Page 3 of A Game So Reckless

I don’t want to look soft and pretty tonight. I want to look like I eat men’s hearts for breakfast, goddamnit. Even if most of the experience I have with men is limited to my mob boss father, my psychotic-yet-somehow-loveable cousins Elio and Curse, and the soldiers serving our family.

“Tonight is important,” Mamma reminds me, as if I don’t already understand that. This marriage is the culmination of my life’s duty in my parents’ eyes. An alliance meant to continue growing the Titone empire.

I know my place. I’m a Titone. I’m not going to screw this up.

Besides, I’m already engaged to the guy, and he’s getting just as much as my parents, if not more, out of this match.

What could possibly go wrong?

Chapter3

Valentina

Ilounge on the buttery-smooth tan leather of the backseat as my cousin and chaperone-cum-bodyguard, Curse, drives me to the event at the Fabbris’ brand-new condo building. Mamma is driving with Papà, and since Curse isn’t exactly known for having the gift for the gab, the car is quiet.

Too quiet. It makes me feel all itchy.

“So, first Elio,” I say blithely, examining my manicure. Dark red, to match my lips. “Now me. I guess you’re up next on the wedding train, eh Curse?”

When Curse finally answers, it’s merely to grunt, “We’re almost there.”

I go on as if he hadn’t spoken at all.

“I don’t know why they’re in such a rush to announce this engagement, anyway. It’s not like the last Titone wedding was a roaring success.”

More like a complete fucking catastrophe. Elio’s wedding to the Irish-Canadian girl Deirdre O’Malley blew up in our faces. Literally. Like, with a bomb. After that lovely little fiasco in February, you’d think the Titones might take a break from all the wedding stuff.

Apparently not. Mamma’s already told me that tonight, when the press is all gathered to ooh and ah over the latest Fabbri Construction project’s unveiling, my engagement to Dario will be formally announced.

“Are Elio and Deirdre coming tonight?”

“No,” Curse says.

I could have guessed that myself. Despite the fact that Elio blew a couple of nice, big holes in the heads of the men responsible for destroying his wedding and putting his wife in danger back in February, he’s still keeping her pretty close to home these days. And if they were going to be in attendance tonight, no doubt I would have gotten a call from Elio demanding I hustle over there to get his beautiful wife all dolled up for the occasion.

Not that I’m complaining. I actually really like Deirdre, despite the slightly rocky way her relationship with our family began. Namely, with Elio kidnapping her for her father’s debt and then working some kind of Stockholm Syndrome magic on her to make her adore him the way she so obviously does now.

“What about the Morellis?” I ask, thinking of my other friends, Lucia and Giulia.

“They’re at a wedding in Montréal this weekend.”

“Oh. Right. I knew that, actually. Must have blocked it out. Too much wedding stuff in my brain.”

It’s like I can’t escape it.

“So,” I huff, “how about it?” I dig the sharply pointed toe of my black high heel into the back of the driver’s seat, as if Curse would be able to feel it. “You getting engaged next? Has Papà given you a list of candidates?”

I know Papà had a list like that for Elio. A carefully-chosen catalogue of good Sicilian girls Elio essentially took a big shit on when he married a sweet little Irish nobody like Deirdre against Papà’s wishes. Not that I think Deirdre’s a nobody. She’s basically my sister-in-law and one of my closest friends now. But in terms of the calibre of matches a family like ours is expected to make, somebody like Deirdre isn’t even on the radar.

“No,” Curse says. As I try to puzzle out which question my cousin might actually be answering with his clipped, one-word answer, the car comes to a stop. I blink, leaning towards the window. Curse has pulled into a U-shaped driveway in front of the new building, just off the main street. Toronto’s elite glitter in the early-evening August sunlight outside. Politicians and film directors and philanthropists and men who make blood run like water. Men like my papà and cousins.

I wish I could say that, with enough money and dressed in a clean enough suit, the men from my world are indistinguishable from the upstanding citizens surrounding them.

But they’re not.

Cosa Nostra. Camorra. Bratva. Irish Mob. Doesn’t matter if the hair colours or the customs or the countries of origin are different. Men like that all share one terrible truth. They’re all so steeped in power and violence and pain that it seeps right out of their pores like poison. Changes the shape of the air around them. It’s in the hard, empty stare of a gaze that’s watched men die. The particular placement of a tattoo. The scars from bullet holes and blades.

Wolves will never blend in with sheep no matter how tightly they wrap themselves in wool.

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