Page 67 of Married With Malice

I’m sure Luca is cursing my name right now.

I have no clue when he’ll be back, although I know he does need to come back, sooner or later.

He has no choice.

We have that in common.

14

LUCA

Iforgot all about wrapping paper and ten a.m. on Christmas morning is probably too late to acquire any.

The small white box looks plain even with the name of the jeweler embossed in dancing script across the lid. Yesterday, I killed two hours hovering over a jewelry counter. I’m pretty sure the paunchy, balding sales associate was ready to throttle me by the time I made up my mind.

In the end, what I chose was a silver charm bracelet. Anni doesn’t wear an excessive amount of jewelry. Her wedding ring stands out because it’s far more flashy than her usual choices. The bracelet struck me as her style and I liked the idea of picking out the charms that suit her best.

A pair of figure skates.

A palm tree as a reminder of our honeymoon.

A heart-shaped charm engraved with the words ‘#1 Sister’ because Anni guards nothing more fiercely than her devotion to Daisy and Sabrina.

And a charm in the shape of a tiny diamond ring, not unlike the larger one on her finger, a symbol that she’s mine.

Maybe the gift will help to melt this iceberg-thick deadlock between us. For the past week we’ve both stayed stubbornly planted on opposite sides of the battle line.

But right now she’s busy assaulting the kitchen appliances. I’m all the way on the other side of the house and even with Mariah Carey’s voice crooning about all she wants for Christmas, I can hear every slam of the oven door and each angry clang of a utensil landing in the sink.

“You bastard,” Anni curses amid the sound of metal furiously scraping a bowl. “Just what thefuckdoes it take for you to get fluffy?”

That’s my Anni. Snorting a chuckle through my nose feels weirdly foreign. I’m out of practice. There hasn’t been much worth laughing about lately.

When I’m not here provoking vicious fights with my wife, I’m out making death threats to financially strapped business owners who can’t cough up Richie’s dues. I’m not the first wave that’s sent out, not even the second wave. They know by the time they see me coming they’re in the deepest of deep shit.

Sometimes they cry. They always beg.

“Just a little more time.”

“I have a family.”

“This store is my life.”

“My dad opened this restaurant fifty years ago.”

“Please please please….”

But one way or another, before leaving them behind in a puddle of piss and snot, I’ve extracted a solution, making it clear that the late penalty is blood.

A quick glance at the assets, both legitimate and illegitimate, that make up the Amato empire should support the conclusion that Richie has more than enough to keep track of without gutting a family-owned hardware store in Queens to pay for some poor slob’s addiction to the Atlantic City blackjack tables.

But I’ve swiftly learned that there’s no such thing as ‘enough’ in the mafia. The brutal hunt for more and more and more just never fucking ends.

And while I’m earning my cruel reputation, I get to be the trench coat-clad Grim Reaper who brings the consequences.

A crash comes from the kitchen. Annalisa cuts loose with another string of profanity. She became a domestic cyclone at the crack of dawn, determined to bake some apple cake recipe of her mother’s calledtorta di mele.

She didn’t tell me that. I overheard her talking to Daisy on speaker phone while asking for cooking advice. Anni doesn’t tell me much at all. We circle each other like two jungle alpha predators locked in a cage together.

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