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Stella Rovina

“T hat’s it. Just a few more steps,” I encourage our frail mother. My younger sister, Cami, has one of her elbows while I grasp the other, helping her back to bed after a shower.

“I’m just so tired today,” Mom huffs, her narrow shoulders drooping more than usual underneath her thick, pink flannel gown.

“You need to eat more,” I chide her, though I know her lack of nutrients isn’t the only reason she’s tired and weak.

The lymphoma is eating away at her body, and all we can do is watch as it slowly takes a little more of her from us each day.

I inhale the sweet apple rose scent of her body wash and shampoo on a heavy sigh, knowing I’ll never smell either without thinking of Mom.

The bedroom she and my father once shared for nearly forty years now prioritizes her comfort and is full of medical supplies. An adjustable hospital bed replaced my parents’ king-sized bed months ago. A side table beside it holds her various bottles of medications, a glass of water, and a small family photo album she flips through often.

The rolling tray on the other side of the bed contains light snacks kept within reach, but she hardly touches anything on it lately.

Hospice nurses visit regularly, once in the morning and again at night to provide what they call “compassionate care” to help manage her symptoms. They adjust her medication to ensure she’s free from as much pain as possible and monitor her condition.

I don’t blame her for not wanting strangers to help her wash. There’s a shower chair in the stall, so once Cami and I get her seated, she can take care of everything except for her hair. I usually wash it for her since she says Cami runs the water so hot it nearly scalds her.

“Finally,” she says as she reaches the bed, but her sigh of relief is interrupted by the ding of a new text message. It sounds louder than usual, echoing around the bathroom where I left my phone on the counter while drying Mom’s hair.

Only family texts me, and I’m with my Mom and sister, so it must be my brother. It’s not like I have a horde of men saved in my contacts sending me messages. In fact, I haven’t been on a date in…wow, over a decade. And no, I don’t miss dick. Not really.

Most single women my age are on all the dating apps, hooking up with as many guys as possible to try to get a ring on their finger.

My sister and I are the exception to our peers.

While I have my own reasons, I actually don’t know why Cami insists on abstinence. Well, other than our father being overprotective of us — especially his little girl, Cami. He rarely let her leave the house. He didn’t want her to turn out wild like me in my teen years.

My sister stays busy with our mother’s care when she’s not helping to organize charity fundraisers. I swear, Cami should’ve been named “Saint” instead of my twin brother. Although, Camilla does mean priest’s helper in Latin.

In fact, because of Cami’s obsession with event planning for needy children, sad puppies, injured military veterans, and everything else under the sun, I think she’s a thirty-year-old virgin. I’m not sure if I pity or envy her for her choice to wait for Mr. Right to come along…

“Go ahead and check your phone,” Cami urges me when the device buzzes again. “I’ll get Mom tucked in.”

“It can wait,” I assure her as I push my long, raven hair behind my ears before I help get Mom’s freshly laundered bedding pulled over her.

Once Mom is finally comfortable and already half-asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow, I go and grab my phone from the bathroom, noticing my purple blouse has giant water spots on it before I check my messages.

The first text says, We need to talk. Come downstairs.

The second: You never would’ve kept dad waiting this long…

No, I wouldn’t have kept our father waiting, but Saint is not our father, despite his desperation to fill his shoes now that our father and oldest brother are gone.

“Saint is summoning me,” I grumble to Cami with a roll of my eyes. “Do you mind staying with her until I get back?”

“Sure thing.” She stretches out on the velvet chaise lounge in front of the bay window and points the remote at the television mounted on the opposite wall to flip channels.

Striding out the bedroom door, I intentionally take my time walking down the spiral stairs and hallway leading to our father’s old office and ignore the familiar guards I pass along the way.

Saint paces in front of the large mahogany desk while typing on his phone with one hand and shoving his fingers through his floppy overgrown black hair with the other.

“What’s up?”

“Finally,” he mutters when he turns to face me. Even though we were born sixteen minutes apart, our resemblance ends at our raven hair. Wearing a gray button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and black slacks, Saint looks more like our father before the man went bald, including his dark blue eyes — the opposite of my glacial blue ones.. It’s so unfair that at 6’3” he’s taller than me by eight inches and can eat whatever the hell he wants without gaining an ounce of fat. Nobody would look at us side-by-side and believe we shared a womb without our birth certificates to prove it.

“I was helping Mom get into bed after Cami and I dried her hair after her shower,” I tell him. “You do remember our sick mother, don’t you? You haven’t been up to see her in days.”

He winces. “I…can’t. It’s too hard to see her like that.”

“And you think Cami and I like seeing her die a little more each day?” I yell at the selfish asshole. “She won’t be around much longer, you know?”

“I know she doesn’t have long! And I’ll…try to come up and visit her more. I’ve been a little busy holding this fucking family together, not that you seem to care. You don’t bother responding when I text you, and we’re in the same damn house!”

