Take Me Capo, page 7
“I asked you a question,” Dario rumbles like a man repeating himself with the last of his patience.
Giselle was fun. She and I broke into the sacristy above the Precious Blood school, and we ate communion wafers with jelly. We never got caught for that. Maybe the sin is still stuck to my soul and this is my punishment. Years later, for an infraction involving our pastor, Giselle was cast out. She could be dead for all I know.
But look where I am now. Goody two-shoes.
“I’ll behave in a way that honors my family.”
He leans forward until I can feel his breath and smell his cologne. More than anything my five senses discern though, the psychic darkness inside him pushes against me and pins me in place.
“Your family has no honor,” Dario says. “So that better mean you come as quietly as a woman beaten into a coma.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” I say as the car stops.
When I see the bolted gate and the boarded up stained glass, I realize where we are, and I clench in horror.
I don’t know how, but we’re going to be bound at Precious Blood.
The marriage will be done correctly. It will be unbreakable. Did Daddy and Massimo allow this? How could they?
“I’m not asking you to be afraid.” The door behind him opens, and the sounds of the street enter. “I’m telling you to be quiet.”
Dario gets out and holds his hand toward me. I’m supposed to let him help me. I don’t want to, but my only other option is sitting in the back seat of his car with his driver behind the wheel.
If I stay, they’ll drag me out.
If I kick and scream, I’ll be drawing attention to Precious Blood and my family. After twenty-one years being told to do anything but that, I discard that strategy.
Church bells ring from another cathedral somewhere in the city. I sit straighter, wide-eyed after a deep breath.
It’s Sunday morning! My church looks like any other neglected building in the city, but it has to be full of people—my people. Where else would everyone be?
Does this mean Daddy’s approved of what’s happening to me?
All I can do is get out, but I don’t have to take Dario’s hand to do it, so I slide over the seat and get out without letting him touch me. It doesn’t matter. Once I’m standing, he takes me by the elbow. I try to shake him off, but he won’t let go.
“Don’t.” The word is low but pointed. “Just don’t.”
“It’s Sunday. The Dome is full. You’re walking into your death.”
In the sunlight, with the cool autumn wind pushing his hair back, Dario’s mask of shadows slips. His expression is so fleeting, and the mask snaps back on so quickly, I can tell myself it never happened, but it did.
Halfway between the car and the church, in a microsecond between hard and cold, I saw through him.
He’s scared too.
A car horn blasts. The moment is broken. I turn away. The car is irrelevant, but I see a man in uniform approaching. A cop with a nightstick and a heavy belt under a low-hanging gut.
Colonia children are taught to never speak to the outside authorities…ever. But we are three steps to the end of my life, and this police officer could be the last chance I get to escape.
My mouth opens. What will I say?
The cop reaches up and touches his hat in greeting.
I decide to say the word “help.”
But before I can take the breath, he looks at a place above and behind me, then speaks.
“Mr. Lucari.” He keeps his stride and nods before offering four more words as he passes. “You’re good to go.”
And like that, my last escape route closes.
Chapter 12
Dario
Her family destroyed our lives and never looked back. Not once. That’s their strength and their weakness. They don’t even know what they did, and I’m not going to tell them. I’m just going to make them watch me break their most valuable asset. Let them try to figure out why I’m dismantling their operation and taking what’s theirs to drain them, bit by bit.
By the time I send Sarah away, I’ll be standing on the ruins of their stagnant empire.
With a key Nico made for us, we enter Precious Blood through the basement door. No windows on either side and stained glass front and back, it’s dark as shit.
The ceremony will be performed at gunpoint, which is about what I figured, on a Sunday, when they’re all in one place—in front of me.
The bride wears dirty, wrinkled white and a mask of dead expression. I’ve seen it before. The open eyes that look inward because what’s happening in the world is too horrible to watch, the slack jaw, the moment of awareness as we enter the church nave, as if she’s waking into a bad dream.
When she cries, her eyes are huge.
I said I’d never force a woman. I’d never hurt or break one who wasn’t already whole or play on trauma or weakness for my satisfaction. But she’s different, and for the plan to work, she can’t be just a woman. She has to represent the Colonia.
So, I decided a long time ago not to feel sorry for her. Colonia women aren’t so innocent. They’ve died for their men, and their men are animals. They’ve committed the worst sins for the family, then the family imprisoned them by hanging those sins over their heads.
Adding the Cavallo men was a good idea. Vito and Gennaro are ferocious and well-trained when they relieve the congregants of their weapons. That’s for the bride’s protection. They’d just as happily shoot Sarah as continue to look at her.
Remo’s the third of them and the youngest. He goes up and down the aisles as though he’s passing around the collection plate, taking their weapons and handing them over to Connor the Aussie.
Nico’s in the back. I see the curly top of his head, but we don’t make eye contact.
It is not the day my bride fantasized about as she sewed the corset she has to press against herself. It’s a day of violence and justice, one I have dreamed of since I was a boy and planned to the slightest detail.
What I didn’t expect are my immediate regrets, especially with regards to the princess.
