Page 134 of Beauty and the Mafia Boss

Emotional inconsistency is exhausting. Wanting the life I had with all my might one second only to wonder if I really had it the next. I drag my feet to the bathroom and force myself to go through my morning hygiene routine, step by step. I don't have the strength, however, to force myself to change my clothes.

Alina is still standing in the same spot when I return to the room. She waves, indicating that I go ahead of her, and I obey, finding myself in a hallway with four closed doors. We walk along it before turning left, then right and I count exits and windows.

“Don't think about trying to escape, there are men guarding each exit,” she warns as if reading my thoughts, and I remember the chaos that was the day that brought me here. Gunshots, cars, and violence. Coppeline is not a criminal. Hmmm, okay. I continue my count despite the warning. I can find a way; I need to believe so. “And if you ran away, where would you go, Gabriella? To the man who was going to sell you?” Alina's last words are like salt being rubbed into an open wound. I ignore her.

When we arrived at a room where a huge breakfast table was set, I counted twelve windows and seven passages that I don't know where they lead to. There is no door. The tall, bald old man turns his head, diverting his attention from the newspaper in his hands by looking over his shoulder.

He smiles at me, and I look away, barely able to bear to look at him.

“Sit here, Gabriella,” Alina indicates, pulling out the chair to the old man’s left. I exhale deeply and grit my teeth, but I do asshe says, because if I sit close enough, maybe I can pay attention to the newspaper in his hands and find some clue as to where I might be.

Unfortunately for me, Coppeline seems to think about the same possibility. He folds the newspaper before I have a chance to lay eyes on it and holds it up in the air. It takes five seconds for an employee to appear and take it away.

Despite the immediate frustration, I make a mental note of the fact that there are staff in the house and, unless the girl who took the newspaper is going to set it on fire immediately, those papers are going somewhere. If I can maintain my freedom long enough, I can find out what that place is.

“Calmer?” The man addresses me, but it is Alina who responds.

“She is. Right, Gabriella? And she is also very excited about the wedding.” I shouldn't provoke, but this woman's delusional tone is starting to irritate me, and, by La Santa, I have the right to be irritated. When I speak it is completely inconsequential, without caring about what I may be losing.

“Is she crazy about everything, or just about what concerns me?”

CHAPTER 65

________

Vittorio Cataneo

My feet haven't visited this place in a long time.

The darkness that surrounds me is pleasant to my afflicted senses and with each step descended in silence, I say a prayer. A kind of profane prayer that keeps repeating in my mind.

A bargain between me and myself: finding my girl and then calmly destroying the entire world, taking the time necessary to savor the agony that can only be provoked with serenity, a luxury I don't have now.

My mind is not calm, every man involved in Gabriela's kidnapping is being punished immediately. Savoring their deaths is not a privilege I'm giving myself, because it could cost me a lot of time. Which is, in fact, another thing I don't have. The main one, I would say.

“No one can hurt me but you, not even me.”

It was with this certainty that Gabriella left my bed. It was with this certainty that she left my house. Pure and full trust in a way I had never experienced before and with every minute that mybambinaremains in the hands of my enemies, I feel my promise slipping away, my words becoming light, without meaning, without honor. And there is absolutely nothing more important to a Don than his honor.

Gabriela may be doubting mine now and that's why I calmly plan the death of my enemies. The blood in their veins seems little to purge the poison of dishonor that they are making me swallow.

There is a special kind of poison with which we can only torture ourselves and today I am drinking liters of it, sips that choke me but that I cannot stop consuming while my men pile guilty bodies onto the streets of Sicily.

Catania may be my home, the ground on which Sagrada stands, but it will bleed, and it won't be quick.

I continue walking across the cold floor, guided by the dim, yellowish lighting outlining the stone walls of the hallway. There was a time when this was Tizziano's tower of fun, in a way I believe it still is. When our mother could no longer bear the libertine and uncontrolled behavior of her second son, our father gave him this tower and restricted to its circular walls all the debauchery that Tizziano was capable of practicing.

Each of my senses is provoked by the hidden purposes I know this floor serves and I move slowly, aware that Tizziano invests a lot of his time enriching these floors with different traps that can be triggered at any moment.

Meters and meters of ground are left behind, but my internal bargain continues to repeat itself incessantly in my thoughts, guiding my steps and creating fantasies of all the cruel scenarios that I intend to paint with the blood of the men who dared to stand between my woman and me.

The silence that accompanied me begins to fill, the first sound I hear is that of churning water, then someone struggling and the next item on the list should be a scream. The latter, however, never comes and the former makes me more curious as it gets higher, because I don't remember there being a pool in here.I put my hand on the door, aware that if Tizziano is playing, someone is suffering.

“You’ve spruced up this place,” I comment upon entering and encountering a scene that embraces the poison accumulating in my veins and clogging every space in my body.

“You're always welcome, Don.” My brother wipes his hands and reaches for his discarded shirt to wipe away the sweat running down his torso. “But you could have called me, you didn't need to come here. I was just passing the time while I'm not needed yet.”

“I didn't come to call you; things are still exactly the same. I came...” I point forward and Tizziano's attention turns to the project of a man immersed in the water and struggling. “I came to pass the time.”

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