I had done too many things I despised myself for, whether I should have or not, whether I was forced or willing.
Now, I just wanted it all to end quickly.
So once again, obedient as a beaten dog, I knelt and slid the shoes onto the girl's feet.
Maybe I was too obedient. It bored him. It stole the sport out of it for Salvatore.
He dragged me into his room in a fury and stripped Gina bare in front of me.
I had witnessed scenes like this more times than I could count. Sometimes Salvatore even made me guide them, made me the silent servant to his cruelty under his own roof.
As before, I tore open a condom and held it out.
But this time, Salvatore pushed my hand away.
"We won't need that tonight."
My hand trembled and I withdrew it.
His hands didn't stop, yet he lifted his eyes to me, watching.
I didn't look at him. I no longer cared to.
That angered him again, and he locked me in the bathroom.
Outside there was a great deal of noise that night, threaded through with wind and snow beating the compound's windows. I sat on the cold tile and listened to all of it, all night.
In a daze, I was jolted awake by the frantic ringing of a phone.
"Is this Miss Bellini? Your mother has been in an accident and is currently being worked on. Come to Public Hospital immediately."
My heart lurched.
"Salvatore!"
I slammed my palms against the door, trying to drown out the sounds beyond it.
Salvatore opened it, wrapped in a bathrobe. His loose collar revealed the marks she'd left on his throat, and the woman clung to his arm like a trophy pinned to his side.
"What is it?"
"My mother. She's been in an accident. Please, take me to the hospital."
I knelt on the floor and begged him, tears welling in my eyes, terrified he'd refuse out of spite. I pressed my thumb against the bare groove on my finger where a wedding ring should have sat, the phantom weight of it the only thing holding me together.
"Adriana, you couldn't even bother to invent a decent lie. It's three in the morning in a blizzard. People stay indoors. Did a car drive into your mother's bedroom?"
Gina sneered, one hand drifting to the borrowed pearls at her throat as she gestured at the black sky and the heavy snow outside.
Salvatore chuckled along with her, not bothering to look at me. He pulled an unlit cigarette from somewhere and rolled it slowly between two fingers. "Adriana. You're stooping to lies like this now?"
"What's the matter? Can't stand the sounds we were making?"
Salvatore locked the door again.
The more I shouted, the louder the noises beyond it swelled, deliberate, cruel.
Completely desperate, I seized the stool beside me and smashed the window, climbing through.
The jagged glass tore my legs open and blood came at once.
I couldn't find a car at that hour, not in the snow.
I could only run forward like a dead thing walking, leaving shocking trails of bright red across the white.
A black Cayenne slowed beside me after two short blasts of the horn.
"Get in."
The man behind the wheel never turned to look at me in the dim, close dark of the car.
I thanked him again and again, but he said nothing more.
Only as I reached for the door to leave did I finally hear his voice.
"Adriana, you have options that aren't Salvatore."
"When you've made sense of things, remember to come find me."
A card, edged in gold, was held out to me. I took it with both hands, thanking him over and over. A marker of protection, though I didn't understand it then.
In that moment my whole heart was fixed on my mother, so I never looked closely at it, only pushed it into my pocket.
I stumbled into the hospital's emergency ward. Before I could even ask, I saw the nurses wheeling out a body draped in white from the operating room.
"Is Carmela Ziglio's family still not here?"
"Unbelievable. Her own daughter didn't show up before she died."
Two nurses murmured to one another, and their words slid into me easily as blades.
I rushed over and lifted the white cloth. My mother's face, once so delicate, was ruined with cuts, and her body was covered in wounds of every size.
For ten years I had hated her because of Salvatore.
I had even, viciously, wished the whole family dead together. But now that she truly lay dead before me, all I felt was the ache.
