Mafia Captive (11 page)

Before she could avert her gaze, he smiled at her—a smile with too many layers to untangle that sent a chill running down her spine.

Leo spent most of dinner talking to Fabrizio. From the bits of conversation Faith could pick out, his cousin wanted to open a sandwich shop near Carroll Gardens. He needed start-up help, which Leo was happy to offer.

Most of Faith’s attention was taken up by Leo’s grandmother, Alba. Her Sicilian accent was still strong, even after so many years in America. While most of the family had an accent straight out of Brooklyn, Alba was a first-generation immigrant, and proud of it, since every other sentence started with: “In the old country…”

The matriarch of the family was a touchy-feely sort who couldn’t speak a word to someone without putting a hand on their arm. But Faith didn’t mind. It was unusual but comforting, a sharp contrast to Alba’s cold, silent husband.

The ugly lie of the fake engagement squirmed through Faith’s insides. Maybe the elderly woman would mercifully pass before she ever had to suspect the truth. She could die with the unshattered hope that babies were still on the way to carry on Leo’s line. Faith felt a twinge of guilt for fantasizing about the woman’s demise.

Inwardly, she scolded herself. This man was keeping her from freedom. A less secure freedom, sure, but still. Shouldn’t she be able to meet a man in the normal way and fall in love? Shouldn’t she have a mate? And if they wanted children… if she could have them… children she’d
chosen
to have? And if she didn’t want them, shouldn’t she have the peace of mind to know she never had to bear them? Shouldn’t she be able to come and go freely and have a job if she wanted and hobbies and places she went and people she saw?

It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain anger or fear toward a man surrounded by his family with all its boisterous and colorful conversation and good Italian food.

She startled when Leo laid a hand on her arm. He was so warm and solid and safe. He shouldn’t be safe. Sure, he hadn’t harmed her. And after that first night he’d been careful not to scare her and to keep his distance.

Whatever sexual needs or desires he might have, she knew he’d taken her primarily to keep her safe, and then
that
started to make her feel guilty. And selfish. After all, she wasn’t the only one whose options had been cut off. What about his right to choose an appropriate wife? Someone who was wired like him, who liked the same sexual things he liked? What about his right to have children? What about him not having to keep someone locked away like a household pet to keep them from the barrel of Angelo’s gun?

All fair questions.

Leo leaned in, his lips and warm breath brushing her ear. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she whispered.

He squeezed her arm. “Good.”

He turned back to his cousin while Gina engaged Faith’s attention to discuss… what else? Weddings and babies. It was pointless for Leo to have bothered to learn anything on the questionnaire. The family’s biggest concern about her past was her Irish heritage, which they were working to overlook. The only other thing that mattered was being a good wife to Leo and breeding good quality Italian-looking stock. They’d overlook the lack of pure Italian blood if she could give them enough tiny dark-haired babies to admire and coo over. They were nice enough people. A normal family like everybody else’s—if you turned a blind eye to the crime, but it was still unnerving how fixated they were on this one subject.

In Catholic wedding vows, women promised to accept children as they came from God. And yet, this obsession with procreation went above and beyond standard Church doctrine.

By the time everyone moved on to dessert, Faith was ready to hit the panic button.

“Leo?” she said, low enough that she didn’t draw too many curious stares.

“Yes, sweetheart?” he said with practiced precision. She could almost believe the ruse. Something inside her twinged and ached at that moniker, wishing it was real instead of an act for his family.

“Can I go to my room for a few minutes?”

“What’s wrong?”

“N-nothing. I’m overwhelmed. T-too many people here.”

Concern passed over his face, then flitted away. “Be back soon. We still have to go to Mass.”

Of course. Christmas Eve. Midnight Mass. She hadn’t been to church in so long that she dared not participate in the Eucharist, lest some angry lightning bolt strike her down.

***

Leo watched Faith’s slight body disappear through the doorway. He pierced Angelo with a glare when his brother’s predatory gaze went after her. In Angelo’s mind, Faith was always going to be a loose end. Leo could almost see the thoughts tumbling through his brother’s head. What if she talked? Even inside Leo’s house, there was family here, and not all of them knew what was what.

