Page 41 of Beauty and the Mafia Boss

“Sit down and eat.” The order doesn't take long to come, and I obey. I approach the table and sit in the furthest chair I can find from Vittorio. “There are clothes for you in the bags on the sofa,” he says, and my eyes immediately look for the piece of furniture.

Paper bags sit on the deep blue upholstery, just one of the many luxury items around me.

Marble floors, chandeliers worthy of castles, tables and chairs that look like they came straight from the pages of an interior design magazine, lots of art. There are pictures hanging on every wall, their frames are intricate pieces of carved wood and I get lost, letting my eyes wander over them.

The paintings are so different from each other. Who are the artists? They are geniuses, for sure. I remember very little about the art classes I took at school. A sigh leaves my lips at the thought of my doodles. I shake my head slowly, from side to side, they will never be art.

My gaze continues along the walls, jumping from piece to piece, giving each painting the admiration, it deserves that I wasn't able to give yesterday, when we arrived. I felt exhausted and even though, from the facade of the Roman hotel to the vase on the bedside table in the room where I slept, everything caught my attention, my mind was begging for a rest that it found the moment I closed my eyes.

I have no illusions that this tranquility came from anywhere other than the conversation with Vittorio on the plane. It was short, it's true. But considering the first time we were on the air; the surprise was that he was willing to have a conversation.

Seeing him again after all these weeks gave me the same feeling as the first time. An inconsequential attraction towards imminent danger. A desire to surrender that, the first time, I thought was for death, but today, I no longer think it is.

The apprehension I felt when theconsiglieredecided to take me and those men to Vittorio only became more intense when I found myself in his presence.

The Don is not a man who shows feelings, but the few times I've seen him, counting now, his aura of violence has always been there, almost like a second presence. And yesterday, for a moment, I thought it would swallow everyone within a mile radius around him.

I wasn’t alright.

I'm still not well. The situation I faced yesterday is the scenario of most women's worst nightmares. I lost count of how many times I walked the streets of Rio de Janeiro, completely terrified of the possibility of being ambushed at times when I was forced to walk alone because of one job or another.

My heart raced every time I felt an unknown presence near me, I was startled every time a man walked towards me in an empty and dark place, I was absolutely terrified of one day leaving the house in the morning and coming back at night even more broken than I’d already felt. Irreparably broken.

Vittorio's reaction, however, filled me with a sense of security that I had never experienced before until the moment he said that my life belonged to him. I have no illusions of believing that this is not distorted and problematic. Yes, there's no way not to be.

The man in front of me, reading his newspaper and drinking his coffee, is an unscrupulous criminal who ripped me away from the life I knew and then abandoned me in another, completely different one, on the other side of the world. I should hate him with all my being.

Being in his presence should make me feel disgusted and a million other nameless feelings and yet, here I am, pressingmy fingers to the plane seats and then loving the feeling of butterflies in my stomach as they take off.

Here I am, gluing my eyes to the windows of cars as they pass through streets and cities that I’d never, not even in my wildest dreams, believed I would one day set foot on.

Here I am, staring at the monster of grown men's and women's nightmares and being distracted by the pictures and furniture around me, but it's not like monsters are foreign to me, I've been dealing with them for so, so long. They have torn me apart and scattered my pieces to the wind more times than I could care to count. I know what they are capable of, there were many times I wished to be like them, even though I never had that courage.

So, when Vittorio told me last night on board of that plane that only he could hurt me, all the weight in my chest melted away, because in my broken mind, I really consider that a very small price to pay.

“You aren’t eating.” The Don reminds me and, once again, I am startled by the tone of his voice. The newspaper is lowered, giving me a full view of the man sitting in front of me.

“Sorry” I say, already moving to assemble my plate. He watches my every gesture until I bite into a piece of toast with jam and cheese on top.

“We're going to a party tonight.”

“We?” I ask, and he answers me with an impatient expression. The man doesn't like to repeat himself, of course not. “Do I really need to go?” I test the goodwill he showed yesterday, however, lifting the newspaper warns me that it is no longer at my disposal. “I don't know if I know how to be at a party,” I confess quietly, abandoning the Italian.

The newspaper lowers once again, and Vittorio looks at me carefully before asking.

“What do you mean?”

“I've never been to a party.”

“Black tie, you mean?” He questions, and I shake my head, denying it. Trembling with the information that, on top of everything else, the party he wants me to go to is a gala event.

“Any parties.”

“What do you mean you've never been to a party?”

“I’ve never been. I was going to work on one that night...” I start, but I bite my lip, interrupting myself. The black box in my chest rattles when I almost mention some of what I left behind. The work, the people...

“The night we came to Italy,” he adds, and I nod.

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