Mafia King: The DiLustro Arrangement #2 by CD Reiss

Author:CD Reiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781953520326

15

VIOLETTA

The story exhausts me. Hearing it and believing the parts of it grounded in reality, newly aware that it’s affected every part of my life. Not because of its supernatural powers, but because so many people made choices about my life because they believed.

Now the pain of having my choices stripped from me is that much sharper. That much more exquisite for knowing the forces behind it. The anesthesia’s worn off. Now I get to feel it all, and unless I get my period in the next couple of days, I’ll be bringing a baby into it, and she’ll inherit more than a culture of servitude.

Out of the car, I make my way to the front door, but Santino grabs me and presses me against the rough stucco of the house, between two trellises tangled with rose vines.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he says.

“Jesus Christ on the One True fucking Cross. How can you miss the entire point?” I push him away, lose my footing, and grab onto a trellis of thorns. “Fuck!”

I’m bleeding, but as much as I’ve wanted to see blood in the last few days, it’s just my hand. Not deep enough. I want to bleed myself clean from the inside.

Santino takes my palm and puts his handkerchief in it before closing my fingers into a fist. I hiss from the pain and his tenderness. They’re both unwelcome.

“Calm down,” he says.

“No.”

“Yes.”

I don’t have to dare him. His mouth presses firmly against mine, prying it open. I want to bite him, but he’s too strong and I’m too weak.

The world goes quiet for just a second. Eventually, I’ll hate myself for yielding, but not yet. The mental voice screaming for me to stop and grab Gia, run for the border grows silent the more Santino reins in his kisses from firm to soft, from commanding to offering.

My knees are weak and I’m so close to being a boat adrift. He can’t just kiss me and make this disappear. It won’t fix things. It won’t undo this obscenity of a life.

And yet, like a guy looking at a stolen artifact, I want to believe.

“This is how I make you calm down.” He leans past me and punches a code into the door’s keypad, then he pushes it open with his foot. He’s calmed me with a kiss, and now he’s going to bring a sweet, docile wife into his house.

“Fuck you.”

“That mouth.” His voice rumbles and breaks like a wave. “Why can’t you just be quiet sometimes?”

“You can’t make this go away by kissing me.”

He smirks, then steps just outside the door, holding his hand toward the entrance to our home.

I am suddenly hyper aware of every sound in the front yard. The night birds singing in the trees. Fountain water trickling into the pond. The whisper of the breeze in the leaves. It all adds up to a song of outside. Not just outdoors, but my existence outside the boundaries that have been set for me without me even knowing.

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