Page 9 of The Butcher's Wife

Dom carries me upstairs with steady, sure-footed steps to Serafina’s room. Even in private, I must pretend to be her.

For your safety, Mom had said, but her eyes were hard and condemning.

I might’ve lost my sister, but Mom lost her favorite daughter.

Dom brushes aside the canopy to lay me on Serafina’s bed and steps back to let Mom take off my shoes. The mattress envelops me like tepid bathwater. I wish they’d let the canopy fall into place and let me sleep for a hundred years.

“I’ll bring you some broth,” Mom says.

A weight tips the mattress, and I open my eyes, turning toward Dom. He’s kneeling on the floor with his arms on the edge of the bed like he’s about to pray.

There’s no one up there to listen, I want to tell him. I tried.

My prayers, my reaching for the smallest scrap of my sister’s… what? Her soul? Her consciousness? My clawing against the void for the most minute assurance she’s somewhere peaceful was met with a resounding, yawning nothingness.

Dom covers my hand with his. A week ago, his hand on mine and his massive body kneeling at my bed would’ve shot pleasure into my veins, but right now, it makes me nauseous.

His dark eyebrows pulled up in the center and the soft line of his lips forming a pitying expression doesn’t suit him at all, but the dried blood on his neck, strangely, does.

“It’s going to be okay,” he says in a low rumble as his thumb strokes against mine. Shame and desire spiral through my body.

I turn to hide the way he’s affecting me, but even that’s a lie I tell myself, because I leave my hand tucked under his. I can’t admit how badly I want him here, sitting at my bedside, tending to me, stoking my stupid little crush on the older man who’s always been like a part of my family.

“You won’t have to marry Aldo,” he says.

Too tired to lift my head, I roll my face back toward him and wait.

The rough pad of his thumb scratches lightly against my knuckle as he strokes my hand in long movements. A vicious flash of jealousy toward my sister shocks me.

Did he touch her like this?

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter. I don’t get to be jealous of a dead girl.

“Turi’s going to take care of him.”

I want to smile, but the connection between my brainand muscles is so weak that my face doesn’t even twitch. Dom is naïve for a man in his late thirties.

What does it matter if Aldo dies? I’ll just be married to Junior or any one of my dad’s associates. My parents didn’t send us to ballet and pilates and piano classes, pay for our nose jobs, and fly us out to Venice and Florence and Tuscany in the summers so we could be single.

Dom may promise me the world now, but he’ll fade away from my life again like he’s done for the past three years. His loyalty isn’t to me—it’s to Dad, to the Family.

“Did you really mean what you said?” It surprises me to hear my own voice, raspy from my screaming.

“Mean what?”

Even though I know better, part of me wants to believe the lie he’ll tell me, to give myself one thing in my life I can hold on to. “That you’d protect me?”

He fixes me with a focused stare, the dark brown of his eyes glowing from the light of the bedside lamp. “With my last breath.”

I exhale and turn to stare at the ceiling.

I can tell by the staggered steps on the carpet that Mom’s returned. She takes Dom’s place at the edge of the bed, and he walks away.

“You have to drink something,” she says.

As she pushes me into a sitting position, I catch Carlo just outside my door. I haven’t seen him since I returned home, but the record of his grieving is written all over his face. His tired, bloodshot eyes meet mine for a moment before he turns his gaze to Dom. My lanky, tattooed, leather-jacketed older brother looks like a child in a Halloween costume next to the other man. They measure each other for a moment.