Page 196 of Vita Mia

Chapter Thirty-One

Two Months Later - 1996

Rome, Italy

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MIRABELLA WASN’T REALLYpaying attention to where she was going. She was driving. With the Russians, Nigerian’s and Camorra hunting anything Battaglia the risk was always present. Still, she and Catalina jumped in a car when the men weren’t looking and sped away.

“They’ll find us, we need to go back. You need to be in court in an hour.”

“Just a little longer, a little further,” Mirabella said. She jerked the wheel swiftly to the left and stepped on the gas. The sports car with the windows tinted so dark you couldn’t see inside, hugged the narrow curve of the road around the mountain. Her phone rang in the car. She could see from her peripheral that Catalina wanted to answer it.

“Go ahead, I know it’s Domi.”

“He’s worried, we shouldn’t be doing this. It’s dangerous.”

“I haven’t seen Giovanni in over three months,” Mirabella said. “And today, this is the day I see him? When he’s at his most vulnerable?”

“It’s okay sweetie,” Catalina said with a patient voice.

“They’re watching us, everyone is always watching us. Why did our life become this? Why did I become this?” she sniffed back her tears and gripped the steering wheel even tighter. She needed someone who knew her before she became what she was—a Donna for the Mafia, a fashion designer for the world, a mother for four to five children. She needed friendly smiles, laughing voices, tender eyes, non-judgmental words. She needed normalcy.

“What are you afraid of? Talk to me?” Catalina gripped the inside door handle when Mirabella swerved around a car and then continue to speed dangerously close to the mountains edge.

“It’s okay, we know what Domi said. This is all part of it. You get on the stand and answer the prosecutor questions; then it is really over,” Catalina reasoned

The phone in the car began to ring again.

“Answer it!” she shouted through her tears.

Catalina answered the phone. She reassured Dominic they were headed back. She pleaded with him to be calm. She said they were close. She hung up the call.

“Mirabella? We have to turn around. Domi already has his men on the streets looking for us. It’s not safe. Please.”

A bitter sob threatened to break loose, but she held it tight in her throat. She didn’t want to tell Catalina what her real fear was. It wasn’t the prosecutor or the magistrates. It wasn’t the blonde Russian who had put a hit out on her and her children or the crazy Puglia dirt farmer who turned the Camorristi against them. No. She’d been kidnapped, poisoned, possibly raped while drugged. She’d seen a man killed in front of her, knew her husband killed several others. She watched her own flesh and blood jump from a window to her death, and her best friend blow up in a fiery flame before her eyes. She had abandoned her principles, and her spiritual upbringing reasoning that love justified it. She’d come to another country, learned the language, the customs, disappeared into the underworld and turned her back on anything familiar to who she was.

“Mirabella, please slow down.”

She couldn’t stop, sit, or wait to be told what to do or say anymore. She couldn’t survive on the trauma, the turmoil, the heartbreak by just the love. She needed more.

“Mirabella! That car!”

She swerved back into her lane and avoided an impending crash. Catalina let go a deep sigh of relief. She didn’t yell at her to stop. She didn’t have too. Mirabella turned hard left and came to a screeching stop on the narrow side curve of the road. The other vehicles zipped and passed them. She dropped her head on the steering wheel and wept. She cried for the dead. She cried tears all the way back to her mother Lisa and her lover James who fled to Philadelphia in hopes of finding their own happiness and a real future. Her tears went even further back to her Me-Ma and her twin sister’s betrayal of her trust. To the lies and secrets, that loving Giovanni unraveled in her life, over her own conception and the mass deception in her family. She wept. But tears did not bring back the dead. They did not grant forgiveness for mistakes. They changed nothing.

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