She’s nothing more than a brain with useful information and a warm body with Colonia blood running through it. Once that body is bound to mine by their rules and laws, she’ll turn into a key that unlocks a world I intend to pillage.
And also, she’s beautiful, and tender, and sheltered—traits I despise because they’re weak. All broken as easily as her loyalty.
Outside weddings don’t bring you in. They cast her out.
On screen, with her in the room, her father made sure I knew that whatever I did to his daughter, the important thing was that I wouldn’t get any of the privileges that came with the marriage. Already, her father’s thrown her away. She’s disposable to me, to her family, to her fiancé, to her own people.
I see myself in her because her reaction was to fight to belong. To my own disgust, I admire her loyalty.
She’s at my feet now. After Vito shot a guy who tried to come after me, she fell to her knees with her dirty gown arraying itself around her. Her head’s bowed, and her hands are folded in her lap.
“Please stop,” Sarah begs. “I’m begging you. Don’t hurt anyone else. I’ll be good.”
She’s begging for her family and the people she calls friends. They’d sell her in a minute. There’s no time to fight with her. She’s going to sell herself to me to save lives.
Guilt is pointless. Wasteful. I should reserve it for anyone in the room but her.
I don’t want to feel like this.
“Where’s Father fucking Falcone?” I shout, scanning the congregation’s shocked expressions.
Yeah. I know their priest’s name. I know the Vatican didn’t send him. He was raised to go to seminary in Rome so he could leave the Church and land at Precious Blood, where he’d spend four days a week in the confessional.
“Gennaro found him,” Vito says from a stone archway to my left. “Coming right up.”
These Cavallo guys are a machine. I’m going to send Santino DiLustro and his pain-in-the-ass wife a bouquet.
I see a movement to my right, and it takes me a split second to assess that it’s a Colonia raising a weapon we missed. I whip my handgun out of its holster and shoot him, noticing his age (ancient) and dress (important person) between the time a flower of red blooms between his eyes and he falls.
My wife squeaks out a sob. I don’t care. Let her cry.
“Anyone else want to die today?” I shout over the sound of her, looking around at a few dozen faces all wordlessly saying the same thing.
Yes, they say. We all want to die.
“Get your fucking hands off me!” a voice booms from the crowd.
Connor pushes Peter Colonia into the center aisle. He nearly trips on his uneven feet and brushes his jacket straight.
“Peter,” I say. “Where’s your boy?”
“What’s it to you?”
“It’s his sister’s wedding.”
Peter stands in the aisle with his arms crossed and his thick hips rocking back and forth. I’d shoot him right there if I didn’t want him to see me degrade his daughter so badly.
“This isn’t going to work.” Sarah looks up at me as if I’m the one kneeling at her feet.
A howl rises from the dark tunnel Vito’s guarding. It’s a nauseating, cowardly sound that tells me the person who made it isn’t as eager to die as the ones staring out from the shadows.
My guys drag in the priest. He’s in his forties, shaking like a bitch.
The fucker ran when we showed up instead of protecting his church. Weak link. Probably not the weakest.
“Why isn’t your brother here?” I ask Sarah.
“He doesn’t come to church.”
“How is that possible?”
“Massimo does what he wants. No one can control him.”
She’s just opened the possibility that there are dynamics at play I haven’t prepared for, and I’m going to learn them right here, in enemy territory.
“Stand!” I growl, pulling her up by the excess fabric at the back of her dress.
She’s dead weight, but her legs hold her, and after a moment, she pridefully tilts her chin upward like the fucking queen of the ball.
I don’t have time to admire this shit.
The priest is pushed to the altar.
“You ready to do a wedding, asshole?” I say to the priest, then I look at Peter Colonia, who’s still standing in the center of the aisle.
“I cannot,” the priest says through pursed, prayerful lips. “Please, sir. I cannot. It is a death warrant.”
He’s resigned, as if he really can’t and I may as well ask him to take out his own liver and cook it with onions.
I put my gun to the priest’s head. He actually seems grateful for death.
“Peter. Tell him to do it.” I look at Peter. “Or did you decide to start packing?”
It was never about getting all these scumbags out of New York. It was about asking for something they’d never give willingly—then taking it.
He rocks his hips so hard he goes from toe to heel and folds his hands in front of him as if he’s cupping his balls before unleashing their power.
“Daddy?” Sarah calls to him, surprising me.
“Zip it,” her father shuts her up before he nods at the priest. “Go ahead.”
He’s giving the weasel permission to proceed.
“I don’t want to marry him,” she squeaks. It’s as if she didn’t live with these people long enough to know none of them—not even her own father—give a shit what she wants.
I’ll add her faith to the list of things I’ll admire later.
“You’ll do what you’re told.” Peter crosses his arms.
I’ve got firsthand experience with asshole fathers, and this guy’s a new breed of the same. I don’t even need Massimo.
“That’s real brave, Peter.” I say it as if he’s the one I look up to, not his little princess. “I’ll get you a father-of-the-year trophy.”
He says nothing.
I take Sarah’s limp hand. “When I’m done fucking your daughter.”