“Well, I came as soon as I could. Now, are you going to tell me why you summoned me down here or just keep bitching?” I cross my arms over the front of my damp shirt.

Leaning his ass back on the front of dad’s desk, he slips his phone into his pocket to mimic my posture and folds his arms over his chest. “Why haven’t you accepted the engagement ring from Andre yet?”

“Not this again,” I huff with a shake of my head.

“Your wedding to a Ferraro is going to happen before the end of the year, just like dad wanted.”

“Why do I have to marry one of them when we both know they killed our brother and our father!”

“That wasn’t the Ferraros,” my brother asserts. My brother, who is now in charge of our family because the oldest son and our father are both dead. It doesn’t matter that I’m minutes older than Saint. In the Italian mafia, women are treated like nothing more than an assembly line of glazed doughnuts with sprinkles. We’re just a pretty hole for the men to fuck, easily and often replaced, with only one job — pop out a few kids to raise while pretending our husbands aren’t fucking a fresh dozen on the side.

“Creed Ferraro has no reason to kill our family off,” Saint says.

“That you know of.”

“But you know who does?”

“The Sannas,” I mutter, already aware that’s who he blames for Izaiah’s disappearance several weeks ago and our father’s so-called ‘suicide’.

“You don’t even have to marry Andre. Would you prefer Tristan or Lorenzo? They’re both?—”

“No!” I cut him off, unwilling to even consider being tied to either of those two men. One is a known psycho sadist enforcer. The other is an old, dickless bastard whose only job is to sit back and give the capo dei capi advice while watching him fuck everyone over like its entertaining cinema.

“So, you admit Andre is clearly the best choice, right?”

“Best is not the word I would use to ever describe that arrogant prick…”

“Would you rather have Cami marry him?” Saint asks, making my guts twist like a pretzel. The thought of our sweet, virginal sister stuck in a loveless marriage with that grumpy asshole makes me want to vomit up my breakfast all over our father’s antique desk.

“No.”

“She’d do it. We asked her?—”

“You are not asking Cami to marry anyone!” I warn him.

“Then you’re going to have to marry Andre, and you’re going to do it before the end of the year.”

I stare my brother down for several long, silent moments. “You better be fucking glad we weren’t identical twins, because if we had been, I would’ve eaten you in our mother’s womb.”

Saint flashes me a genuine smile. One I haven’t seen in weeks. “You missed your calling writing greeting cards, sis. You’ve always had a knack for saying the most vicious shit imaginable. No wonder you’re still single at thirty-three.”

“And what’s your excuse? I don’t see any rings on your finger either, jackass.”

“Oh, trust me, the offers are rolling in now that I’m the newest mob boss in New York City,” he says as he walks around and drops down onto the leather rolling chair behind the desk. “And if there was a Ferraro sister to marry, I would say the vows in a heartbeat to save you the trouble.”

“Oh, please. I find that incredibly hard to believe.”

“I would, because we need them more than you know.” He props his feet on the corner of the desk in a move I know is a ‘fuck you’ to our deceased father. “How about this? I’ll make you an offer: Marry Andre, and if you can get me proof the Ferraros were the ones responsible for our brother or father’s death, I’ll let you help me kill them.”

“Just like that, I can murder my new husband?” I ask in disbelief. Not that I wouldn’t take him up on the offer. After all, it wouldn’t even be my first kill…

“With actual proof,” Saint grits out. “You won’t make a move without evidence, though. Do you hear me, Stella?”

God, why does it have to be this damn family Saint needs? I’d gladly marry anyone else without the slightest hesitation, anyone except for a Ferraro.

Walking over, I brace my palms on the desk. “What if you’re wrong? What if the Ferraros are plotting to take us all out, and as soon as I marry that son of a bitch, they kill me too? Is that a risk you’re willing to take?”

He rolls his eyes. “Our father trusted them. He wanted this Rovina and Ferraro union. It was one of his last requests before he slit his…”

“Before he was killed, you mean? There’s no way to even know if he wrote the shit in the email he sent to himself. Why didn’t he send it to all of us?”

Drumming his fingers on the leather arm rests, he nods. “You’re right. I don’t think dad’s death was by his own hand, but someone forced it. Aiden Sanna forced it.”

I scoff and straighten to my full height. “Our father filled your head with his same conspiracy theories, and you just believe them without any evidence, while I’m required to obtain proof against the Ferraros?”

“Izaiah’s car was found in Queens within spitting distance of one of Sanna’s businesses. What more proof do you need than that, Stella?”

“His car could’ve been part of a set-up too. For all we know, the Ferraros killed our brother and then planted his car in Queens.” Saint rolls his eyes as if he thinks I’m out of my mind. “There’s more than one possible explanation to Izaiah’s disappearance and our father’s death. I wish you could see that!”

“Maybe you’re right, but I can’t operate on hypotheticals.” He stands and paces again, this time behind the desk. “Either you or Cami are going to marry Andre Ferraro on December fourteenth, not just for our father, but…”

“But what?” I ask when he hesitates.

