10. Salvatore
10
SALVATORE
“Thanks for helping with that rat problem, Sal,” Red says over his glass of whiskey.
I’ve lectured Red more than once about the dangers of talking business in public meeting places, but he thinks if he has a gun at his back and speaks in code, he’s invincible. He’s lucky Barbara has a soft spot for him because I would’ve let Dom run him out of town ages ago.
I nod at him as I cut into my steak. Next to me, Dom’s nearly finished wolfing his down and is already eyeing the bread basket.
“You might be dealing with another infestation soon,” I say, ignoring the crawling sensation over my skin. I just had this restaurant swept for bugs—I don’t need to overthink it. What I need is to move this check-in along so I can get back to the house.
My phone buzzes. It’s my special alert for movement in the basement. Marisol must’ve woken up from her nap.
Next to Red, his uncle Barbara puffs at a cigar. A breeze carries it directly to my face, and I make note to shower immediately after this. Technically, Medium-Rare doesn’t allow cigars, but you wouldn’t know it by the waiter’s gleeful expression as he races to our table.
“More whiskey, gentlemen?” the waiter asks.
“No, Matty, we’re good,” Barbara says, rousing from his torpor. Red looks at his own empty glass and pouts. “How’s your mom doing?”
“Great, thank you, Mr. Barbara.”
“Stay in school, yeah?” Barbara flashes a few twenties as a tip, and Matty takes the money and runs. Barbara turns to me. “What sort of infestation?”
“Wild dogs,” I say. “Running around your warehouses. Make sure they’re locked down tight is all I’m saying.”
The younger of the Boughan brothers Colin goes by Mad Dog—a fitting name for a man that makes Junior look like a Boy Scout. His older brother Gavin does what he can to reign in the younger but despite Gavin’s efforts, Mad Dog’s been mixing with a bad crowd. He wants to hit some of the warehouses the Barbaras’ use for their prescription drug distribution. If he doesn’t blow himself up, he’s liable to start a war.
Barbara digests this as he accepts a fresh cigar from his nephew. “Thanks, Turi. We’ll look into it.”
As he pulls out his cigar cutter, I lean back in my chair. This is the same song and dance he always goes through when he’s about to suggest something I might not like. Dom senses it too and yanks the bread basket toward him. My phone buzzes. My fingers twitch.
“Aldo still hasn’t changed his mind about Rekhson?” Barbara asks once he’s finally sucking on his new cigar.
Next to me, Dom snorts.
We had a good thing going with the former District Attorney Harrison. He stayed in his lane, helping protect the fine men and women of Chicago by passing all the laws that Aldo didn’t veto.
When Rekhson took over last year, Aldo set himself to charming her as well, but she rejected him. She’s completely clean and a little too popular. She ran her campaign on reducing gang crime within the city, and she just passed a law that punishes gang members harshly if they’re caught with a gun. Such a simple and effective measure to keep us in line.
Aldo was spitting mad when it came out. She caught Barbara’s nephew Virgilio with that one, and the idiot almost threw us all in hot water by making a plea deal with her. Luckily, Summit Construction is building a high rise over his remains as we speak.
“Maybe,” is all I say.
Barbara’s on board to scare Rekhson or bribe her, but as consigliere, he needs to keep what the other families want in consideration. And very few people other than Aldo want her dead. Better that Aldo goes to jail for a while than the entire Family takes the kind of heat that comes with killing a state official.
“Be careful with her,” Barbara says. “We don’t need any extra attention, capisce?”
Of course, I agree. But Aldo likes flaunting himself in front of God and everyone. And Rekhson doesn’t like that it makes her look like a fool. She’s made Aldo a special project of hers, and I can’t say I blame her.
“Yeah.”
Barbara sighs. “You’re a good boy, Turi.”
“One more thing,” I add. “I’m getting married.”
Red sputters on his water, but Barbara only raises one thick eyebrow.
“The e-girl?” Barbara asks, using the stupid fucking nickname Dom came up with for Marisol.
“Her name is Marisol Vasquez,” I say at the same time Dom chimes in, “The very same.”
“You got a picture of her?” Red asks, too-casually.
“Shut the fuck up, Red,” Dom cuts in.
Red mutters something about wanting another whiskey and wanders off in search of the bar.
After a long pause, Barbara scratches the side of his neck with his fork like an orangutan with a stick.
