I’m shaking. I can’t stop shaking.
My eyes fix on her lap and the folds of her too-big dress. The pale fabric worn soft from washing. I have nothing left. No pride. No strength. Nothing but this desperate, aching need for someone to stay.
I sink down and rest my cheek on her lap. I press my face into her dress like I’m trying to hide from the whole world.
Her hand finds my hair, soft and careful. Her fingers thread gently through my curls. I feel the warmth of her hand as she hums something familiar.
My breathing slows. The shaking stops. The pain recedes to something distant and bearable.
My arms wrap around her. My hands curl into her waist.
Stay.
Don’t leave me.
The words fill every hollow space inside me.
Stay with me. Don’t leave me. Please.
She has her mother. Her sister. A whole life that doesn’t need me in it. But I need her more than any of them do. Her mother is always working, exhausted, pulled in a dozen directions. Rosa has her own friends, her own world. They don’t need Mina the way I need her.
No one needs her like I do.
I want to live in this moment forever. I want to crawl inside it and never come out. I can’t lose this moment. This girl who makes the world bearable.
I memorize everything about her. The weight of her hand. The sound of her voice. The way she smells like safety and home and everything good I’ve never had.
This moment is mine.
Mina is mine.
She belongs to me and no one else.
I hear a cough behind me,and I turn to see Tommaso in the doorway. The memory releases me, and I drop my hand from the scar in the bookcase and turn to him with a suppressed sigh.
He enters with his usual gravitas, gray hair slicked back, his face carved from stone. Andreas is at his heels, his eyes lit with excitement. My cousin appeared almost out of nowhere the moment I landed in America, and he’s tried to make himself indispensable these past weeks. He’s hovering at my elbow, offering advice I didn’t ask for, angling for power he hasn’tearned. He’s ambitious, I’ll give him that. He wasn’t raised in the mafia but he wants in, and his overeagerness means he sometimes puts his fucking foot in it.
“Tommaso wants to speak with us,” Andreas says, flashing his too-white smile. I notice with a spurt of annoyance that he’s started styling his hair like mine. “He says it’s important.”
Everything is important to Tommaso. The old guard capo has opinions about how I dress, how I speak, who I meet with, what I eat for fucking breakfast. He was my father’s man through and through, and he watches me with barely concealed contempt, waiting for me to fail.
I go and sit behind my father’s desk, using the massive mahogany expanse to keep him in his place.
“The Barones have reached out to us,” Tommaso says without preamble. “Don Carlucci proposes a marriage alliance. His daughter Ariana for you. His daughter Lucy for Andreas.”
My eyes catch on a divot in the wood, and I reach out and run my finger over it. The brass paperweight, hurled at my head. Dad was so furious that his aim was off, and it crashed into the desk instead and left a scar. The next throw hit its mark, and my heart was pounding so hard when I ran from this room.
Cristiano, get back here. Cristiano, I swear to God, when I get my hands on you—
“Are you listening to me, Don Cristiano?”
I lift my gaze to Tommaso’s irritated face. “What do you want?”
Andreas can no longer control his excitement, and bursts out, “He’s talking about brides, for us. The Barone girls.”
Brides? Marriage? What the fuck are they talking about? I lean back in my chair. “No.”
“You haven’t heard the terms—” Andreas begins.
