Love's Inferno

Chapter 18 - An Idea of Annulment

Dante

I was smiling, I could feel it and despite knowing how inappropriate it was - I couldn't seem to stop. The woman was the most magnificent, unpredictable, gloriously brave person that I had ever met. For the first time, in a long time, I couldn't work fast enough to ready my muscles into a scowl, even a light frown because I was overjoyed. My future wife was, as Vitto had described her, "dangerous" and I was enthralled. Before me stood an iteration of the woman I had once called cartoonish and somehow, that also felt fitting. She was in no way comical, with a harsh furrow marking her forehead in the form of a frown but she was animated. She had switched deftly from surrendering her own life to protecting someone else's with nothing more than dangerously shaped pepper spray. She transformed in the blink of an eye from a woman overcome with emotion, a misguided one I would have to work hard to erase, to a gun-wielding one-man army. 

She had disarmed him, the boy, with a kubaton that I only briefly recalled having been nestled in her hair earlier. I had heard the clink of it against the helmet and thought a metal hairpin an interesting choice for her soft natural hair, and nothing more of it but it was so much more. The woman had removed the kubaton from her key chain and pinned her hair up with it. My smile faltered then, at the thought that someone this brave kept a weapon stashed in her hair in case she ever encountered McCarthy. I knew now, unlike weeks ago, that he was why she was this stocked up - a walking armoury. What I didn't know weeks ago was that she knew how to throw knives...with frightening accuracy. I had only ever seen one knife thrower in person... and she was better than him. 

I watched her now... closely and realised I had failed once again. I couldn't figure her out. I couldn't get any assessment of her right because I didn't know her. I didn't know her history, the deep lore which would explain how she had learnt to throw knives. Sure the metal weapon was technically a kubaton but still. I had learnt about them during a miserable time in my life where Vitto made me his involuntary sparring partner during hand-to-hand combat. Kubaton's had two purposes. One, they were used to increase the blow in fights, with metal ones causing serious non-lethal damage. Two, steel ones could be used defensively to break car windows. Three, I had never seen anyone throw one - let alone with spectacular faultlessness which is how I knew she threw knives. The end of her kubaton was pointed but not sharp which is probably why she threw it at the, now still mewling, boy. 

She stood over him and spoke to him in a language I'd never heard her use before. I listened to them attentively and realised she was speaking patois of some kind. The more I listened to their hushed, hurried conversation the more I realised that she was speaking pidgin not patois. I only knew this because two of the bouncers at the club routinely spoke pidgin to one another when they wanted to exclude other guys on the wire. Watching her felt like an uncanny de je vu, you know the kind where you're acutely aware you've experienced this before but can't quite piece the next sequence of it together. Then it clicked. It was weeks ago on the front steps, she was everything I'd never imagined. She was holding a gun without bullets and I was ablaze with interest once more. The only available indicator that the gun wasn't real was the fact that it wasn't cocked, which was only apparent from my vantage. She was holding it as if it was real... hell she probably knew how to work one if Uncle Ern had any say; what with her cleaning his collection. "Begrudgingly"... She didn't like guns - another clue that she probably favoured knives.  

"What a fucking party!" I heard the sounds of bodies moving before I turned - Vitto. "Cugine. Bonasera or should I say Good Morning!" he smiled broadly at me, as I took the opportunity to turn my gun fully towards the crowd, towards Silvio if need be. 

"Riot! How the hell are ya!" he beamed at Shiloh who winked back at him without moving a muscle. "Dante... what did I miss?" I filled him in in Sicilian, in private, for all of ten seconds before I was interrupted by Silvio.