The Capo's Bride

He will not let anyone touch her. That is decided before he has spoken ten words to her, and it holds for the rest of the book, including the stretch where she gives him every reason to change his mind. A half-smoked cigarette burns in the ashtray between them, smoke curling past the stained lampshade like it is looking for a way out. Rosalina De Luca stands in the kitchen doorway still wearing her apron from the dinner shift, the grease clinging to her skin, the smell of fried peppers soaked into wallpaper that no amount of bleach will ever get clean. *Ma. It's almost midnight.* Vittorio does not look up. Rumpled suit jacket, collar loose around a thinning neck, a glass of grappa sweating into the Formica. The bottle beside him is empty and the pasta on the stove has gone cold because he has not eaten. She asks who the man in the black sedan was. He says business associate. Business associates do not make you chain-smoke and drink yourself stupid before noon. Then he pulls a folded photograph out of his coat and slides it across the table. An underboss outside a construction site, silver signet ring catching the light, left leg dragging slightly. She has seen him once before, at the restaurant, with a woman who laughed too loud. He walked out without touching his veal. *And he needs a wife. Someone outside the family. Someone clean.* *You're selling me.* *I'm saving us.* Two hundred and thirty thousand, borrowed from a man who does not forgive, due by the new year. If it goes unpaid they take the house, and then they take her nineteen-year-old brother, because being a De Luca is the same thing as being a target. What follows: a domino that falls and takes the row with it, a gilded cage with very good heating, a first night neither of them will describe accurately afterwards, a debt collector with his own agenda, the true story behind a scar, and a serpent's tongue in the family's own dining room. Rosalina has already been bought once. Before the year turns she has to decide whether a man who keeps his word to her is worth the one thing she swore she would never hand over voluntarily, which is the assumption that she is nobody's property.