14. Milan
MILAN
Sicily was dancing in the passenger seat of my car because I had permitted her choice of music for three minutes total. She was singing quietly, spraying her pink perfume over her throat, brushing her hair, and attempting to apply lipstick in the small mirror.
There were blonde hairs trapped in the door handles, perfume spray stains all over my leather seats, and makeup scents instead of my expensive air freshener, but there was evidence of her happiness, and I found that I did not require her to stop.
Since spending time with her in the garage the week prior, I had silently sought out her presence. I had even watched those ridiculous movies she and Adriano enjoyed watching together just to be in the same room as her.
I could not think of the way I had held her in my garage. Not of the way she had allowed herself into my arms, not of the way she had touched my skin, and certainly not of how I had felt a stirring lust in my bones. It caused me to feel…shivery, hot, like I needed her to fix it.
I was becoming a fool, one that required his wife to study closely.
Today, we were meeting with the Ferraris at a restaurant that the Don, Davide, owned.
This was crucial in solidifying their household under my rule as Capo dei Capi, so I did not believe the trip to be as exciting as Sicily did, but I had noted that her friendship with Elena Ferrari could have caused this excitement.
Sicily fished something long and black out of her bag, unscrewed it, and brought it to her eye before frowning.
Adriano had watched her do the flick over her eyelid before and had explained the illogical concept to me.
I did not understand how it could be healthy to put a stick near your eyeball until I noted its purpose, and I found it visually gratifying.
This activity required patience and steadiness, and the car was neither. Her hair got in the way, the car was too fast, and she kept huffing in signs of frustration.
I eased my foot off the accelerator slowly, ignoring the loud beeping from behind us, and reached one hand over to her hair to hold it away from her face. Her curls were smooth and glossy in my hand, and I resisted the urge to pull.
If the car were to speed up, causing me to pull hard and she accidentally ended up with her lips near mine, that would not technically be my fault. If she then felt obliged to touch my skin again, that would also not be my fault.
She smirked at me, but it soon turned into a smaller smile, a true display of happiness, and it softened my burning need. “You are going to cause traffic.”
“You are going to cause a makeup malfunction,” I countered.
“Touché, marito mio.”
Sicily applied the stick with precision. She was very efficient. “What do you think?”
I think you are extremely visually pleasing, and I do not wish to look away from your face.
The words clogged in my throat, leaving me with a simple, “That was well-achieved.”
I did not wish to look away from a lot more than just her face. Sicily had chosen to wear a tight pink dress with her back exposed. This caused me a new kind of malfunction, one that I did not want to rectify straight away.
I was compromised around her, and this was suboptimal on serious levels.
Once we had arrived, I pulled the car into the nearest parking spot and threw myself out before she could say another word and infect my brain with her pleasing face.
Adriano was already waiting by the restaurant’s doors, and I did not respond to his frown at my behavior.
I simply pushed the doors open, deciding instantly that remaining in the car with a confused mental system was more enjoyable than sitting anywhere with the man who threw his arms around my neck.
Davide’s interests lay within loansharking, though his wife had enjoyed this restaurant while pregnant with their second child so much that he had purchased it as a gift for her and had designed it to be reminiscent of her childhood village in Italy.
It consisted of red brick, fake green vines and plants, and black and white photographs of the true village.
It was quaint and somewhat relaxing to the ordinary mind, I assumed, but I was far from relaxed.
My body stiffened upon Davide’s impact, jolting as if he had shot me through the stomach.
Hugging was revolting.
Davide was a tall, muscled male with thick arms, so his hug felt more like an attack, just like how the scratch of his black hair against my skin forced a shiver through my body.
I tapped his shoulder twice with my palm, attempting to indicate that he could stop, but he did not appear to understand my communication and continued, laughing into my ear, strengthening his arms, and likely speaking words I was too stunned to hear.
When he finally pulled away, I let out an audible groan of relief, one that Adriano chuckled at while my wife became Davide’s next victim.
She cringed over his shoulder.
“Davide,” I warned.
It was relieving that she did not enjoy hugging too, though I contemplated whether our close bodily contact at the garage constituted as hugging. Surely a hug would have been forward facing and we had not been…
I did not know, and I did not desire to think about it too hard either.
Humans were confusing.
Davide placed a hand on Sicily’s spine, leading her to the table. I watched her face lift when she saw her friend, Elena, and how she attempted to sit opposite her. I shifted instantly, stepping forward to guide her to sit between me and Adriano instead. She was in optimal safety there.
The scowl she shot me indicated her anger, and I rolled my eyes in response. Perhaps she would not have scowled if she was permitted to sit with her friend, but she would not have smiled ever again if she had been targeted and killed.
“Congratulations, both of you,” Davide said, interrupting my mind thinking of my wife’s death, as he took his own seat beside his youngest daughter. “Consider this meal our wedding gift.”
I did not correct him that he had already gifted us a significant sum of money for our wedding or inform him that I had spent it on ridiculously large pink cushions to make Sicily feel welcome in my home.
“Thank you,” I answered. “Your restaurant appears to be something my wife may like to return to, so I shall be in touch to book the entire place out one evening.”
Davide chuckled, his wife grinned, their youngest child continued coloring on her napkin, Adriano shot me a look that I had learned was of approval, and I was aware of Elena mouthing “oh my god” at my wife, to which Sicily simply blushed pink.
Resting my arm over the back of her chair appeared to grant me the further approval of Elena Ferrari, and I tried not to imagine the paintings of her and her father’s enemy that were seared into my brain.
