Page 43 of The Butcher's Wife

Dom’s gaze cuts up to me, and we lock eyes. Even with a man wriggling underneath him, his muscles straining to trap him down, and half his face covered in blood, Dom’s expression is relaxed—amused, even.

“And why would the Chiarellis have a hit out onSerafina?” he asks me.

“I-I don’t know.” Mikey starts to blubber. “But it’s not Serafina—I-I mean, she’s not that they—who they w-wanted?—”

“Dom,” I say. It’s almost a whisper, and Mikey stops struggling to look up at me, hope shining in his eyes. “Hurry up.”

A wail bursts from Mikey’s mouth as he thrashes against Dom.

“You see my car?” Dom calls over Mikey’s cries.

I look up sharply. It’s not far away, only a few parking spots from us.

“Go sit inside,” Dom says while Mikey wriggles under his hand like a worm on a hook. “Lock the door until I get there.”

Mikey looks up at me with pleading eyes for the briefest of moments, until I turn away and do as I’m told.

His muffled cries follow me as I take thirty-four steps to Dom’s car, counting each one. I open the passenger door and lock myself inside.

I stare straight forward through the windshield out onto the dark scene.

Dom rises from the shadow that is Mikey’s body, where it lies there, unmoving.

I expect Dom to come to me, but he goes to the strip club instead. For a long, breathless moment, my vision locks onto the club’s door as my imagination runs wild at the thought of beautiful women rubbing themselves against him.

But it’s not beautiful women he comes back outside with. Russell has his hands hooked onto Dom’s wrists as Dom drags him outside by his throat. Carlo and the rest of his friends follow behind. Checkers is stumbling so much that it looks like he might fall over. Dom tosses Russelltoward Mikey’s dead body, points at it, and walks toward me.

His wild grin fills my body with sunshine. He’s got one of those perfect smiles—a wide mouth, brilliant white teeth, and a hint of dimples hidden beneath his salt-and-pepper beard—that make it impossible not to smile back. The corners of my lips raise.

Then he seems to remember himself, and his mouth plunges into a deep scowl.

He throws himself into the driver’s seat of the car, turns the radio on, and drives. “Start talking.”

11

ANNETTA

He’s hurt.

But it’s hard to tell by the way he’s carrying himself. The radio’s tuned to a pop song, and after he wiped his face with his shirt and—thank God—opened his other eye, he’s driving steadily through the dark streets like he doesn’t have a care in the world, like he’s not covered in his own blood.

“You’re supposed to be talking,” he says.

Annoyance flares inside me.

“You were supposed to answer my calls,” I bite back.

“I was busy?—”

“Doing what? What do you even do all day? All you do is avoid me and leave mealoneall the time.”

“You want some fucking company? Get a dog or go move back in with your parents. I didn’t ask to be your babysitter.”

He’s got a point, and that pisses me off more than anything else.

“It’s too late. We’re married now. How many women marry men they hate and still have to smile and pop out babies for them and cook and clean for them? Why doyouget to pick your fate when I can’t?”

“Is that your fucking problem? Daddy stuck you with me, and now you’re crying because you’re not fucking Russell?”