Page 4 of Married With Malice

I love you, Annalisa.

I can’t leave this mountain without my wife.

TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE STORM…

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ANNALISA

My mother has decided this is the appropriate time to discuss my virginity.

Too bad she waited until half an hour before my wedding and six years after that piece of business was settled atop a lumpy mattress in a stuffy NYU dorm room.

Her fingers stroke the chunky gold cross nestled in the hollow beneath her throat. The edges of her accent are still intact twenty-eight years after she was shipped out of Sicily to marry New York mafia big shot Albie Barone. “Try not to cry out, Annalisa.”

“Sure,” I say.

I’ll agree to anything if only her speech will be over.

Alas, it’s not over.

My mother clears her throat. “You need to prepare yourself.”

I wonder if she’ll stop if I vomit on her.

“He may be rough,” she says. “The men sometimes are.”

Try as I might, vomit is not forthcoming. I should have eaten lunch.

“But in time you will learn to tolerate the act,” she says in a near whisper.

My mother must be under the impression that she has frightened me into silence.

She’s not wrong. I’m very afraid she won’t ever stop talking.

But she seizes my hands with fresh urgency. “And yes, there may be some blood but not much.”

Giulia Messina Barone didn’t have a normal upbringing. Cloistered in the walls of her father’s heavily guarded villa, her contact with outsiders was limited. She never dated local bad boys or giggled with other schoolgirls over dick picks. She must have been intensely lonely as the only daughter with older brothers who were allowed to do as they pleased.

In her sheltered formative years, my mother was raised to believe that future wives are obedient and chaste and don’t know what a rigid cock looks like until their wedding night. She has never seen fit to adapt to reality.

There’s no point in interrupting her. Her eyes will cloud with indignant tears. She’ll start spitting out prayers in Italian. She’ll wail about ungrateful children and then she probably won’t leave me alone to do what I need to do. My only option is to hang out here at the vanity table in a white silk robe and try not to cringe to death.

“But the blood is a mark of your honor,” says my mother, oblivious to my revulsion.

If this goes on for much longer I might jump out the window. We’re only on the second floor. The worst I’ll get is a broken ankle. That probably won’t be enough to postpone the wedding.

“And,” she whispers, “you need to save the wedding sheets to remind him of the gift you have given him.”

Maybe I’ve already cringed to death. Hell would be the logical place where I might receive a lecture on rough sex and virgin blood from my puritanical mother in the same hour I’m forced to marry Luca Connelly.

A sudden noise on my right sounds like a piglet is being strangled. Either Sabrina is choking on her lipliner or she finds my torment amusing.

My sister’s shoulders convulse with poorly concealed laughter. Any second now she’ll probably topple from the swivel stool because that’s the way her life tends to go.

Brina’s bad luck has always been a problem. Since we’re only fifteen months apart, I’m the one who got saddled with childhood instructions like ‘Keep your sister away from the bulldozer’ and ‘Don’t let Sabrina get bitten by the pond geese again.’

Callista, technically the oldest, would have been the rational choice to keep our younger sister from wandering into the nearest quicksand patch but Callista was always easily distracted. She was distracted by pretty flowers and pretty clothes and pretty boys. As a child she earned the nickname Dizzy and in time it evolved to Daisy. Now she’s rarely called anything else.

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