Take Me Capo, page 3
You don’t scream or give these assholes none of your fear.
My father told me to be silent.
You belong to us.
I’d forgotten.
You are Colonia.
No one comes, and for a moment, Daddy’s instructions are a mercy.
Then I’m confronted with the cyclops gaze of a camera I hadn’t noticed before. It’s mounted in a corner, too high to reach, its lens shiny and black, as menacing as the view down the barrel of a gun. Next to it, a red light blinks.
Whoever they are, they’re watching me closely.
I’ve always known we have enemies. Other, newer families calling themselves Mafia or Cosa Nostra. They are criminals, and the few authorities we aren’t inside confuse us with them. But until now, that knowledge remained vague and shadowy—as I got older, I started to think of our rivals as nothing more than bogeymen the grandmothers used to keep little girls in line.
Of course, the outside people would destroy our way of life if they knew about it—but they don’t know about it. How could they? We are stealthy and smart. Law-abiding citizens, invisible in the system for generations. We’re nothing more than a web of imperceptible connections.
I look for something to hide under—a table, a chair, a pile of burlap, anything to shield me from that impassive, all-seeing gaze. But there’s nothing: just empty racks and broken pots and my ruined dress hovering inches from my as-yet-unruined body.
I press the neckline to the skin and look right at the camera. “Are you just a pervert?”
Nothing happens. I bend my knee to take off my shoe, grab it by the toe, and as my arm is back, I think of the times Grandma took me out and all the outsider men who looked at me with lust.
“Pathetic.” I fling the shoe at the camera and hit it, but it still stares at me.
It’s not until night, with hunger clawing my body from the stabbing in my guts to the tingle in my fingers that I hear footsteps from the other side of the door. Even through the hope of food and rescue, I back away from it.
The door to the greenhouse bangs open. I whirl around to find myself once again face-to-face with Dario Lucari.
Chapter 5
Sarah
Dario’s now dressed in plain clothes: dark pants and a white shirt with buttons open at the throat. The sleeves are rolled up to reveal his tattooed forearms. They are corded with muscle, and the rest of him coils like a whip. He’s tall and deceptively slender. I don’t think I stand a chance if I attack him outright. Especially since the cold façade he presented in the car has cracked open to reveal a simmering cruelty that scares me more than anything.
“Princess Colonia,” he says without an ounce of emotion. He’s stating a fact, and I am that fact.
You don’t give these assholes none of your fear.
“Only daughter of Peter Colonia, one of the most powerful crime families in all of New York.”
“Don’t talk about us like that. We’re not like you.” I don’t know what he’s like, but we wouldn’t point a gun at a woman’s head on her wedding day.
He takes a couple of steps in my direction, stopping in a strip of blue moonlight.
“You went to a private school in an abandoned church. All your friends were raped into marriage in their teens. Your life was sold for territory.” He spits out the last word.
One of the first things a Colonia child learns is how to deny her world if outsiders ask. I respond automatically, my voice surprisingly proud for someone who’s shaking in her skin.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His laugh is mirthless. “Don’t lie to me.”
I remember the feeling of the gun at my head, his look of determination, the way a potential for violence seeped from his pores, stinging my nose with bitter terror and the sense that I’d never been so alive.
He knows about us, and he means us harm.
And yet he is like a vaccine, inoculating me against fear by giving me a dose of it.
“Do you feel pathetic?” he asks.
I bow my head so my face doesn’t give me away.
“You should,” he continues with a sneer. “You’re neither as powerful, nor as pure as you think.”
I remain silent.
“You think your little group, your secret society, will protect you. That it cares about you. You believe that it matters to be among the chosen.”
He’s drawn close to me, but he doesn’t touch me. The malice radiating off him is as palpable to me as his body heat.
“It’s my wedding day,” I say to the floor because I need to say something and it’s the one thing he knows already.
“I don’t have any sympathies,” he assures me. “So, if you’re trying to appeal to them, you can save your energy. You’ll need it.”
My eyes settle on the hollow of his throat, near where his pulse throbs, and I think. Okay. He can claim he has no human side, but he is fully corporeal. Just a man.
“You want something from my father.” I look up, meeting his eyes. “He’ll give it to you. Whatever it is.”
My father would draw the stars down from the sky for me. I’m as sure of this as I am of gravity.
“What if I want something from you?” Dario asks with a gaze so direct I’m lifted from the floor, standing on nothing but air and the solidness of his will.
It’s unbearable. When I try to put my own gaze back on the floor, he takes me by the chin and points it up until I’m looking right into the dark emptiness of his eyes.
“I know what you want,” I say. His hand falls away from my face, and I make an effort to point it upward without his help. “It’s the only thing you can take from me.”
“Maybe I just want a forbidden plaything.”
“My family will find you.”
“Correct. The minute I made that first wrong turn, I was as good as dead. Shit, the minute I put your driver in the hospital, I committed to my own murder. But enough about me. Let’s talk about you and how much you mean to me.”
“They won’t let you hurt me.”
