Love's Inferno

Chapter 17- Legtimised Want

Dante

Silvio was a man weak with privilege. The kind of man the other men in the organization laughed at and not affectionately either. He was the butt of the joke, the sad clown none of us could seem to avoid inviting to parties so you could imagine my surprise at finding myself grateful to him. He had just given me the best party favour of my dreams - my wife. 

I considered myself to be a man who had achieved a great deal in life, it's not something I often thought about (my life's achievements) but I knew I had made a good thing out of the opportunities life had presented to me. I knew it well, the list of accolades the few magazines I agreed to interview with would recite to me but it had always felt feeble and hollow in comparison to my father's. I had been raised with the belief that my manliness and my success in life could only directly be correlated with the kind of family that I'd make for myself. "Men who don't spend time with their family aren't men at all." my father would say to me, echoing a sentiment shared by all the Sanseverino men. 

The absence of a woman, a wonderful one, was frowned upon as a departure from tried and true familial tradition. There was nothing more formidable to a Sanseverino man than his wife. No one was to be respected more. No one's advice deemed more valuable. The absence of my very own was incongruous with the values I was raised with and an ever-aching pressure point I'd learnt to ignore since New York. Since Rosalie, if we're being precise. I had shelved away the failure, hid it behind the solitude that my position demanded from me and I had managed just fine until now. I felt the beginnings of it - hope. I felt it begin to burrow into my marrow, into me, while Lou argued with Silvio. I wasn't just turned on by her brazenness; I was in awe of her wit. I was in reverence of her agility. Both Lou and I knew that there was only one person who was looking for her but, for reasons I couldn't understand now, she had concealed this knowledge from Silvio and goaded him into an argument. 

Not just any argument but one she had won by all accounts until just now. I had never, in twenty years, seen a man violate omerta if only because we all understood the severity of the repercussion which always followed afterwards. Repercussion, singular. In this instance? the end of your life. Silvio had a penchant for recklessness and this argument proved no different. In his haste to dominate the space, and assert his importance over her he exposed himself, worse still us all. Well... not all of us. He knew nothing about me, my role, except for the fact that I wasn't made. While I watched the two of them argue, I came to the unshakeable conclusion that Shiloh knew I was involved with the family, perhaps from the first moment she read Tony's Twitter account. I was convinced of this because she had a tell. Shi would rather start a fight, to detract from the truth, than engage in a conversation. It's exactly what she had done with me and what she'd successfully achieved with Silvio. 

Silvio was an idiot of his own kind, yes, but he was also hurt. His father had defended a stranger (to his mind) over him and simultaneously thwarted his plan for petty vengeance. He would never admit it out loud, the fact that he didn't have his father's respect, but it was clear in comparison to how he treated Shiloh; a woman. And not just any woman but one outside the family. Well... not for long if I had a say which I now did, albeit two geriatrics refused proposals later. 

Here's the thing that everyone seems to have skipped over, suspiciously including Uncle S, Shiloh had successfully outsmarted him. Silvio could make all the threats he wanted against Shi, about exposing her to the rest of the family, but in doing so he would end his life with hers. There was no way he could explain his commitment to killing her without explaining how she knew about him in the first place- she'd won. Self-preservation could easily ensure that he wouldn't breathe a word about her ever again if I called his bluff. Knowing him he probably wasn't even aware of this caveat in his onslaught of threats. Knowing her she would've been - if she knew more about us and our rules but she didn't... I did.