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“Do you know who he was seeing before me?” I ask, even though I don’t really want to know.
“There was this bottle blonde named Felicia,” she says. “They were pretty hot and heavy for a while.”
I swallow hard.Felicia. I've seen her around. She’s kind of a wiseguy groupie and I know a lot of them. They are always around the famiglia in the area. But Felicia is a blonde bombshell. She has a perfect hourglass figure and she’s around Dante’s age.
“Not Felicia,” I groan. “She’s so pretty.”
“She’s a nobody,” Marta says disdainfully. “She’s not even full Italian.”
I sigh. Marta can be a bit snobby about her full Sicilian heritage. “Neither am I,” I mutter.
Marta’s eyes widen. “Sorry, Mia, I didn’t mean it like that,” she backtracks. “I just mean she doesn’t have connections, not like we do.”
Our fathers are both Caputos, and now I’m married to one, so I understand what she means. But it doesn’t make me feel any better about Felicia and Dante.
“Make me another drink,” I demand, and Marta does so.
“Do you think he’s sleeping with her still?” I ask after another drink, my words slightly slurred.
Marta shrugs. “I dunno. You know how wiseguys are. They have a wife and a mistress and two on the side.”
“Like my father,” I whine.
I know that he’s cheated on my mother, that he’s had relationships on the side and full-time mistresses. He loves my mother, but that’s just the lifestyle. I don’t want that with Dante. I want to be the only one. I’m not the type of woman who can deal with my husband cheating on me.
“Mine too,” Marta points out. “I just think that’s what we have to expect, right?”
I wrinkle my nose. “That’s not what I want to expect. I want him to love me and only me.”
She gestures to the hickeys all over my neck. “I think he does definitely love you,” she laughs.
“That has nothing to do with love,” I argue. “It’s just because some guy touched me at a bar.”
Her eyes widen. “Shit. What did Dante do?”
“He beat the hell out of him,” I admit. “It was almost scary.”
Marta raises an eyebrow. “But also kind of hot, right?”
“So hot,” I agree, giggling. The alcohol has gone to my head.
She sighs. “I wish I had what you had. All I have in Vincenzo Gallo sniffing around.”
I grimace. “Not him.”
Vincenzo Gallo is next in line as Caputo of the Gallo family, and he’s disgusting. He started sniffing around me when I was only sixteen, and I’ve always found him awful and creepy. He’s not nearly as handsome as Dante, and not half as respectful.
“Right? He went from you to me like I’m supposed to think he’s in love with me, or something,” Marta complains.
“You don’t have to date him,” I point out.
She sighs. “My father is urging me to. He says it’ll help us gain territory. But I’m tired of being a tool to be used, by everyone.”
I understand exactly how Marta feels. Even with Dante, it seems like my father married me off in order to gain power. He never asked me how I felt about the situation. It turns out that I’ve always had a thing for Dante, and I think he’s an honorable man, but my father hadn’t cared about that.
I suppose he would never marry me off to someone like Vincenzo, because he’s disrespectful, but I still feel like Marta does sometimes: a tool to be used.
“What about Rocco?” I ask, and Marta sighs heavily.
