Page 13 of Bene

It didn’t matter. He would wait for as long as she needed on this hot Sunday afternoon while the June sun beat down on their backs, and he wouldn’t say a thing about it. After all, some shit never changed, even if the world kept spinning while Vanna’s felt like it had come to a fucking standstill.

Things like Mario stayed exactly the same. He still chased her like a puppy who wanted the toy being kept away from it. His crazy idea that someday, she would want him just as much as he wanted her, kept him eating out of the palm of her hand.

She never even fucked him.

He was just … there.

Whatever.

Vanna went back to what she had been doing before Mario interrupted. To her far right, she could see the parking lot of the church starting to empty. Mario’s mother and father had likely already gone, along with the rest of the clan. Probably to their usual Sunday dinner, which she almost always attended. Other times, she just didn’t care to make the effort. They never said anything one way or another.

Staring at her father’s grave, the item she held at her side felt heavier. She didn’t glance down at the newspaper she clutched tightly, and even Mario hadn’t seemed to notice it as they walked to the grave for her to have a moment with her father.

She’d forgotten …

No, that was a lie.

Vanna never forgot.

She promised her father, after all.

The vendetta.

Guzzis.

The reason for all of this.

Even her father’s death, in a way. All those years ago, when Gian Guzzi murdered her grandfather, causing her half aunt’s suicide, and forcing her father to be a shamed man in the eyes of the Detti mafia … her father would never had needed to do what he did, to plan the way he had, and then to be killed at the end of it all.

She wouldn’t be alone.

She wouldn’t hurt.

If not for them …

No, Vanna never forgot the vendetta.

She simply had other things to focus on for a time. Wasn’t that life, though? Something else was always waiting in the wings to take a person away from what should be most important.

Well, not anymore.

Not for Vanna.

Her fingers flexed around the newspaper she held as she let her father’s words drift through her mind from all those years ago. She could still hear him clearly—his demands, and her promise to follow through, no matter what.

She didn’t need to look at the newspaper again—once as she passed it by where it sat forgotten on a back pew had been enough. The picture of a very happy man, and his five sons had been more than enough to burn the image into her brain. She wouldn’t soon forget Gian Guzzi’s smiling face, and his boys surrounding him.

Oh, and the woman.

In her wedding dress.

No, she certainly didn’t need to see the article about the wedding again, but she still lifted it to look at the picture once more. Gian stood in the middle, his arm around the groom on his left, and the bride on his right. He had two sets of twins, apparently. The groom had an identical twin, and two of the three men on the right were also identical. According to the article, Beni Guzzi was the third Guzzi son to settle down in the past couple of years.

Not that it mattered.

They were happy.

They had everything.