Page 40 of My Dark Fairy Tale
Before I killed him, I took the tie from around his neck. I loosened the knot and stuffed the Gucci silk inside his mouth so he’d stop his pleading.
It meant nothing to me because it meant nothing to Aldo and Tonio.
He thought I had the power to change his fate when I was already struggling to swim upstream against my own.
I took two steps back and shot him through the forehead, right between the eyes.
My father wasn’t pleased.
“Too easy,” he muttered in disgust as he narrowed his eyes at me. “What kind of message is this to send our enemies?”
To appease him, because I wanted to go back to the big house for breakfast with my mother and sisters, I yanked the hunting knife fromzioTonio’s belt and carved a message into the dead man’s forehead.
Traditore.
Traitor.
When Tonio, Leo, and I carefully staged his body back in his apartment, I took care to clean him up and set him perfectly behind his desk. Aside from the lurid red gouge marks in his forehead, he could have been sleeping.
Some reporter called the killing almost gentlemanly for a Mafia hit.
Unfortunately, the moniker stuck.
“Good,” I told the thugs as they tensed for flight, sensing a bigger predator in their midst. “You know who I am. So you will understand how serious I am when I say if any of you so much as look at the small brunette who just entered Signora Verga’s apartments, I will skin you alive and then play mix and match with your flesh until you are each dressed in another man’s face. Do you understand me?”
The skinhead’s mouth had fallen open on the broken hinge of his jaw. “Yeah, yeah, man. No worries.”
“D-do you need us to like ... look out for her?” an acne-faced boy worked up the nerve to ask me.
I considered it for a moment and shrugged. “If you want to, it would not go unforgotten.”
Though I was one fucking mishap away from telling Guinevere she was spending the next five weeks under my roof.
The kids stammered their agreement and skittered away with one wave of my hand. I shook my head as I made my way back to Verga’s building and pushed through the door. Kids like that were usually prime pickings forsoldati, but not in my outfit. We played sharp and smart, which meant teenage wannabe badasses were exempt from ourranks. I let Damiano pick them up in Naples and put them through the wringer before I ever thought about accepting them into the fold.
The Romano family had more college graduates than a prep school.
It was the key to our success and our subtlety.
The soft lilt of Guinevere’s American accent reached me in the foyer, and I followed it up two flights of stairs to the open doorway of an apartment. The entire thing was visible from my position in the frame: a small kitchenette with a half fridge to the right, a tiny table for two, a lumpy blue love seat and ancient television with rabbit-ear antennae to the left, and a double bed with a brass headboard at the back of the room beside a hand-painted chest of drawers. The postage-stamp size, along with the lingering scent of heavy Middle Eastern spices from the shawarma place down the street, lent it a distinctly unappealing air.
Guinevere, though, seemed to think it was fabulous.
“It’s fabulous,” she crowed, clapping her hands together as she stood in the middle of the room with a bright smile, as if Signora Verga had shown her the wonders of Michelangelo’sDavid. “I can’t believe I get to live here.”
Signora Verga smiled at her widely, caught up in Guinevere’s enthusiasm as it spilled out of her like sunlight. “Si, si, very lucky. You be happy here.”
“I will,” Guinevere agreed, touching the windowsill gently, giving it a caress as if it were sentient. “Thank you for renting it to me. I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to get here sooner.”
“No, you explain,” Signora Verga said, waving off the apology.
“Signora Verga,” I said in Italian, startling both women who turned to face me with hands over their hearts. “I assume you know about the boys who loiter outside your apartment selling drugs?”
The older woman’s finely lined face creased like a crumpled silk scarf. “They aren’t bad boys.”
“Oh?” I asked, crossing my arms as I leaned into the frame.
“Not like your kind,” she said, brave in the way of all older people, close enough to death to disregard danger.
