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Shit. I didn’t consider that angle. I always ignored the silly title that some people call the daughters of a don—princesses. But Salvatore is right, I am one tiara away from a subtle princess aesthetic.
His hand finds the slit in the dress that shows my thigh, and for the first time, I notice his black leather gloves. The cold touch travels up until his fingers hit the barrier of my panties.
“What are you doing?” I ask him in a hot breath, pushing his hands away. “Aren’t you supposed to be dragging me to some dinner?”
“I don’t want anything between me and your cunt.” He tugs at them again.
“Don’t,” I whisper, my hands wrapping around his huge wrists and thick watch. We lean into the moment, our heads bowed together, foreheads almost touching. The negotiation wavers between us, silent and heavy. I know he wants me like this, and I feel like I’m crashing into his gravity, drawn into the black hole of his full suit and subtle cologne.
I can’t go without panties. Especially if he’s going to start dirty talking me before we even sit down for the appetizers, though I keep that criticism to myself. I linger in the moment, trying to think—though he makes that frustratingly difficult. What would Salvatore do? How do I give him what he wants in order to get my way?
“If I don’t wear panties to dinner, how will you take them off me with your teeth afterwards?” I ask softly. The vanilla-flavored question is the closest thing to dirty talking I’ve ever managed.
Salvatore’s gaze meets mine. I can see the judgment passing—the consideration working beneath that dark stare. I catch the glint of his teeth as he finally steps back.
“What?” I’m instantly defensive. Embarrassment runs hot up my neck. I don’t know how to talk like him, how to just drop the word pussy and cunt in every other sentence like they’re a part of polite, everyday conversation.
“I’m starting to think they were right all along—I am a bad influence.”
“So, I can keep them on…?”
He nods.
He offers me his arm. “Let’s go, princess. You and your panties are required downstairs.”
A rowdy conversation arises in the dining hall as we approach. It pinches my heart with nostalgia, the raucous sound of a family seated around a table, arguing, laughing, swapping stories. It brings memories I thought I felt indifferent about. Nostalgia casts so much history in a soft, rosy light.
Salvatore’s labyrinth house opens up into a wide room with crystalline light dancing on the walls. The massive chandeliers seem merely average in a room of this size.
The family is already seated. If I look too quickly, just out of the corner of my eye, this could be my own family. It is, at its heart, the reason none of this mafia business has ever made sense to me. People who share the same features, the same ancestry, the same desires and struggles—all determined to kill each other over the insignificant details that set them apart.
How can you war with another family when it’s just a mirror of your own? Your own children? Your own parents?
No matter how much my father tried to show me, I couldn’t see it the way he did.
The men seated around the tables have all dressed similarly, dark suit jackets and white undershirts, with black gloves and dress shoes. The women have no set dress code, but I notice a couple in gangster attire, wearing suspenders and gloves alongside the men.
When Salvatore and I enter, the boisterous conversation dies. The talking dries up into a yawning silence. Like something out of a bad dream, every person in the room turns to stare at me.
My eyes sweep across the faces of strangers. I see the truth written in their stunned reactions, their utter disbelief: Salvatore didn’t warn them I would be attending the family dinner. I am a surprise.
My heart leaps into my throat.
There are so many of them that two long tables are necessary to fit everyone. Only a handful of chairs sit empty, set with plates but no one to fill them. Salvatore guides my numb feet to his place at the head of the table. I pass Ava—the only person who smiles at me. She’s painfully far from where I’m seated.
On this end of the table, the age range skews upwards. Seamlessly, a young man in fashionable glasses and a model’s face rises from his adjacent seat and pulls it out for me.
Anticipating the need for me to sit next to Salvatore, he gives up his seat graciously.
Though the chair beside me is empty, the man doesn’t take it. There’s a shuffle of commotion and confusion as the seating arrangement shifts. A place is made for him, a chair plucked out of the ether.
My seat faces an older woman in a wheelchair. She looks at me like she’s smelled something particularly foul.
Salvatore takes his seat at the head of the table.
Silence wavers.
I glance down the long line of faces, trying to make sense of the people staring back at me. To my right, beyond the empty seat, is the woman from the driveway. She’s still in those dark shades despite being indoors. The little boy is seated next to her, his face lit up by a phone screen.
