“Capable,” I offered.
“Si, so capable. It was very different from my husband with his books and his words. This other man, he looked at me, Cosima, for such a long time that I stopped to watch him look at me. I had Elena on one hand and my baby on the other hip. He looked, and then he just walked to me like this.” She used her arms, swinging them firmly, her brow lowered in mock concentration. “He walked to me, and he said his name, Salvatore, and did I want to get coffee right now with him.”
I could imagine that. My strong, determined father seeing my beautiful mother across a stinking fish market and deciding then and there to have her.
His sense of conviction was something I admired and aspired to.
I thought of my plan to dispatch of Ashcroft, and my resolve hardened.
“I went. Then the next day, I went once more. This was again and again until I was so innamorato with him, I couldn’t see beyond his golden eyes.” She smiled softly at me then. “The eyes he gave my twin babies.”
She had been enamoured with him.
There was something about her word choice and the way she spoke about Salvatore that panged in my heart like a gong. This was the way I’d felt about Alexander.
Both men had entered our lives like a storm, and where there should have been only devastation in their wake, there was beauty too in what remained.
“Why didn’t you just leave with him?” I asked the million-dollar question, and it tasted metallic on my tongue.
The dreaminess in her eyes snuffed out.
“He was le mafie and not small, capisce? He was rising like this.” She slapped her hands together. “One day, we walked with my babies. I was pregnant with you, but just, and I had not told him this. A man from another mafia, le Cosa Nostra, he attacked us because Salvatore had done something. He took the knife here,” she said, pressing a hand to her upper right shoulder. “And my girls, they were not hurt, but I was inside here.” She moved her hand again, this time to her chest over her heart. “I knew this was no life for my babies. Seamus, he was involved because of the cards and the money. But Tore, he was involved because he liked this life, and I knew he would not leave it.”
She shrugged as if her shoulders were waterlogged. “I asked, we fought, he begged, and I cried more tears than one person should in one lifetime, but this is life, uh? We make decisions, and this was mine.” She stared at me again, squaring her shoulders and tipping her chin in a way that was so me, it made me want to cry. “You can judge me for this, piccola, but this I will not ever regret. Look at what we have today because of this choice.”
I was still too mired in her story to argue with her that we were exactly where we were that day, sitting in her restaurant in the America of her childhood dreams, because of me more than her.
I could give her pride. It would hurt no one to let her have that after everything she had been through.
The door at the front of the room ricocheted opened, heralding calls from my brother as he commanded the space. Mama snapped out of her melancholy to hustle up to him and squeeze him even more tightly than usual.
He frowned at me in question over her smaller form, stroking her hair softly to comfort an ailment he couldn’t understand.
I shrugged one shoulder, unable to give voice to her story.
Or my own.
Were all love stories inherently tragic?
Was that what made them so epic? Not the gentleness of connection between two souls or the comfort of their union, but the inevitable loss of it at some time or another.
I wondered if I loved Alexander in retrospect more than I ever had while I was with him, and I came up blank.
My emotions toward my Master were too convoluted to untangle. Most of all, when I thought of him now, all I felt was grief and embarrassed hatred.
I tried to pay attention as Sebastian sat down, then as Giselle and finally Elena joined us for lunch, but my mind was lost to musings.
I had a degenerate Lord blackmailing me for sexual favours, a worried mafioso and soon-to-be worried father on my hands as well as lingering, eternally unresolved feelings for the man who had once owned me.
I figured, even though my family didn’t know it as they gabbed about Elena’s plans for adoption and Giselle pretended too hard that she didn’t care about them, then as Sebastian stormed out because of Elena’s rude inquiries about Savannah Richardson, they could damn well cut me some slack for being distracted.