A selection of food was delivered to our table to thankfully interrupt my thoughts of Matteo Bonafede’s painted penis.
Pasta dishes, risotto with expensive seafood, salads, cold meats and bread, fish, steak, and roasted vegetables were plated in front of us, and while this was an ordinary display to win favor, Sicily had not been raised with the extravagance that she should have been; she blinked at it all as if she did not know where to begin.
Primo Bianchi had once possessed all the means and money to give Sicily the upper-class childhood people assumed she had experienced, but in the years that I had known him, it had always been evident that Bianchi had prioritized throwing money at fixing his reputation rather than giving his children the expensive lifestyle they’d deserved.
I took her plate before my own and selected everything that I knew she would like or perhaps would be tolerant of trying considering her ridiculous habit of eating box mac and cheese for lunch daily.
She did not look at it when it was placed before her, but she did look up at me, smiling and exhaling like I had cured world hunger.
“So, tell me, Milan,” Davide started as he set food in front of his little twin of a daughter. “Tell me what this Capo business is about.”
“There is no business to it,” I said. “I will be Capo dei Capi.”
Davide leaned back in his chair, skewering a salad tomato roughly onto his fork but not eating yet. “Only if we agree, correct?”
Adriano chuckled. “Sure, but if you don’t, you’ll be fucked.”
“Have the Bonafedes agreed to your rule?” he asked.
Elena’s fork slipped from her fingers, clattering onto her plate, and Sicily sent her a look that she appeared to understand because she fixed the expression of surprise on her face.
I only nodded once Elena had composed herself; I was not interested in making it worse for her or exposing anything that was for my wife to deal with.
Davide scoffed. “Then no. I fucking hated your father and his god complex, but I like you, Milan. I was prepared to follow the Gioffres and allow you to be my Capo, but I would rather be exiled from this fucking society than be neighbors with the Bonafedes.”
I frowned. “You are not required to converse with them. I am prepared to respect your ridiculous feud. You only need to respect me, and I will handle your differences.”
An uncomfortable silence fell over the table.
Sicily grew stiff beside me, her focus flickering between the parents and children opposite us. She locked eyes with Davide’s wife, Anna, a few times, and the two of them shared a silent smile that told me they were both finding this silence as intolerable as I was.
And then, as if she could read my mind, the tiny speck of a human opposite me pointed at my wife with a huge grin and fingers covered in bread and cheese and practically screamed, “I drawed a fairy princess that looked like you at school!”
Sicily paused her chewing, swallowed, and the smile that appeared was one I had not seen before. She looked like my mother when she had smiled at me, but Sicily did not have children, and she never would, yet this was still a maternal look.
“You did?” my wife asked, leaning closer to the girl. “Well, fairy princesses are really important. What did your fairy princess like to do?”
The sudden urge to smile was unwanted and inopportune.
The child reminded me of Siena with her dark curly hair and intense imagination, but I forced myself to note her blue eyes; Siena’s had been brown, like mine.
Adriano shot me a brief look from behind Sicily’s back, but I did not look at him, not fully. He was likely thinking the same. He noticed Siena’s absence as much as I did, and malfunctioning was not an option right now.
The girl gasped and looked up at her big sister who grinned. “The fairy princess likes to do sports.”
I raised a brow.
Sports were a unique choice, though I nodded as though this was an extremely important hobby for a fairy princess to partake in.
Davide rolled his eyes and turned to his mobile under the table instead. The Don did not appear to care about his daughter’s interests. This made my chest hurt, but it was unsurprising and that made it worse.
“What kind of sports?” Sicily asked, exaggerating every syllable, which the child seemed to respond to as if it was another language entirely.
“Tennis.” The child nodded sternly, manhandling a piece of bread into her mouth. “She is allowed to do tennis; her papa did not say ‘no more tennis at school.’”
“Arianna,” Davide growled, still not looking at her.
Sicily sucked in a breath, taking my glass of red wine and staring into the liquid as she swirled it around the bottom.
I placed my palm on her tense, slightly cool spine; something in my body required me to because it was highly likely that my wife was about to say something that she should not.
That, and her spine was exposed right beside me, and I could not stop myself.
I wished badly that she would touch me again.
“What’s wrong with tennis?” she asked Davide sweetly, with a small head tilt that was anything but sweet.
Davide remained silent for a long second, his eyes flicking upward and onto Sicily. Finally, he barked, “Who gave you permission to question my parenting, woman? Do you see my wife speaking out of turn? You have a lot to learn, Mrs. Lucca.”
“I did.”
The attention of the table turned to me as I leaned back in my chair, pulling Sicily’s closer to run my hand down the length of her back. It reminded me of touching her skin on our wedding day, though I had not known back then that I would find her skin so soft.
“I gave her permission to speak,” I continued. “You will not refer to my wife as ‘woman’, and you will respect her questions as you would mine. Am I understood, Davide?”
He nodded once, barely an action, and that was how I knew that we were already following the social cues of a Don to his Capo dei Capi.
Some signs were more important than the contract itself.
“Step outside and allow my wife to speak with your daughter about tennis without your unnecessary interference.”
He paused, evidently unsure what to do with that order.
“Now.”
He rose tentatively, only leaving once he realized I was serious.
The table breathed in his absence, but Sicily gave me a glance that I could not determine the meaning behind, but that I knew she believed I had errored somehow, that she was angry. I leaned back in my chair, and she moved hers away, engaging with Arianna again but not me.
She was ignoring me.
Silence meant anger, yet I did not know what I had done to invoke this reaction.
I had almost become the king, but it seemed as though I was losing more than I was winning.