The women, particularly. They may suspect something wasn’t quite right, but they were wise enough to never ask questions, to always carefully skirt around topics that might prove their worst fears. So the family ran some casinos in Nevada? It was honest work. It was legal. No reason to suspect anything. Or so they kept telling themselves.

And if any of them were uncomfortable by the quick migration half the family had taken across the country five years ago, they told themselves a comforting story that made everything feel better again. After all, weren’t their lives better? Weren’t they stronger financially? Didn’t the kids now have a brighter future out west? If Grammie and Papi could cross the Atlantic, surely they could cross the country. It’s who their family was… the brave ones who traveled to new opportunity when they found themselves stifled in their homeland.

Angelo settled back into his dessert after another short glare at Leo. Leo raised an eyebrow as if to say: “You gave her to me, what are you so pissed off about?” Being twins, the two of them could have carried an entire telepathic conversation without much trouble, but Angelo’s gaze went back to his coffee, and Leo allowed Fabrizio to pull him back into talk of the sandwich shop.

Angelo’s internal morality had come into the world broken, and the examples he’d received from the men in the family hadn’t served to straighten him out. He’d always been too observant. That, combined with his willingness to cross lines, made him ideal for grooming into his current position of leadership over the Brooklyn crew. Meanwhile, Uncle Sal oversaw both Vegas and Brooklyn and reported back to Papi, who had stopped taking an active role years ago but still liked to remain informed.

Once upon a time, Leo had been offered a chance to climb the ranks. Sal liked him, trusted him. Would things be different now if Leo had chosen that path instead? Could he have managed to keep any integrity or sense of identity that wasn’t covered in blood? He feared had he chosen that life, it would have unlocked the kernel of evil inside him, allowing it to bloom into something truly gruesome.

Fabrizio continued to go on about the sandwich shop while Leo half listened, his attention now turned to his sister, Gemma: the reason he knew about covering bruises. She shot him a disgusted look and went back to her cannoli, coffee, and conversation, pretending he wasn’t there at all. If there was an easy way to be with the whole family where Leo wasn’t involved, she would have taken it in a heartbeat.

He couldn’t blame her, but he’d done what he’d had to do. Her husband had been beating her and nobody had stood up to protect her. It wasn’t their business. It was between Gemma and Emilio. But she was his kid sister and he couldn’t follow the unspoken rules.

Emilio’s body now rested in pieces in some garbage bags in the bottom of a harbor three states over. Leo’s handiwork. If the body were to be discovered, there was unlikely to be enough evidence left for an ID. It had happened more than a decade ago, after all.

Leo had been a week outside taking his final vows and being inducted into the order when he’d found Gemma, standing on the doorstep of his small apartment, trembling in the middle of a harsh winter snow, with mascara trails going down her cheeks and those angry bruises and fractured jaw. He’d taken her in and cared for her like a broken bird. He’d given her sanctuary from Emilio.

Six days later, the man was gone. No one suspected Leo, despite the scar Emilio had given him. Leo had explained it as a freak gardening accident, and the family accepted it. Maybe they accepted the story so readily because it was what they’d been trained to do: accept ridiculous lies to keep their delusions safe, to believe their men were good.

Or maybe it was the fact that he’d been practically a man of the cloth, and no one had seen the darker edges inside him that he kept carefully under wraps. The priesthood had been meant to divert his urges. The fantasies that twisted and gnarled inside him to own a woman, to dominate and subjugate her, to watch a whip make a bright red line across her flesh and the strange sense of serenity the idea brought him as it took him over the edge to orgasm. He’d been disgusted with himself. The priesthood would lock all that up in a cage and keep him from doing damage to anyone or to his own soul.

But Emilio changed that plan. Leo had caught him alone, knocked him out, and taken him to an abandoned warehouse where he’d spent the next forty-eight hours torturing him. Leo had taken the once powerful bully and turned him into a quivering lump of terror who could barely speak his own name. He’d finally killed him and taken apart the body piece by piece with a kind of glee that had scared him.

