Page 22 of The Butcher's Wife

“I don’t have one.”

“You can cheat—with an outsider. You can put Serafina in a new apartment, you can keep her and find her a hobby, you can do whatever you’d like, but wear the damn ring. That’s an order.”

Goddammit.

I exhale. “Yes, boss.”

“You doing your rounds today? You should rest after your trip.”

“Yeah, well, if I don’t get a heavy dose of cigar smoke and cheap whiskey, I risk going feral.”

Turi shrugs, turning back to his monitors and changing a few more images. “I’ll fill you in.”

As he talks, my gaze drifts back to the camera in my penthouse, searching for a glimpse of the woman inside. Turi’s suggestion of finding her a hobby chafes. She’s not my kid. Why do I have to find her a fucking hobby? If I’m wrong and it really is Serafina, I don’t even know what she likes to do. Serafina was always into flower arrangements, piano, and ballet. Everything in favor of looking beautiful—notthat I can blame her, really. She’s been training to be someone’s trophy wife since she was a kid.

It was Annetta I could understand. She did piano and ballet, too, but she also cooked. She could sew. She babysat. She liked photography.

When Annetta was sixteen, I’d come over to her house for dinner with her family. I’d thought nothing of her absence through the entire meal until I stepped outside for a smoke with Barbara, and I spotted her. She was lying perfectly still on her stomach on a blanket across the lawn, a big camera in hand, and peering through the lens without moving an inch. I remember being impressed that a kid could be so patient and thinking it was a shame she hadn’t been born a man. She’d make a great hunting partner.

It was also then that I decided I’d stay away from her. Nothing good came from a man wanting to befriend a girl, and besides my lapse of judgment on her eighteenth birthday, I’d held to that.

“You get that?” Turi asks, one eyebrow raised.

I nod. He thinks the old-guard capos are conspiring against him—which, of course, they are. They’re not going to appreciate our quick, violent change of power, and the only reason Turi isn’t on the chopping block is because he had the full support of his dad and the rest of the Commission in New York.

“Some of Aceto’s men are meeting for drinks,” I say, which is hardly intel. They meet for drinks almost every night. Aceto was the most vocal in favor of Turi’s promotion to don, so I’m curious to hear if he had anyone try to sway his vote behind the scenes. “I’ll go see about that.”

“Thanks.”

I glance back at the cameras.

“Can you send someone to trade shifts with Mauro? He’sold as fuck, and I’ll have to kill him if he can’t keep his eyes open.”

“I have two guards cycling to watch her, but I’ll add a third to the rotation,” Turi says with a stupid, private look of amusement.

I resist the urge to ask for more. We don’t need to waste resources to watch one girl cook dinner in a penthouse. I do voice my other concern, the one that’s been nagging at me since… since that dinner at Turi’s house when Serafina bit me. She left a crescent-shaped wound, too. I resist the urge to pick at the still-healing skin.

“Turi, how closely have you been following Serafina in the past few weeks?”

“Seeing as how she seems to have little intention to overthrow me, not very.”

“What’re the odds the girls have switched?”

Turi throws me an annoyed look. “The odds that myconsiglierehas been lying to me and instead of marrying his virgin daughter, you’ve been tricked into marrying Chiarelli’s widow?”

A widow, huh? I didn’t realize her spineless husband had kicked the bucket. “Let’s say I got a gut feeling.”

7

ANNETTA

At twenty years old,I’ve never really been alone.

At my parents’ house, I had Serafina, and at Frederico’s, I had expectations. If I wasn’t with him, I was with his mom, Giulia, or one of the other wives from the family. It was hard to pick who I liked least. The wives were a bad influence, always asking me to get day drunk or to go shopping and gossip about our husbands. When I came home, Giulia would be there, judging my expensive new handbag, the happy flush to my cheeks, my lack of caution.

“A wife should never embarrass her husband,” she’d say, patting my warm cheek.

When I would tell Frederico, he’d blow me off.