“Good. This is good. Aldo know?”
“Not yet.”
For a moment, Barbara is all cunning consigliere as he files that information away. Then he burps, and the impression fades. He lifts from the table with a groan, sounding every bit the old man he is.
“I better go pull Red outta that bartender’s tits,” he says. We shake hands, and he brings me into a tight hug. “You take care, Turi.”
“You too.”
Barbara reaches over to clasp Dom by the back of his head and presses their foreheads together. Dom has to fold himself over to meet Barbara, but he does so willingly.
“You take care, Dom. Come by soon. No one appreciates Debbie’s arancini like you do.”
Dom grins. “I will.”
The second we’re in the car, I whip out my phone to check on Marisol. She’s been in the basement for two days and hasn’t stopped pacing long loops around the perimeter. She’s looking for another exit, I note with equal measures of disappointment and thrill.
I thought we were getting somewhere after she let me fix up her lip. She saw me covered in another man’s blood, but she hadn’t cared. We were finally ready for me to join her at dinner instead of watching her on my monitors all night. And then she ruined it by running.
She keeps reminding me she’s not the girl behind the camera. That girl couldn’t argue with me. She couldn’t lie to me. She didn’t know she could leave.
I run my thumb along the edge of my onyx ring and stare out the window. Now that I have the real Marisol, I’m fucking it up.
Mom told me all the ways Dad had hurt her. Matteo would cry and refuse to listen, but I couldn’t turn away. I always had to know. A few days before we escaped New York, she slipped Dad’s onyx ring onto my too-skinny finger. She made me look into her bruised face and swear I’d kill him one day. He was the first man I learned to hate.
I’m not him.
I’m not hurting Marisol. I want to protect her.
Even to myself, it tastes like a fucking lie.
“How’s your prisoner?” Dom asks as he drives the car into the street.
“Restless.”
He’s been doing this all day, needling me with questions.
What’s the captive doing? Is she crying? Did you break her yet?
He wants to call on my threadbare conscience, force me to reckon with my paradox. I have a woman—my fiancée—in my basement, and somehow, I still want her to walk out and tell me she’ll stay with me and she won’t ever try to leave again.
“I would be too. I don’t think I’d ever forgive someone who put me in a cage like that. I’d certainly never marry them.”
I meet Dom’s bright eyes across the rearview mirror.
“Where was all this empathy while we were dipping Viriglio’s fingers in a jar of acid?”
Of all the shit we’ve done over the years, keeping Marisol safe in my house with hot food, fresh water, and clean clothes has to be the mildest of my sins. I haven’t forced her to do anything. I haven’t hurt her.
“Same place as your foresight. Tucked deep away. You keep trying all this vinegar nonsense, but where’s the honey? All you’ve shown this woman is that you’re a grade-A asshole with control issues. There’s not a single thing she could point to that would make her say, yeah, that’s the guy I want pumping me full of babies.”
I set aside the image of pumping Marisol full of my babies. “And now you’re an expert on women?”
Dom scoffs. “Doesn’t take an expert to know if you treat a woman like shit, she’s gonna hate you for it. Especially your woman.”
“I’d rather her hate me than get caught by Junior and tortured.”
“Pretty fucking convenient the only solution you’ve come up with is keeping her under lock and key in your basement.”
I grit my teeth. “What would you do if it was Annetta?”
His hands tighten on the wheel and then slacken just as quickly. “I’d let her make her own choices,” he answers gruffly. “Even if I hated them.”
All the building anger drives out of me like a punch to the gut.
We drive the rest of the way home in silence.
Falling into work is the easiest thing in the world. It’s as simple as turning on my computer and letting myself get dragged in any one of a hundred different directions.
But not today.
The only screen that draws my eye is Marisol’s. She’s taken the books I had left next to the mattress and torn the pages from them one by one.
She left them artfully arranged on the concrete floor in a pattern that spells “LETS TALK”.
I’m surprised it doesn’t say “FUCK U”.
Let’s talk.
Half of me wants to hear how the person with no options tries to bargain. The other half knows they’d be sweet, empty lies.
Dom, and likely the rest of my staff, think I’m a tyrant for doing this to her, but I haven’t even put in a fraction of the effort I could into breaking her.
She broke the rules and now she can suffer the consequences. That’s not tyrannical, it’s fair. Expected. She had no reason to run when Junior came to my house. She was perfectly safe with Camillo.
