Yeah, come on down,we can end this here and now if you want, old man.Arturo was old, and any ruling he did, he did from his office. Achille had complete control of the body, except for the brain and the heart. He hadn’t been born with either.
As I stood underneath Arturo’s window, dressed in black, he couldn’t see me, but I could see him. I could even hear his wife, the blonde-haired bimbo with fake tits, talking to him. She came into the restaurant, too. And she was a fucking hoot. She was dumber than a sack of bricks. No wonder she gave birth to a joker when she was only seventeen.
No one would ever be able to replace my mamma. She gave Arturo a prince, and he destroyed her. He had killed her innocence. Slaughtered it. Then she killed herself because of it. He took something that was supposed to be unique, innocent, and turned it into something dirty.
My phone lit up. A picture of Mariposa and I from our wedding in Italy appeared on the screen. Not even a second later the song Mariposa and I danced to came through the speaker, the one that sounded like a song that should be on a Tim Burton soundtrack. My wife constantly changed her profile picture on my phone and the ringtone. So I started doing the same to her.
This time, though, she had caught me at a bad time. It was my own fault. I should’ve put the phone on silent.
Arturo was going to get curious, so I sent her to voicemail and silenced the phone. I quickly sent her a text.
Me:At work. You okay?
A second later her response came through.
Your wife(she programmed this into my phone):Fine, just lonely in this big house without you.
I grinned.
Another text.
Your wife:It’s nice to have a friend who stays home and watches old movies with me. I’ll make some popcorn and root beer floats.
The lights in the yard came on, and the dogs jumped up, going toward the back door. A second later, Arturo appeared, holding a gun.
“Who’s out there?” He narrowed his eyes. Then he called for his men to check the yard. He was getting too careless in his old age. He should’ve known. Send the men out first. One bullet and his life was mine.
Too fucking easy, though.
I was gone before his watchdogs even made it behind the tree.
My phone lit up again as I opened the door to my car. Snow covered the windshield, and the leather felt like ice. My breath fogged when I took another deep breath.
Your wife:On second thought. Can you stop and get marshmallows? We ran out. Since it’s cold out, hot chocolate will be better.
Me:You’re going to owe me.
Your wife:That was my plan.
Then she sent me a smiley face winking.
I sat in the cold for a while, staring at my phone. I clicked on the picture she had uploaded. We’d been sitting under the grape arbor, and I’d been rubbing her feet. The photographer had caught us in a candid moment. Mariposa loved it so much that she had it blown up and hung it over our fireplace. I used my finger to scroll through the other ones. Some of them I had taken in Greece.
In that moment, I was a liar. In my life, I had once done something that was not in my plans.
Her.
My wife.
She changed the entire course of my life.
She had been a surprise the first time, and again when she came back into my life. It would take a fool to think that fate doesn’t exist, that some things in this lifedon’tbelong to us, no matter how much we fight them.
Mariposa Macchiavello was mine in every way. She had been since the moment I found her on a night like this one. Dark. Cold. Snowing. The air had been almost blue with cold. No stars in the sky. She’d been only five at the time. Only five. Her innocence had been a blow to my heart.
Her mother’s big bag had been pressed against her little chest as we drove away from the place Palermo had been hiding them.
“Where we going?” she had asked me in Italian.