He scoffs as if I’ve said something laughably naïve. “They’ll let me torture and abuse you before I kill you, as long as their hive isn’t disrupted. They’ll let you die to maintain secrecy. They’ll let me stick my cock anywhere I want if it’ll buy them time.” He shakes his head and takes one step back. “If, in your worthless education, they taught you the world was fair, they lied to you.”
“Just do it, then.” I stop holding up my dress. It doesn’t drop but sits inches away from my body. The cold air goosebumps my breasts where the loosened bodice falls away. “I can’t stop you.”
“Be quiet, Schiava.”
I don’t know what the last word means. Maybe it’s Italian. My family came here at least two hundred years before his showed up. Civilization has wiped the language from my genetic code.
Dario circles me, taking in my dusty dress and single shoe, making it clear that he’d just as soon spit on me as have to keep looking at me.
“I’m not one of you, and that’s all that you need to know. I don’t follow your rules. I don’t honor your boundaries. I don’t care how many hundreds of years of uninterrupted triumph you’ve enjoyed. I have my own people, and they follow my rules. To the letter. Or I shoot them.”
My heart is a fist trying to punch its way out.
“Nod if you understand,” he says.
I nod. I understand he’s a murderous deviant. That’s enough.
“Bene, principessa,” he says, and I take it for an agreement.
“I’m not a princess,” I insist. “If that’s what you mean to call me.”
“No, you’re not a princess to them. You’re a tool. Or…” He takes half a step back to take in the whole of my frame. “A nail. Just another pretty little nail holding up the entire structure.”
He doesn’t deserve my denial because he’ll only use it to prove his point. If he wants to rape me, he will. I press my lips together. He doesn’t say anything, stretching the silence between us until his attention is so taut my insides squirm.
“I know what they tell you,” he says before breaking his gaze to come behind me. I feel him there. I feel how my dress hovers away from me. Feel his eyes probe in the space between, looking for the place the shadows cast my body into mystery. “That you’re separate. That you don’t hurt anyone. That you have your own economy with the outside and it runs clean. That it’s moral. That you’re sheltered for your own protection. I’ve met plenty who know what they tell you. I never met anyone stupid enough to believe it.”
I feel his breath on my skin, and I want him to touch me so badly I have to swallow back a plea.
“I’m not stupid,” I snap defensively.
Outsider men live for nothing besides themselves. They consume a woman’s soft parts and discard the husks on the street. Grandma told me horror stories when I was little—tales of what depraved men have done to women who leave the Colonia. Seduced by promises of love or money or freedom, they’re destroyed by all three.
Then it happened to my mother. She wasn’t seduced. She was out getting fabric, and she was forced. I hate these men. One of them raped and killed my mother.
“How do you know so much about us?” I ask, distracting myself from the heat of his body and his animal scent. I’m facing east, turned in the direction of the apartment building that has its back turned on me. If I can keep my attention there, I won’t fall to my knees.
“How I know is irrelevant.” His voice and breath move from one shoulder to the next as if he’s stroking me with a fingertip. “Ask me what I know, and I can spend all day telling you about you.” He pauses, and I’m convinced he’s going to touch me. “I know that you haven’t had anything to eat or drink since sundown yesterday.”
The afternoon sunlight is making me sweat, a clammy thing that spreads at the backs of my knees and my neck as my pulse hammers too hard in my wrists.
“You’re a monster,” I whisper.
“And you look beautiful in that dress.”
I hate him for saying it, and I hate myself for being pleased that he means it.
As he steps away, a piece of clay pot crackles under his heel. For the first time since I broke the pots, I realize that the pieces are sharp enough to shear skin and soft vascular tissue.
Dario stands to my right and pushes a shard away with the toe of his shoe.
I could kill myself. End it all. Remove the possibility of him finding my weaknesses or raping them out of me. Whatever Dario wants from us, he wants it badly enough to kidnap me. If I’m his only leverage and I remove myself from the equation, he won’t get what he wants.
“You broke the pot you were supposed to shit in.” He flicks the shard away. It skips and clicks a few feet, landing on top of another one and transferring its energy until they both take off in opposite directions.
“I need water,” I say.
“I know.” He’s in profile—not fully turned to me—when he says it, and I can see where the top of his ear ends in a surgically straight line.
Turning away, he opens the door just enough for me to see light on the other side, then he slips through and closes it behind him.
The deadbolt clicks. I drop to my knees and weep, and the sadness sedates me into something that I mistake for sleep.
Chapter 6
Dario
Somewhere in Queens, the Town Car is getting stripped down to the chassis and disassembled like a Colonia bride on her wedding night. Missing the car switch was a contingency we’d planned for. We weren’t followed. Oliver and Tamara, my heads of security, made sure of that. Everything to plan.
So, why am I sitting alone in a dark room, trying to figure out what went wrong?
In the car, she caught me off guard.
Bronze hair swept off her shoulders in a perfect twist, in her corseted wedding gown, wide brown eyes with explosions of amber at the centers. I’ve known her my whole life, but I didn’t know the color of her eyes.
