Emilia (Part 1)(2)

“Good. Good. So what can I do for you?”

My uncle cleared his throat. “We ran into a little problem with Vito Stringari. He was—”

“He was short this month.”

“Yeah, and he still hasn’t paid last month.”

“Why are you bringing this petty shit to me?”

“Well, you know about his kid…”

I felt a tugging sensation on the bottom of my maxi dress. My hands traced the line of my dress, coming to a halt at the door, and that was when I realized my mistake. Somehow I closed it on the hem.

Oh, crap. This is bad. Really bad.

Every choppy mouthful of air was like sandpaper on my cotton-dry tongue. My heart pumped harder than before. A whirlwind of crazy outcomes danced through my head, each worse the last. I’d escaped my father’s notice for years, and explained away little inconsistencies with relative ease, but this…this would be unexplainable. His office was firmly planted in the no-go zone. I could count the number of times he told me not to go in here on five people’s hands and toes.

“Give him another month.” My father’s firm bark broke into the stream of deranged thoughts. “Is that it?”

“For now,” my uncle replied.

Chairs scraped across the floor again, and with each shuffled footstep out of the room, my muscles unwound fiber by fiber.

“Are you coming, Sal?” my uncle asked.

“I’ll catch up with you in a minute. I need to make a call.”





CHAPTER TWO





My body tensed like a bowstring in anticipation of the likely confrontation with Sal. Part of me wanted to leap out of the credenza and scream surprise!, like this was nothing more than a silly prank gone wrong, but my common sense kept me pinned inside the stifling cabinet. The tapping and pinging of his phone thundered through my ears, each one lulling me into believing he truly didn’t realize I was hiding in the room. Maybe he thought the material sticking out of the door was a random chunk of fabric.

I was dead wrong.

In slow motion, the door of the credenza crept open centimeter by centimeter, finally revealing Salvatore D’Amico. He stood squarely with his chin lowered and his black loafer-clad feet more than shoulder width apart. He stared down at me, capturing me in his gaze like the proverbial deer caught in headlights.

The air thickened, and I knew I needed to say something, anything really, except I couldn’t find my words. Until this point in time, I’d only seen this man from afar. Up close, he was devastating. Tall and lean, his runner’s build was evident even beneath the lines of his fitted black suit. His skin looked like the heavens had sprinkled it with gold dust. And his eyes…well, they reminded me of a kaleidoscope complete with swirls of cinnamon, honey, and speckles of sage, the right one slightly lighter than the left, or maybe it was a trick of the light.

“What are you doing in here?” Salvatore asked, the upward curl of his lips betraying the serious pitch of his voice.

“Oh, um…” I uncurled my legs and scrambled to my feet, careful not to flash my underwear. “I, um, well, you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

I rolled my shoulders forward and dropped my chin. “It was stupid. I hid when I heard voices. My dad doesn’t like it when I come in here.”

“Then why were you in here?”

I scanned the room, searching for a plausible excuse. Any excuse. “Uhh…I was looking for a book.”

He rubbed his hand across his jaw, his expression inscrutable. “A book?”

“Yeah,” I bobbed my head up and down, “a book. I needed something to read. Ya’ know how my father hired someone to homeschool me?” At his uncomprehending look, I continued spewing bullshit. “Anyway, the tutor emailed me a reading assignment and I came in here to look for something. I already had one picked out when I heard you guys in the hall. I panicked and hid. It was stupid. I should’ve left.”

I smiled inwardly at my ability to come up with something that wasn’t a complete lie. Right after my mom died, my father pulled me out of school and hired a tutor, one I hadn’t seen or heard from since I passed my GED three months ago. Sal didn’t need to know about that though.

He strolled over to the bookcase and ran a finger along the spines of ten or so books. Without reading the titles, I knew the books were nothing a seventeen-year-old would read voluntarily: the history of winemaking, the fall of the Roman Empire, military strategy, plants, and so on, all of which supported the tutor assignment angle I had pitched him, at least in my mind.

“Which one were you going to read?”

“Any one of them. I’m a history buff and naturalist like my dad. So yeah, I thought I’d find something to occupy myself for the long weekend.” I sounded like a rambling idiot. I knew it, and judging from the growing smirk on his face, Sal knew it too. Even worse, I somehow managed to contradict my lie in the span of thirty seconds. I glanced over my shoulder, making sure my father wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity before inching my way to the fluted bookcase.