My future wife’s breath hitches as if she hit a speed bump at seventy miles per hour, but her father is unmoved.
“Let’s go,” I bark at the priest, taking a ring from my pocket. It’s a cheap pawn-shop find I picked up in Sugar Hill yesterday. Gold with diamond chips in a six-pointed star or flower or maybe a snowflake. Whatever.
I take her left wrist and hold it out. Her fingers are balled in a fist. I start to forcibly open her hand. But before I can even do that, her father’s voice echoes under the dome.
“Open your hand.”
She does it. Just like that. All her fortitude crumbles. It should be disgusting and pathetic. But it isn’t. It’s enraging and heartening because her utter obedience is what I need, and that pisses me off.
“No more fighting, Sarah,” Peter says. “Do what you’re told.”
She holds out her left hand, palm down, fingers bent at the first knuckle. I push the ring where it goes, then lock my right fingers to hers, pushing my knuckles into her webs, making a flat surface between us.
“I don’t have the knife,” Father Falcone whimpers.
“Of course you don’t, mate.” Connor hands him a silver blade, two inches long. “No worries.”
“Daddy, please.” Her voice is tiny but still sounds loud in the stone room.
Her father says nothing, and that’s even louder.
Without batting an eyelash, he just consigned his daughter to die the way my mother did, and I’m so angry I’m ready to blast this whole place to rubble, but I can’t. That’s how mistakes happen.
The coward priest mutters some made-up shit in Italian that no pope ever approved. He lays the blade on our linked hands, adding pressure to cut us together, curving the edge across the tops of our fingers and creating a cut that’ll make a scar unique to my wife and me. The lines will only connect when I hold her hand like this.
Neither of us even flinch when he cuts. Blood drips between us, adding to the dark staining on the stone where the crimson bond of marriage has been cut for centuries.
This part—the corporeal part—is done.
“There it is,” I say to my wife.
“There it is,” she replies in a tone that’s much older and wiser than I thought she was capable of, her deep eyes steady and calm for all the pain she’s experiencing. It’s as if the ceremony opened the skin that held her innocence inside. Now it’s been cleared out, and all that’s left is a woman who forgets as little as she forgives.
Strange what a ceremony will do.
“Her body’s mine.” I address Peter while looking at her. We need barely a minute to make sure the way out is clear. “What should I do with it first?”
“You think dragging her in here and getting cut makes you one of us? I already told you. It don’t work like that.”
“Doesn’t it?” I push Sarah to her knees.
I do it to throw him, but Peter’s merciless, indifferent mask doesn’t slip. He’d make everyone’s life a lot easier if he’d just submit. He’s going on a longer, harder journey to the exact same ultimate destination.
It’s his choice, not mine. I don’t care who among his people suffers; it’s just twisted to have him confirm that he doesn’t either.
“We got your name,” Peter says. “We know your business. You got a lot going on for being such a little shit. I’m gonna take it all.”
“Are you?” I yank Sarah’s hair. Her lips part. “I’m gonna fuck your daughter’s face right in your church.”
My dick reacts to the suggestion, but Peter Colonia is unflappable. At this point, I don’t know who I’m trying to shock besides myself.
“Fine.” He agrees as if I’d just threatened to shampoo his carpets.
My dick turns to melted butter, and I fist my wife’s hair so tightly her cool expression scrunches in pain. I want to shout at her. Your people know nothing of love or family. Your own father’s going to throw you to a wolf because he only loves power.
But it isn’t my job to tell her any of that. She can figure it out for herself, or not.
“Dario,” Sarah says softly. Comforting. An opening into a negotiation I’m losing.
My name from her lips snaps me.
“Are we clear or not?” I yell to any of my men who are bothering to listen. The echoes peel the power away from the doubt. I sound terrified.
“Clear!” Gennaro calls.
“Nice doing business with you.” I wave to Peter before shouting, “Let’s move!”
I grab my new wife by the back of the dress again. She won’t get off her knees, and fuck if I’m going to carry her.
“Get up.” I squeeze her jaw in a vise. “Follow me or I’ll snap your neck.”
“Make me.”
“So, this is how it’s going to be?”
I throw her over my shoulder and run out the side opposite of the one we came in. She’s mine now, and her pitiful screams won’t save her from her new husband or her old family.
Chapter 13
Sarah
My wedding dress was meant to be bloodied when the cut was made, but as the wounds in my fingers stop bleeding and begin the process of scarring, the red streaks on white silk offend me.
This blood was supposed to be the sign of a bond that strengthened all of us. I was supposed to marry Sergio to expand our influence into new territories. It was already a dangerous marriage, but Massimo said we needed to branch out. He said Daddy knew I could handle it.
Daddy must think I can handle this too, but I can’t help wishing that he’d found a way to keep me from marrying this animal.
We’re in a different car than the one we escaped in. That one had a driver and barely stopped as we got in. We got out on 21st and into an old, empty Chevy Dario wordlessly ditched on 49th Street in favor of a Honda with tinted glass. He put me in the front seat as if he knew I wouldn’t run and headed across town in a zigzag.
