Page 140 of The Enslaved Duet

He snagged my wrist gently before I could make it out of the car, but his face was creased with conflict as he mulled over his words.

“I try to give you space,si? I try to give you freedom to live the kind of life you want to live because you were so long in a cage, and not just one owned by my brother. I try, Cosima, when all I want to do is stand guard like a sentry by your side every single minute to make sure life cannot fuck with you anymore. So have a care, hmm? Take pity on this overprotective guy, and promise me, when I come to you next, you’ll tell me what happened, and you’ll let me help.”

I paused, my throat thick with unshed tears.

“You’re not alone in this,” Dante said, his own voice thick with emotion. “You won’t be alone ever again. Not with Salvatore and me on your side,bene?”

I nodded jerkily, then let out a deep exhale to settle my hummingbird’s heart, pounding rapidly yet so fragile in my chest.

“Va bene,” I agreed softly, before moving quickly out of the cab, dashing at the wetness under one eye as I moved to the sidewalk.

I didn’t look back as the cab pulled away, but the crowded streets of Little Italy wouldn’t have afforded me the room to turn around anyway.

Mama’s restaurant straddled the line between Little Italy and the trendier Soho, the perfect place for her intimate, upscale Italian restaurant. She drew in a combination of the city’s wealthy, elegant couples and deeply traditional Italian-American neighbors.

Italian-Americans were not like native Italians. The immigrants had packaged the culture of Italy pre-World War II and put it in a time capsule, cracking it open after passing through Ellis Island and settling in the small rectangular neighborhood of Little Italy in New York City. They spoke in broken, bastardized Italian, different than even the most obscure dialects back home because English underscored it like a highlighter, turning accents into mockeries they’d made famous with cartoon characters like Mario. They were only American enough to set them totally apart from Americans and barely Italian enough to pass for it if they ever re-entered the mother country.

My siblings and I didn’t like to spend time there in that cramped neighborhood slowly shrinking under the expansion of China Town. It felt claustrophobic and tragic, like maybe we’d worked so hard to escape Napoli only to wind up right back inside another version of it.

But Mama loved it.

She wasn’t an old woman, but she was set in her ways, and her ways were just as antiquated as the Italian-American ideal. She believed in the outward strength of patriarchy and the secret skillful workings of the matriarchy. She spoke Italian whenever she could get away with it, and though she wasn’t bigoted, most of her employees at Osteria Lombardi were Italian or Italian-American because of it.

She’d escaped a small world, a world that was a cage, only to carefully lock herself inside another one. It made her feel safe, I knew, but it also made me feel sad for her.

We weren’t on bad terms.

We could have been, and part of me even thought we should have been, but I took too much pride in my ability to intellectualize and understand a person and their motivation to truly blame her for her past.

Especially given that both her mistakes had come from falling in love. First with the wrong man at the right time, and then the reverse with the other.

She wore the weight and the indignity of those decisions every day in her dark eyes, her demons making the brown seem black with shadows.

At first, when I’d moved back with Salvatore and Dante at my side, she had been quiet, almost shy with shame around me. She knew I knew the truth about my parentage, and she wondered when I would strike out against her, and more, when I would tell Sebastian and take another child away from her.

But I didn’t tell anyone.

My year of slavery and its contrast of deep horrors and tender mercies went into a locked box in the farthest reaches of my soul and stayed there, untouched.

It was a defence mechanism, maybe even an unhealthy one, but I wasn’t going to castigate myself for it.

I’d been through enough.

So had my family.

I didn’t need to throw a bomb into the middle of my family just as we were all reaching for each other and our dreams.

Still, Mama and I existed on my terms. She walked on eggshells around me, and a small, horrible part of me enjoyed that. She deserved some discomfort for telling lies, for ruining my life before it had even started.

Without her, I wouldn’t have been a pawn to the mafia or to Alexander.

But it was also why I cut her so much slack…because without her, I wouldn’t have met Alexander.

And no matter what, I’d always treasure my connection with him.

I pushed through the wooden doors of Osteria Lombardi, inhaling the yeasted scent of focaccia and semolina dough as I walked across the dark wood floors to the back of the restaurant. It was a traditional space, exactly how you would imagine an elegant Italian eatery right down to the bookcases stocked with regional wines, the exposed brick walls, and the old, weeping candlesticks at each table.

I loved it there. It was the manifestation of a dream Mama had dreamt her whole life and never believed would be possible. Sebastian and I had made it so through hard work and sacrifice.