I watch as she falls back on the mattress and stares at the ceiling, her arms extended like wings.
Better that she’s bored than floating in pieces at the bottom of Lake Michigan.
Buck hops onto my desk and peers at the monitor with Marisol’s image. He levels an accusatory gaze at me.
Giordana knocks at the door.
Besides Dom, Giordana’s the only person who has the access code to my watchtower, and Dom doesn’t knock. She lets herself in, dragging a vacuum and duster behind her. I swivel around in my chair as she makes a show of plugging the vacuum in. She’s normally very efficient about cleaning my watchtower when I’m out, so there’s only one reason she’s here at this moment.
She cocks an eyebrow at me as she starts vacuuming and glances meaningfully at the duster.
In the old days, Mom and Giordana took us to work cleaning people’s houses. Matteo would always pout and huff over a stove or bookcase for an hour, but I didn’t mind the labor. I liked having the excuse to look through the clients’ things.
I pick up the duster and work alongside her in silence. When she finishes, she doesn’t slip me a cookie like she did when I was a kid. Instead, she gives me a sour look and folds her arms across her chest.
“Let’s hear it,” I say. Everyone’s volunteering their opinions today.
“Are you ready to hear it?” Giordana asks. I nod, and she continues, “You’re being an idiot.”
I can practically hear Matteo muttering, “ Lecca-culo .” Ass licker.
When Giordana was pissed, he’d always say her face puckered up like she’d just licked someone’s dirty asshole.
“Care to expand on that?”
“You’re torturing this poor girl. She doesn’t want to be here, and you can’t keep her locked up forever.”
“I’m not locking her up forever. She escaped against my orders, and now she has to understand what the consequences of that look like. Anyone else in her shoes would have been cleaned up by the Janitor. The basement’s hardly a punishment in comparison.”
Impossibly, Giordana’s mouth puckers further. “What did she eat for lunch?”
“Antipasto, chicken involtini, salad?—”
“No kibbles?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Just double-checking, because you are treating her like a dog . If you want one, get yourself a puppy and let her go.”
“I’d love to treat her like a guest , but every time I give her another freedom, she tries to escape.”
Giordana looks like she’s making a concerted effort not to swat me with the feather duster. “Of course she does! I swear, Turi, if your mom could see you now…” She pauses, and we both let that sink in. “Marisol’s a smart girl, right? She’s going to see the danger in your life and go running in the opposite direction, as any person with common sense would. What do you have to offer her? Protection? How is she going to feel protected when you’re suffocating her? The only thing you’re going to get out of this is a broken girl or a woman who hates you. "
“So I just let her go, knowing Junior will take her?”
“What would your dad do?”
I frown. My dad would do whatever he needed to get what he wanted.
He convinced my mom as an eighteen-year-old girl to abandon her family and get pregnant, knowing her weak-willed Don of a father wouldn’t anger God—or the new connections my dad’s family offered—by taking her back. And once he had his wife and his two heirs, he wanted complete obedience from us all. He beat my mom every time she forgot an associate’s name, failed to show anything less than absolute adoration, or whenever baby Matteo or I pissed him off.
My kind, delicate mom, who’d grown up on canapés and champagne, withered into a bitter husk. Once her brother Aldo came to power, he sent for the stolen Mafia princess, but by then, it was too late. It’d been too late for years.
She worked cleaning jobs with Giordana, ate dinners with Aldo, and watched movies with Matteo and me, but none of us could distract her from the letting go that drinking could offer. Even with all the love surrounding her, real life continued to poison her when my piece-of-shit dad—who already had a new, younger wife—sent Mom regular death threats because he couldn’t stand the idea of her surviving without him. In the end, he got what he wanted when I came home from college to find Mom’s body in the garage, surrounded by empty bottles and her pistol.
“If you love this woman so much,” Giordana says, dragging me back to the present, “let her go. Be patient and watch out for her. If she decides she wants to come back to you, then trust her.”
I swore I’d never be the kind of man my dad was. I want to guard and control Marisol, but I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t want to break her.
“If I let her go,” I say, “Junior’s going to hurt her.”
“ You’re hurting her.”
“I… don’t want to do that.” My shoulders drop on an exhale. “Thank you. Please help her bathe and change. I’ll wait for her in the dining room.”
“About time.”
Giordana takes the cleaning supplies and leaves.