If Luca Tangorello wanted to marry me, we'd have been married by now. It's for the best we aren't, because he's brought home a bruised prostitute. What does he expects me, his fiancée of four years, to do? Roll out the red carpet for them?
The girl sits on the edge of the couch and watches me like I'm the devil incarnate. Her eyes are pansy-like. They peek innocently from her face, despite her being used six ways from Sunday, then beaten up. Or in the process. I frankly don't care to interview her. The problem is that my fiancé did. He'd spotted her crying in his place of business and brought her to our sort-of love-nest. For years, I knew he sought love everywhere he went, but he never dragged the evidence to me with a proud look of a cat displaying a killed bird.
"Let me guess. She's a new item for our couples' counseling." I twist the engagement ring around my finger. The golden band is getting a bit loose.
She shoots furtive glances at the rug and the paintings on the walls. Yes, bitch, we picked all these beautiful things with Luca when we had such hopes for our future.
"Well, Luca? What do you want from me?" If he'd asked me to finish her off, I'd help him. I wouldn't like it, but I would help him. That's how I was raised in the mafia: bratva sticks for their own and all that.
"Kamila," Luca pleads, "be a human for once. The girl needs a place to stay until we can press charges."
"When you say 'we', do you mean the three of us?" I ask sweetly. "Because to me, three is a crowd."
"Stop it. Stop it or I'll-"
"Do what? Hit me? After fuming about men who lift their hand at defenseless flowers?"
Luca's lips curl into a snarl. This is the only hints so far that the son of a bitch is a scion of the bulldogs and hell hounds, not poodles.
"You're not a defenseless flower, Mila," he says. "You're a steel flytrap."
"And so, I can be threatened with physical violence? Or told to pucker up and host your whore?" I love how cold I sound. His breathing turns rugged. It used to be that his hitching, labored breaths made me moan. Not anymore.
"That's not what I meant. Just look at her, for God's sake." The girl straightens the pleats of her tartan skirt as if on a cue, harmless, terrified, unfortunate. "Isn't there a shred of compassion left in you?"
I blow hair out of my eyes. "In the old country-my old country, not yours-we say, don't humiliate a man with pity. And when I say, a man, I mean women too, Luca."
"Compassion isn't the same as pity."
"Fine, let's split hairs." I survey his prize, like he asks me to, because four years together is a long time, and some habits die hard.
On her own, this troubled young woman who likely lives with an asshole pimp would move me. I'm sure Pansy didn't have someone kind to turn to. Police wouldn't do anything, no matter how black-and-blue her tormentor paints her tummy, how many pricks he sticks inside her, and how loud he makes her cry. The shelters are losing funding because screw socialism is our government's motto. I know how the cruel world works. Sure, on her own, she deserves compassion.
But she didn't come to me with her grievances.
Oh, no. She came to my house glued to Luca's strong arm.
He deposited her onto our couch, because she did that thing available to her-batted her eyelashes-and a defender stepped right up. Some women prefer to get a man to rip the throat of their abusers. They seek shelter with the biggest bruisers, until they batter them too. Then the cycle repeats till their youth is smashed.
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Raised by the Mafia
Science Fiction||L.A. Lawless Serial|| ||Season 2|| What do mafia princess and an ex-FBI agent have in common? An enemy. What should they do about it? Fake-marry, of course, and rub it into his face. What could possibly go wrong...or right? Right.