He faces me. “Our father didn’t leave us in a great place financially.”

I brace my hands on my hips, preparing for what’s coming. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, Dad took out loans a few years ago when shit got tight during the pandemic. Now those loans are coming due, and we don’t have enough money to cover them. It’s going to take some liquidating or another loan.”

“If he could’ve just gotten another loan to cover the others, then why didn’t he?”

“Because he couldn’t! No bank is going to loan him millions…” His fingers spear through the front of his hair again, tugging on it in frustration. That’s when it finally occurs to me where this whole conversation is heading.

“You need me to marry into the Ferraro family, so they’ll give you the money,” I state simply.

“They’re the richest family in the city,” Saint remarks. “Two hundred million is nothing to them.”

“Two hundred…” I can’t even repeat that number. I knew our father shuffled funds around for his construction business and laundered most of the income from drug sales, but I had no idea he’d dug that big of a hole.

“Izaiah had one hell of an expensive drug problem, which certainly didn’t help,” Saint explains. “He was skimming money off the pizzo he was collecting from businesses to buy heroin.”

“How?” I ask him, already knowing that dirty truth about our older brother. “How are we supposed to ever be able to pay back that much money to Creed fucking Ferraro?”

“The construction business will earn it back once we finish the building projects that are half done. It’ll take…maybe a year at most if we can get that loan to finish shit off.”

“So, you’re turning me into a very expensive whore, huh?”

“You or Cami.”

“Me or Cami are expected to spread our legs to save this family. That’s what you’re telling me?”

“It’s only for a year until we can pay them back. And you could do worse than Andre Ferraro, right? Is he really that revolting?”

No, he’s not. At least not in the physical sense.

The mobster attorney, the underboss to the most powerful man in New York City, is a gorgeous bastard. That was never why I turned him down over the years when he tried to make a move. It’s his disgusting family, and the lengths they’ll go to cover for whatever the hell their ruthless bosses do that makes me loathe them all.

“How can you expect me to fuck the man working for the asshole who killed our father and brother?” I ask.

The question is a literal one, even if my brother doesn’t know it. I’m not sure how I’ll go through with it. I haven’t been with a man in so many years that I’m horrified by the thought of enduring the act again, especially with a Ferraro.

“You have to forget that shit and let it go, Stella. We need the Ferraros. Our father trusted them, and so do I.”

“You’re starting to sound like him too. Dad was a lot of things, but mostly he was a greedy asshole.”

“I’m not doing this out of greed! I won’t see a cent of that money. We need the Ferraros help for the loan to save this house and everything else we own,” he replies. “And when the time comes to go after the Sannas, I need Creed Ferraro to have my back.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed if you go after the Sannas,” I warn him. “Whether or not Ferraro backs you up.”

“They’ll never know what hit them,” Saint says as if he’s already been plotting. Of course he has. “So, unless you can give me one damn good reason, besides your fucking assumptions, for why you shouldn’t marry Andre, this wedding is going to happen in less than a month’s time.”

I open my mouth, ready to tell him, to spill the secret I’ve kept from my entire family for more than a decade. But no words come out. I don’t want to think about that night, the parts I remember, much less speak a word about it to anyone, especially my brother.

There’s a chance Saint won’t even believe me, that he’ll call me a liar, blame me for what happened, or think I’m only telling him now to try to get out of the wedding.

And if my own brother won’t believe me, no one will. It’s the same reason I never told my father either.

I don’t know if I could live with that kind of heartache.

Even if Saint chooses to believe me, if we need the Ferarros so badly, he will twist Cami’s arm until she agrees to marry Andre.

Cami might be a grown woman, but she’s still my little sister. I would do anything to protect her.

And then there’s our mother, who is so sick, she probably won’t make it to the end of the year. I’m surprised Saint hasn’t thrown that in my face as another reason why I should agree to this marriage, to let our Mom see one of her children happily married before she leaves this world.

So, I’ll suffer through this whole fucked up ordeal, but not for the money or the power Saint so desperately thinks he needs. I’ll do it for our sister and our Mom who has suffered enough the past few months.

“I’ll do it. I’ll marry him,” I concede with a heavy sigh. “But only for Cami and mom. You’ll have to ask the Ferraros for the loan and whatever backing you need to go after the Sannas yourself. That is, if I’m wrong about them being responsible for Daddy and Izaiah’s deaths.”

“Fine,” Saint agrees, ignoring my last comment. “Thank you for doing what needs to be done for our family.”

His words may sound like gratitude, but I hear the underlying meaning.

If I’m a bitch to Andre, if I refuse to share his bed, then Andre won’t be as willing to ask his mob boss and cousin, Creed, to do us any favors.

Somehow, someway, I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact I’ll need to have sex with the bastard.

I hope my therapist has some openings this week, because I’ll need them to get through this marriage.