She rubs her wrist and stares up at me, her eyes calculating as she weighs her next move. I can already tell I’ve underestimated her. She’s probably used to that, and she’s figuring out how to use it to her advantage. But I’m onto her now. She’s not the spoiled, drunk party girl I read about in the gossip columns when I did a little research over the past month. Or rather, she’s more than that. It’ll take more than a curfew to rein her in.
Behind me, the church doors open, and I hear the first guests spilling out, talking about the beautiful ceremony, the kiss, Eliza’s dress. I don’t turn. I stare down my bride, resisting the urge to drop my gaze to her plump, pink lips.
Her eyes dart to the crowd, then back to me. “Did you mean what you said in there?” she says, her words coming out in an urgent rush. “That you won’t control what I do behind closed doors if I’ll be your wife in public?”
I have only a second to decide. In a moment, we’ll be noticed. She’ll scream I was hurting her and get me executed. Just because it’s a wedding, that doesn’t mean anyone’s unarmed. You can bet your ass every guy in here is carrying, plus half the women, not to mention the number of nondescript guys hanging around the bosses, guys I know must be bodyguards. This wedding is probably the FBI’s wet dream—if they could pin anything on anyone. All the families are here. They could take down the entire New York mafia. Or they could try, anyway. They’d probably only succeed in getting a lot of their own men killed.
Just as I know better than to refuse her outright, I know better than to agree to anything binding with this girl. I can already tell she’s sneaky and fake as fuck.
“Show me what a good wife looks like to you today, and I’ll decide tonight.”
“Not good enough,” she says, lifting her chin and giving me a haughty look.
“Eliza,” calls the woman I thought was her young stepmother until Little Al corrected me and told me she was Mr. Pomponio’scumare.She comes tottering our way on the paving stones, her heels making her wobble.
I grit my teeth and resist the urge to tell the woman to get lost as she waves and calls out again.
“Be my good little wife today, and you can choose your reward tonight,” I say to Eliza. “Act like a little brat today, and I choose your punishment.”
Something flickers across her face, some unreadable expression. I could dissect all I saw in that one flash of her eyes, but I don’t. It doesn’t matter. She slips her hand into mine, lacing our fingers like we’re a real couple, but I know the gesture for what it is—a handshake. She’s agreed to my deal. She smiles serenely at her father’s mistress, and I can’t help but wonder about the true feeling she harbors for this woman. She’s too good at faking it, better than I am. But I won’t be outmatched. I won’t be outsmarted and manipulated.
My life depends on doing my one job—bringing our families together. So, that’s what I intend to do. If I have to make a new bargain with my bride each day, so be it. I’ll compromise, like a good husband. One bribe at a time, she’ll give me what I want. If she doesn’t, she’ll get what she’s asking for.
eight
Eliza
“Girl, why are you still here?” Bianca asks, staggering against me and throwing an arm around my neck. We stumble a few steps into the water, which is frigid even in July. “That’s what I don’t understand. Shouldn’t you be bleeding on that beautiful man’s white sheets right now?”
Even in my drunken state, my heart lurches at her words. I know better than to believe the promise of a Valenti, to believe he’ll leave me alone tonight. That’s why I’ve postponed the inevitable, why I’ve gotten myself sloppy drunk with my bridesmaids instead of spending the reception next to my groom. If I take enough shots, surely it won’t hurt too bad. If I drink enough, maybe I won’t even remember it tomorrow.
I don’t do well with pain. I live for pleasure. What really scares me is that once I do this, oncewedo this, it’s real. The deal is sealed. There’s no undoing it, no getting out of the marriage. Part of me knows it’s already too late, but that’s the rational part, the one that recognizes the ring on my finger and the marriage license in the safe.
Some other part of me, somewhere that doesn’t care about signatures and official documents, the real Eliza, inside my heart, knows. It knows that once he’s been inside me, he owns me. There’s no going back from that, no getting out of it. Once it’s done, King will control me. He’ll have all the power. And maybe that’s an illusion, but it’s all I have to hold onto. The only bit of control left to me. My own body.
Because I can’t control where I’ve been forced to move or live, who I live with. My whole life uprooted from the bedroom at Daddy’s I’ve slept in since I was a baby, when Mom went through an artistic phase and painted giraffes and lions and safari animals on the walls.
The same room where I got my first period, and Mom wasn’t there to ask, and I didn’t want to ask Daddy, so I just lay there in bed bleeding all night, thinking I was dying, that something in my belly had ruptured and that’s why my abdomen hurt so bad. The next day, the housekeeper found my bloody sheets and had to tell me about periods because that wasn’t the sort of thing I learned about in Catholic school. Then she told the whole staff, and everyone knew, and shame burned in my cheeks every time I passed them, as if they could see what they hadn’t before, that I wasunclean.
But at least the nanny asked if maybe it was time we painted over the babyish safari animals still on my walls. It wasn’t the kind of thing my father would notice or think to ask, and I was grateful when she offered me buckets of pink paint with a hopeful smile that I thought was about me and not her bid to ride the Anthony Express. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I didn’t even like pink.
Back then, I hadn’t understood Mom like I do now. I’d been angry. But those animals had made me feel like maybe one day things would be right. As if knowing she’d once cared enough to hand paint each stripe and spot on every zebra and giraffe proved that she somehow loved me, even though she hadn’t contacted us once in the two years since she left.
But now that I was a woman, as the housekeeper informed me, I had to accept the truth. I had my dad and the nanny parade, and that was all the family I’d ever have. My brother was dead, and my mother was dead to me. I told the nanny I loved the paint, even though it was hideously bright and looked like something an eight-year-old would pick. I even asked if I could help. I relished each stroke as I rolled the garish paint in wide stripes over the beautiful animals my mother had painted with love and care. It felt positively criminal—and I loved it.
I halfway expected her to walk in as we were doing it and scream at us for ruining her hard work. Or to call the very next day and casually ask, and I’d have to admit what I’d done, slathering on the pink paint so thick it ran like Barbie blood down the walls.
I didn’t understand then. Now I get it. Now I know why she left, what was worth so much that she’d disappear from her own daughter’s life forever, not even showing up at her wedding, what people say is the most important day of her life. Mom knew. She had one when she was eighteen, too. She knew this day isn’t something to celebrate. It’s something to dread.
“If you don’t fuck that man tonight, I will,” Lizzie purrs, swaying her hips in a seductive slow dance as she twirls at the edge of the water, her hands twining into the breeze above her head like silk scarves. I wonder if she’s dancing for my husband, if he’s watching her, wishing he could fuck her instead of the frigid little bitch he ended up with. An ugly streak of jealousy darts through me, but I push it away. I don’t want his eyes on me. If he’s watching her, wanting her, he can have her. I hope he goes to bed, and she sneaks into his room and fucks him for me.
I glance at the bay windows overlooking the beach, but I don’t see him there. I turn back to my friends, enemies, and competition.
“Like you’d bleed,” I scoff at Lizzie, and the other girls break into a chorus of giggles.
“Oh, I’ll bleed for my husband,” Lizzie says. “You just have to know what you’re doing. Let him rough you up a little when you’re still dry, and you can bleed any time you want.”
“Really?” Bianca asks, gaping at the other mafia daughter.