She needs water. I knew it before she said it. My throat got dry listening to her. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t now.
My brother, Nico, is a facts-on-the-ground guy. He’s not prone to under- or overstatement, so when he told me Sarah Colonia turned out nice looking, I believed him. Figured he was describing a girl somewhere in the bell curve of fuckability. A girl you’d make an effort to get into bed but not one you’d wait around for. Someone else’s wife. You’d understand how another guy wanted her for the rest of his life but not why. Or you’d understand why but not how.
Beauty isn’t new. That’s not it. Once I was close enough to see her exact eye color, I doubted myself. A decade planning her every torment, of steeling myself to do it, and in the car I was ready to throw it all away.
I’m thirsty myself, but I won’t drink until she does.
Too many people depend on us destroying the Colonia, but from the moment I saw her up close, she’s haunted me. If I ever deviate from the plan, it will be because of her.
I can’t feel this way. It’s not allowed.
She’s thirsty.
Oliver's a refrigerator-sized man with a boyish face that belies years spent fighting foreign wars. He clears his throat. “Sir? Is anything wrong with the setup?”
“No.”
“Should we give her a few blankets?”
“No.”
“Tamara’s working on a secure line to the Colonia.”
My watch beeps in a familiar rhythm. One-two, one-two-three. One-two, one-two-three. I shut it.
“Is there something on your mind, Ollie?”
“We usually follow a different protocol.”
“She’s not usual.”
I leave before he questions me again. In a smaller room, I open a hidden cabinet with a small flat screen behind it. It’s for one thing—one person—only.
A minute later, it comes to life.
Nico appears from somewhere under Precious Blood, secretly embedded with the Colonia technical data crew.
The screen he sees me in reflects on his big, wire-rimmed glasses. We have the same parents, but while I got our asshole father’s dark, wavy hair and blue eyes, he got our mother’s dirty-blond ringlets and tobacco eyes.
“Tell me everything,” I demand in a tone that’s curious, not furious.
“It was beautiful,” he replies from deep inside enemy territory. “She was ‘late,’ and for the first twelve and a half minutes, Giovanni Agosti went on and on about Midtown traffic while his son tried telling jokes from the pulpit.”
“And when he realized he was ditched?”
“It was…” Nico shudders. “Scary. Even from up in the nosebleed seats…”
“Prince Charming isn’t so charming.”
“Don’t count on his tail staying between his legs. How’s his betrothed?”
“Better off, she just doesn’t know it yet.”
“She may never know it,” he says. “She was groomed to be a king’s wife.”
“It’ll take me forty-eight hours to get her heeling and begging for a biscuit.”
“My point is, she’s not like the rest of them.”
That’s for sure. She’s not broken. Yet. I’m going to do it. I have to. My brother’s life depends on it.
“She’s not exactly good looking,” I reply.
“Really?”
“She’s stunning.”
The shit that comes out of my mouth surprises Nico, and if I’m being honest for a change, it even shocks me.
“Has it finally happened?” he asks. “Are you getting moony?”
No. I deny it in my head, beating back the thought before it has a chance to escape my lips.
“Have I ever mooned over a woman?”
“You’re due.”
If he ever sees the day, he’ll drop dead. So will I.
“That part of me died,” I say.
“All the more reason you might fall for a woman you can’t keep.”
Once Nico fell in love, the fact that I never have and never will started bugging him. Like I’ve gotta be his emotional mirror.
“Forget what I’m doing,” I say. “What are they doing?”
“Trying to figure out what you know. But keeping Sergio from setting the whole town on fire is sucking away a lot of the energy for now. We have a week, tops, before they start calling in favors at the sheriff’s department.”
“Are you close to getting Tamara her hookup?”
“Yeah. We’re ready.”
“It’s time to throw them off. Give them a reason to make a mistake.”
It takes us twenty minutes to calibrate the practicality and brutality of our next move.
God watches over everything, but He’s not going to tap you on the shoulder and tell you what He sees. God doesn’t fill out and file shift reports. He lays the roads and paves the streets. He digs the tunnels and levels the mountains. He keeps the skyscrapers standing, making the laws of physics consistent enough to fool us into believing the system is reliable.
How you travel those grids and occupy those buildings is up to you.
God formed the infrastructure of the physical world, then we created flawed tools to understand how we fit into it, making sure some people didn’t quite fit at all.
She’s better off. She just doesn’t know it yet.
Fuck those tools. I made my own… except now I’m not sure what they’ve built.
She was groomed to be a king’s wife.
Oliver’s home with his wife. I’m alone in my windowless security room, where two walls of screens show me every moment of every entrance to every space in every property I own. Blind corners. Narrow halls. Nondescript doors. Drained of color and detail, they could be anywhere in the city, but I know them like lovers no other man desires because they’ve never been intimate with them. Only I’ve taken the time to know the shape of that crack in the pavement, the proportion of the spacing between the doors, the growth rate of the tree at the edge of the sidewalk.
