Chapter 7
Chapter Seven: Antonia
Giada decides I need a dress.
I tell her I'm getting married in black and she tells me that's depressing, and I say the marriage is depressing, and she tells me depression is not an aesthetic choice.
I tell her I'm a mafia princess murder machine and I'll wear whatever I want, and she tells me that is exactly why I need something pretty because, and I quote, "murderers deserve nice things too, Toni. "
This is how I end up in the backseat of a Bonaccorso SUV on a Thursday afternoon, heading to an Italian bridal boutique in the city with Giada in the passenger seat and a soldier named Torres driving because Leone won't let us leave the compound without an escort.
Torres is quiet, professional, and deeply uncomfortable with the fact that Giada has spent the first fifteen minutes of the drive asking him personal questions he clearly doesn't want to answer.
"So Torres, you got a girlfriend?"
"Ma'am, I'm on duty."
"That's not what I asked. I asked if you have a girlfriend. On-duty people can have girlfriends. It's not mutually exclusive."
"I'd rather not—"
"Boyfriend? I don't judge."
"Ma'am—"
"Giada." I lean forward between the seats. "Leave the man alone."
"I'm being friendly. This is what friendly looks like."
"This is what harassment looks like. Let the man drive."
She pouts for about four seconds and then her phone buzzes and she's gone, scrolling through something, the Torres interrogation abandoned mid-sentence because her brain found something shinier.
Torres exhales through his nose and his grip on the wheel loosens and I catch his eye in the rearview and give him a nod that says I'm sorry and also this is permanent, she's not going to stop, you should prepare yourself.
The boutique is on a side street in the Italian district, the kind of shop that doesn't have a sign because the people who need to find it already know where it is. The Bonaccorso family has an account here. Leone made a call, and the owner, a woman named Signora Vitale, is expecting us.
She's seventy, at least. Gray hair pulled into a bun so tight it's doing the work of a facelift, glasses on a chain around her neck, and the posture of a woman who has been dressing mafia brides since before my mother was born.
She looks at me when I walk in and her eyes go to the karambits on my belt and she doesn't blink.
"Bonaccorso bride?" she asks.
"Castillo bride. Bonaccorso groom."
"Ah." The single syllable carries thirty years of opinions about inter-family marriages and none of them are positive. "Take off your weapons and step onto the platform."
"I don't take off my weapons."
"Then I don't fit your dress. The pins will catch on the sheaths, and I'll stab you by accident and then your husband will come here and make problems for me, and I'm too old for problems." She holds out her hand.
"The blades stay on the counter. You can see them from the platform. Nobody will touch them."
I look at Giada. She shrugs in a way that says she's right, you know she's right, just do it.
I unclip Vita and Morte and set them on the counter.
The absence is almost dizzying in it’s intensity.
My hips feel wrong. My hands feel wrong.
Everything feels exposed and off-balance, and I hate it.
I hate that I hate it because a twenty-five-year-old woman should be able to stand in a bridal shop without her karambits and not feel naked.
But here we are.
Signora Vitale works fast. She pulls three dresses from a back room, all of them white, all of them wrong.
I reject the first one because it has lace and I don't do lace.
I reject the second one because the neckline is too high and I can't move my arms. I reject the third one because it looks like a wedding dress, which is what it is, and therein lies the problem.
"You don't want to look like a bride," Signora Vitale sighs.
"I don't want to look like a woman who chose this."
She studies me for a long time. Then she disappears into the back and comes out with something different.
Not white. Not black either. Dark red, almost wine, with a neckline that sits just below the collarbone and a back that drops to the base of the spine.
No lace, no beading, no decoration. The fabric is heavy and it moves when I move and when I put it on and look in the mirror, the woman looking back isn't a bride.
She's a warrior.
"Oh fuck," Giada says from the velvet chair she's been lounging in. "Toni. That's the one."
"It's not white, which might piss off my father."
"Fuck white. You're not a virgin and you're not going willingly and white would be a lie. That dress is the truth." She stands and circles me, looking at the back, the way the fabric falls, the neckline. "Matteo is going to lose his fucking mind."
"I don't care what Matteo thinks."
