One of the girls came over and poured two new glasses of wine for us. The table was filled with baskets of bread and appetizers of fried calamari and caprese salad. She set the bottle on the table then turned on the heat lamp as if she thought I might be cold, when she was dressed in less than I was.
“Francesca,” Don Russo said, attracting not only my attention, but everyone else’s too. “How are you liking Palermo?”
“Oh, I love it here. A beautiful place.”
“I hope Wolfe has been a good tour guide.”
“He has,” I said. “And everything I’ve eaten has been amazing. But I kinda eat everything anyway.”
He nodded. “I want to take a moment to share my condolences on behalf of Cosa Nostra for the loss of your father, Vincenzo Mancini. I met with him a few times. He was always a firecracker.”
It still hadn’t quite hit me that I would never see him again. That people spoke of him in the past tense when he still felt a part of my present. “That’s putting it nicely.”
He smirked, his eyes lighting up through his glasses.
“If he’s a firecracker,” Wolfe said, “then his daughter is an atomic bomb.”
Don Russo shifted his gaze to Wolfe. “And I can definitely see why that would be appealing to you.”
Wolfe shrugged, a grin still on his face. “I’ve got a type—Francesca Mancini. When Warren hit her house, I was there with her, and I had the pleasure of watching her blow those assholes to hell, reload her shotgun, and do it all over again.”
Don Russo shifted his gaze back to me, and he definitely looked at me a little differently. He didn’t actually say anything, though…just stared.
“Maybe in a different life she could have been Cosa Nostra,” Wolfe said with a light chuckle. “Would love to see that.”
“Warren will regret the day he crossed Don Mancini. We weren’t allies in life, but we’re certainly allies in his death. Wolfe will always be Cosa Nostra and, by extension, so are you. We’ll make sure your father is avenged and your vineyard returns to its rightful owner. We stand with you, Francesca Mancini.”
Wolfe mingled throughout the evening, and I could definitely detect a distance between him and the rest of Cosa Nostra. They didn’t have the same candor we had at the vineyard. It reminded me of the way they treated Don Russo, like he was the boss. Wolfe was with me most of the time, but he would get pulled to other tables to smoke a cigar.
I was fine on my own, warm under the heat lamp with wine in my belly. I watched Wolfe across the terrace and saw him laughat something one of the guys said. The girls continued to gather dirty plates from dinner, and whenever one of them would walk by, one of the guys would give her a smack on the ass.
The woman smiled like she liked it, but she was probably getting paid enough to like it.
The girl who had poured our wine at the beginning of the evening stopped at Wolfe’s table and made small talk, but then her eyes turned to Wolfe as if it was his attention that she wanted.
I was jealous when women wanted him and I definitely understood that deadly urge that Wolfe had mentioned earlier, but I never actually felt threatened by anyone. Maybe I was naïve to assume that a man as gorgeous and muscular and perfect as Wolfe could actually be monogamous with one woman, but I believed that he could. That when I wasn’t around, he wasn’t sneaking off with one of these women and getting head in the bathroom.
The chairs at my table were empty and I sat alone, but it was nice to be by myself without actually being alone. The music and the conversation were a comfort in my despair. It was refreshing to feel like a part of society again.
The empty chair beside me was suddenly occupied by Don Russo.
I felt my heart race a little bit when he was there, just because of his stature in Cosa Nostra. He was the leader of the largest organized crime group in Sicily, and even though he was in his fifties, he was still a formidable man.
He stared at Wolfe across the terrace for a while before he looked at me. “Francesca, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Is the vineyard something you truly want?”
I stared at him, unsure of his motivation behind the personal question.
“Or is it something you were bred to want?”
“Why do you ask?”
He continued to look at Wolfe. “I’ve known Wolfe since he was born. His father was in Cosa Nostra until he died, and then Wolfe kinda raised himself but with the support of the rest of us. I never had a son, only two daughters, so I took him under my wing, even though I was a young man at the time.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs before he turned to look at me directly. “Cosa Nostra is in my blood. It ran in my father’s veins and his father’s before him. I spotted Wolfe’s potential early on, and I always knew he would be the new leadership when my time comes. He’s volatile and tumultuous and unpredictable, but he knows how to get shit done. His intuition is unmatched. His tolerance for fear and discomfort knows no bounds. He lives on adrenaline the way the rest of us live on food and water.”
I wasn’t sure what point he was trying to make.
