if nothing had happened.
But something had happened. Everyone in that room knew it.
I caught Donna Rosa’s eye across the table. She was watching Bianca with an expression I couldn’t quite read, something between suspicion and calculation, the look of a woman who’d survived fifty years in this world by knowing exactly which threats to take seriously.
The meal passed in the usual way. Courses appeared and disappeared, conversations rose and fell, and I performed my role with the precision of long practice.
I asked Maria Calabrese about her daughter’s wedding.
I complimented Teresa Ricci’s new necklace.
I listened to old Sal Montenegro tell the same story about the ’87 shipment that he told every single month, and I laughed in all the right places.
Bianca, I noticed, was doing the same thing. Working the room from her diminished position, charming the capos’ wives, making herself pleasant and unthreatening and indispensable. She was good at it. Better than I’d expected.
After dinner, we moved to the sitting room for limoncello and gossip.
The men clustered near the fireplace, talking business in low voices.
The women found sofas and chairs and pretended not to be listening while they discussed children and clothes and the eternal question of who was sleeping with whom.
Rosa cornered me near the window.
“That girl,” she said, pitching her voice just under the conversation, “was raised to want my son.”
I took a sip of limoncello to cover my reaction. “Rosa-”
“Don’t Rosa me. I know what I saw.” She nodded toward Bianca, who was laughing at something one of the younger wives had said.
“Tommaso used to bring her to family dinners when she was twelve, thirteen years old. He’d seat her next to Giovanni.
He’d tell her stories about what the don’s wife gets to do, gets to wear, gets to have.
He was grooming her for a position that wasn’t his to promise. ”
“Giovanni was already betrothed to me by then.”
“And you think that mattered to Tommaso Russo?” Rosa’s laugh was sharp enough to cut glass. “He was a schemer, that man. Always playing the long game. If he couldn’t get his daughter married to the don, he’d get her close enough to matter. Close enough to wait.”
I watched Bianca across the room. Her dark hair gleamed in the lamplight. Her laugh was musical, perfectly pitched, nothing like the soft threat she’d delivered in that hallway two nights ago.
“She’s just a grieving woman trying to find her place.”
“She’s a viper in your garden, tesoro.” Rosa gripped my arm, her fingers surprisingly strong for a woman pushing seventy. “Watch your house. Watch your husband. And for the love of God, don’t let her make you the villain for protecting what’s yours.”
Before I could respond, one of the younger wives called Rosa over to settle a debate about baptism gifts. She went, leaving me alone with my limoncello and the view of a party I no longer felt part of.
***
The memory surfaced like a body from a river.
My wedding day. Three years ago now, but I could still feel the weight of the dress, still smell the roses that had been everywhere, on the altar, in my bouquet, trailing down the center of every table at the reception.
Rosa had insisted on roses. Ferraros were always married surrounded by roses, she’d said, and if I was going to be one of them, I’d better get used to the thorns.
My father had been dead three years by then.
It should have been him walking me down the aisle, his arm under my hand, his voice in my ear telling me it would be all right, his approval I sought when I looked back over my shoulder at the doors of the church.
Instead it was Declan, my uncle, who’d stepped into the space my father left behind and done his best to fill it.
Declan, whose arm was stiffer than my father’s would have been.
Whose eyes were harder. Whose silence said this is for the family in a way my father never would have let me forget.
The church was packed. Ferraros on one side, Jordans on the other, and a scattering of neutral parties who’d come to witness the end of a war that had lasted fifteen years and killed more men than anyone wanted to count.
I walked past their faces without seeing them.
I walked toward the altar, toward Giovanni, who stood there in a black suit with his dark hair combed back and his pale eyes fixed on me like I was a problem he hadn’t quite solved yet.
We reached the altar. Declan handed me off.
And Giovanni leaned in.
His lips brushed my ear. His voice was barely a whisper, meant for no one but me.
One sentence. Sicilian dialect, the old kind, the kind his grandmother still spoke when she got angry enough to forget herself.
I didn’t understand the words, but I felt them, felt them land in my chest and settle there like seeds, like promises, like the first breath of something that might have been hope.
He straightened. His ears were red. His jaw was tight.
“What did you say?”
He didn’t answer.
“Giovanni. What did you just say to me?”
“When you’re ready.”
The priest began the ceremony. We said our vows, the public ones, the ones everyone expected.
We exchanged rings. We kissed, and the church erupted in applause, and I became Kylie Ferraro in the eyes of God and the state and two families who’d decided our bodies were an acceptable substitute for peace.
But that whisper stayed with me.
When you’re ready.
Three years of marriage, and I still didn’t know what he’d said. I’d asked a handful of times in the beginning, and every time, he’d deflected. It’s nothing. Just something my grandfather used to say. I’ll tell you later. Later never came.
I’d looked up Sicilian phrases in books, online, anywhere I could think to search. I’d even asked Donna Rosa once, obliquely, if there were traditional things the groom said to the bride at Ferraro weddings.
She’d looked at me strangely. “Nothing beyond the vows. Why?”
So it wasn’t tradition. It was just Giovanni. Just my husband, whispering something in my ear that I wasn’t allowed to understand, and then keeping the secret for three years like it didn’t matter.
Like I didn’t matter.
***
I found myself near his study door without remembering how I’d gotten there.
The dinner party was winding down. Guests were leaving in clusters, kissing cheeks and promising to do this again soon, which they would because Rosa would make them.
I should have been in the foyer saying goodbye.
Playing the donna, performing the gracious hostess, being everything this family expected me to be.
Instead I was standing in a dark hallway, listening to my husband’s voice through a door that wasn’t quite closed.
“-been watching her movements for two weeks.” That was Dante. Calm, measured, the same tone he used for everything from restaurant recommendations to assassination orders. “They’re definitely interested.”
“Interested how?” Giovanni’s voice was harder. The don’s voice, not the husband’s.
“Questions. Pointed ones. One of their guys approached her driver last Tuesday. Asked about her schedule. Where she goes, when, how often.”
A pause. I went flat against the wall, pulse slamming in my throat, knowing I should walk away and completely unable to move.
“The Albanians asked questions about your wife, Gio.” Dante’s voice dropped, soft enough that I had to strain to hear. “About what she’s worth to you.”
Silence. Long enough that I thought maybe they’d stopped talking. So long that the blood rushing in my ears started to sound like the ocean, like static, like the space between one heartbeat and the next.
Then Giovanni spoke, and his voice was ice.
“Set up a meeting.”
“With the Albanians? Gio, that’s-”
“I said set it up.”
Footsteps. Moving toward the door.
I was gone before either of them could find me, heart pounding, mind racing, the question echoing in my skull like a bell that wouldn’t stop ringing:
What am I worth to you?