"I know you don't, but I do, because watching that man's composure crack when you walk in wearing this is going to be the highlight of my entire year. Possibly my life." She turns to Signora Vitale. "Can we take it today?"
"Alterations need two days."
"Perfect. Done."
Signora Vitale pins the dress while Giada drinks prosecco from a bottle she found in the back and provides commentary that ranges from helpful ("the waist needs to come in a half inch") to unhelpful ("can we add a slit so she can access the thigh holsters?
") to completely unhinged ("what if we sewed pockets into the lining for the karambits so she can walk down the aisle armed and nobody knows? ").
The fitting takes an hour. I put my clothes back on and clip Vita and Morte back onto my belt and the world rights itself.
My karambits are back and my hands are steady and the dress is being altered and in four days I'll walk into a compound war room in dark red and marry a man I hate with blades hidden on my body because Giada's pocket idea was actually brilliant and Signora Vitale, against all professional judgment, agreed to do it.
"Drinks," Giada announces as we leave the boutique. "We're in the city. Torres is our DD. There is absolutely no reason not to go to a bar and get drunk before going back to that concrete prison."
"We should go back."
"We should do a lot of things. We should eat vegetables and exercise regularly and not antagonize the Bonaccorso Butcher, but we're not doing any of those things, are we? Bar. Now. Torres can wait in the car while we get our drank on."
Torres, when consulted, says that his orders are to escort us and return us safely and that a stop at a bar falls within the scope of his mission parameters, which is the most military way anyone has ever said sure, I'll wait in the car.
The bar is three blocks from the boutique. Not a mafia bar, not a family establishment. A regular bar with regular people and regular noise.
Giada orders wine. I order whiskey because Savannah has ruined me for wine and the only alcohol that feels right anymore comes in a tumbler. We sit at the end of the bar, our backs to the wall because neither of us sits with our backs to a room, and we drink.
The first drink loosens my shoulders. The second loosens my tongue.
By the third, Giada is telling me about the soldier she danced with last night at Savannah's bar, a man named Ruiz who apparently has arms that should be illegal and a laugh that made her stomach do something she's calling "the flutter. "
"The flutter is not a real thing," I say.
"The flutter is absolutely a real thing. It's that feeling you get in your lower belly when a man laughs, and the laugh is deep enough that you feel it in your own body. Like a bass line. But in your uterus and pounding straight through to your juice box."
"Jesus Christ, Gia. Juice box? That's not how anatomy works."
"That's exactly how anatomy works. You've just never experienced it because you won't let a man get close enough to feel his bass line. You're too busy waving knives around and telling everyone to fuck off."
"My knives have served me well."
"Your knives have served you defensively. I'm talking about offense. I'm talking about letting a man in, Toni. Not emotionally, God forbid, but physically. When's the last time you had sex?"
"That's none of your business."
"It's been a while. I can tell because you're mean and your skin is dull and you've been brOODING.
You need to get laid. Specifically, you need to get laid by the man you're marrying in four days, because the tension between you two is so thick that every person in the compound can feel it and it's making everyone uncomfortable. "
"I'm not fucking Matteo Billone."
"You ARE going to fuck Matteo Billone. Maybe not on the wedding night, maybe not willingly, maybe not without a fight, but it's going to happen because the way you two look at each other when you think nobody's watching is not the way people look at someone they're indifferent to.
It's the way people look at someone they want to destroy, and in my experience, destroying someone and fucking someone are the same muscle. "
"That's disgusting."
"That's biology, babe." She finishes her wine and waves for another.
We're four drinks in when the man sits down next to me.
I don't notice him at first because the whiskey is working and Giada is talking about Ruiz's arms again and the bar is loud enough that one more body on a stool doesn't register. But then he leans in, close enough that I can smell his cologne, cheap and oversprayed, and his arm brushes mine.
"Can I buy you a drink?" he asks. Average height, average build, a face that thinks it's more attractive than it is, and a confidence that belongs in a frat house, not a bar where a woman is visibly carrying two curved blades.
"No."
"Come on. One drink. You look like you could use the company."
"I have company." I nod at Giada, who is watching the exchange with the focused attention of a woman who is deciding whether to intervene or let me handle it.