Once the evidence was gone, he’d locked himself away in his apartment. He couldn’t finish taking his vows. He was no longer a potential monster who hadn’t yet attacked. However he might justify it, he was tainted beyond the repair of the priesthood. And nothing could have convinced him otherwise. It had taken years for him to go back inside a church. He’d gone to medical school, intent on making amends, healing instead of harming. And along the way, he’d found healthier outlets for his sadism.

Most of the family still didn’t believe Leo had done it, but Gemma had seen the look in his eyes that night when she’d come to him. She knew, and no matter what Emilio had done to her or the terror he’d kept her in, she’d never forgive her brother for taking her husband from her and their small boy. He didn’t much blame her. If she’d seen the damage Leo had done to the man before he’d allowed him the sweet mercy of death, she wouldn’t be able to be in a room with her brother at all.

The women started to clear the table, taking Leo’s plate right out from under him.

“Ma, we’ve got people for that,” he protested, knowing as he said it that it was wasted breath. Gina would do what she would do, and God help the poor fool who tried to stand between her and washing the dishes.

“What am I supposed to do until Mass? Huh? Watch the television? Teach Max to roll over? You won’t let your poor old ma do anything for you without complaint, will you? It’s not enough that you haven’t given me grandchildren yet, you can’t let me take care of you, either.”

Leo wisely shut his mouth and let the women do what they were going to do. There were perhaps some Italian families where everybody was a chauvinist, where the men kicked off their shoes and watched sports while the women unhappily slaved away before and after dinner. But if you knew a family, you knew this was as much the women as it was the men. Should an enlightened male make his way into the family, he’d quickly be shooed away and shown his place in front of the television.

Leo suspected the women didn’t just cook and clean and wash dishes. They gossiped about the men. While the men in the family had their secret crime meetings and cues and signals, the women were just as bad. What they did or didn’t know about anything, no one could be entirely sure because they couldn’t get close enough to the kitchen to ever find out. The women had untapped potential. Who knew how brutal the mob could be if it had been run by women instead.

Chapter Nine

Faith had gone straight to her room, Max following behind her. It was night, but with the outdoor floodlights she could see giant puffs of snow drifting down in a steady pattern.

While she’d been at dinner, one of the servants had started a fire in the fireplace. Moments like this obscured reality as if she were visiting royalty instead of a prisoner.

But she was trapped inside a Christmas card. What could be wrong with that? What kind of idiot complained or felt sad about that? She was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Leo to come blazing in to claim what was his, to make her pay with her body for all the kindnesses he’d bestowed. After all, she was his property, his ill-conceived early Christmas gift from his psychotic brother.

Max laid his head on her lap, and she absently stroked the soft, gold fur. He’d become her shadow these past few weeks, as if checking to make sure she was okay and then reporting back to his master with a daily status update. It had taken awhile for the cat to accept the dog’s presence, but now Squish was an expert at ignoring him. She’d briefly hissed when he’d entered the room before snuggling back into Faith’s pillow. In another week, he’d be beneath her notice entirely.

Half an hour or more passed like this when the doorknob jiggled. Before she could ask who it was, Leo stepped inside. He returned the key to his pocket and shut the door behind him. Since the last time she’d tried to lock him out, he’d taken to carrying the key with him. It was a reminder that she couldn’t keep him away from her. This house and everything in it was his.

“Are you okay?” He must not have believed her excuse about all the people.

Faith shrugged and turned her gaze back to the window. “It hurts. This lie. Pretending I’m your fiancée while I’m really your prisoner. They think I have this great life and everything is normal, but I’m like a captive animal. I don’t know if I can stand a week of this.”

She chanced a look at him in time to catch his wince, and immediately felt guilty.

“I told you, you can have whatever you want here. I can’t let you go. I can’t risk that you’d go to the police about Angelo.”

“He’s a monster,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I can’t understand why you’d protect somebody like that.”