The Barren Wife He Buried Came Back With The Donna Crown Chapter 04
The Hand That Pushed
The soldiers pinned me to the marble like a stray dog.
I screamed his name.
“Luca! Luca, it’s me!”
The word wasn’t out of my throat before the pipe came down on my arms. Both of them. Snap, snap. The pain white out my vision. I couldn’t scream a second time. I went limp on the floor.
Luca froze. He turned. “Who called for me? Was that Mia?”
Cara sobbed harder against his chest. Grabbed his lapel. Buried her face.
He didn’t look twice. He carried her out.
The crowd stepped around me like I was spilled wine. I heard them.
“And here I thought Don Fuselli was crazy about her.”
“You know who her father is? Vittorio Falcone. Chicago. Old blood. They say the old man’s got a private line into every seat on the Commission.”
Someone laughed. Low and mean.
“You don’t know? Falcone put a mark on her fifteen years ago. Day she ran off with Fuselli. Told the whole Commission. She stays with Luca till she dies, or she dies the day she leaves him.”
“That’s why she takes it. That’s why she smiles.”
Their voices scratched at me like nails on glass. And through the pain, my head split open into the past.
Fifteen years ago.
He was the least important soldier in my father’s crew. I was Don Falcone’s oldest daughter, raised out in the countryside, unwanted, unclaimed. We fell in love in the dark, the way people in our world always do.
Then my father needed a favor from the Marchesi family. So he traded me. An arranged marriage to a man twice my age, with a habit of putting his last three wives in the hospital.
I stood at the altar in white. Luca crashed the wedding in a stolen car.
I told him he was stupid. “Luca, put me down. My father will put you in the ground.”
He didn’t listen. “I’d rather die than watch him hand you to that animal.”
We ran. My father’s soldiers chased us across three states. Luca stepped in front of me and took three bullets. One tore his cheek open. One shattered his thigh. The third missed his heart by an inch.
I knelt at my father’s feet on the roadside and begged.
He lit a cigar. Watched the smoke curl. Then he spoke. “I’ve seen his kind before, Mia. He climbs on your back. He gets the money, the name, the seat at the table. Then you become the thing standing in his way. And by then, there’ll be so many women in his bed you’ll be a footnote.”
I looked up at him. Blood on my dress. Luca half dead behind me. “That’s what you did to my mother. Not what Luca will do to me. I trust him. He’s not you.”
My father was quiet for a long time. Then he stood up. Called his men off.
“This is the road you chose, Mia. You walk it. You don’t come back. Not even to die.”
He put the word out that night. Across every Family from Chicago to the coast.
[The Falcone girl is marked. If she ever tries to leave Fuselli, she dies before her feet hit the pavement.]
When Luca healed, he heard about the order.
Something in him changed.
He fought like a rabid dog for territory in Atlantic City. He took over crews twice his size. On our wedding day, he spent millions to have the ceremony broadcast on every station between here and Chicago. He looked into the camera, my father’s ghost on the other end of the lens, and he swore.
“I, Luca Fuselli, will love this woman until the day I die. She bet her life on me. I won’t let her lose. You come near her, you die.”
He meant it, then.
But real hearts get lost in whiskey and cocaine and the beds of showgirls.
Later, Luca sat me down and told me.
“Mia, you can’t leave me. If you leave me, you die. Why walk into a bullet? I can’t give you fidelity. But I can give you everything else. Every bag, every jewel, every private room in the city. Isn’t that enough?”
He filled my closet with designer boxes. Told himself I’d forgiven him.
He didn’t know. From the moment he changed, I was only counting down.
Last December, the order was quietly lifted.
My father’s children had died one by one in the wars of the last five years.
Sons, daughters, cousins.
Bullets, car bombs, courtrooms.
I was the last Falcone he had left.
He was giving me a way home.
Now Nonna was gone. My mother’s watch was in my hand. Every chain that bound me to Luca had rusted through.
It was time.