Chapter 8: The Slap
2545 Words
The letter went into the lining of a stuffed rabbit.
Sienna had bought the rabbit for Luna at a hospital gift shop six months ago and, because Luna was twelve and a half and felt she was above stuffed animals, it had come home with her in a tote bag of Luna's rejected "baby things" that the ward would not let her sister keep anymore. It had sat in the bottom of Sienna's duffel on the night she moved into the Russo mansion, and nobody, so far, had touched Sienna's duffel.
At three-fifteen in the morning, Sienna Ricci — Sienna Vitale — slit open one seam of the rabbit's back, folded her mother's letter into a long thin rectangle, slid it inside along the stuffing, and sewed the seam up again with a needle from the hotel-quality sewing kit in her vanity.
She was good with a needle.
Christina Ricci, the only mother she had ever known, had sewn uniforms for a living, and had taught her to stitch by hand before she had taught her to read.
At three-thirty, she put the rabbit back on the top shelf of her closet between two hatboxes, closed the closet, and crawled back into Dante's bed.
Dante, to his credit, or to her terror, did not stir.
She lay beside him in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about the last line of the letter.
Not even the boy with the dark eyes, Sienna. Not even him.
She slept, finally, an hour before dawn.
"Family dinner," Isabella said, as if it were a threat, at eight the next morning.
Sienna was at the breakfast room sideboard pouring her own coffee, because she had learned that lesson. Isabella was reading the paper. She did not look up.
"Excuse me?"
"Tonight. Eight o'clock. The Morettis. The Ferrantis. And the De Lucas."
Sienna's hand stopped on the handle of the coffee pot.
"The — ?"
"The De Lucas," Isabella said pleasantly. "Matteo brings his daughter-in-law and his wife. My oldest friend. Dante's grandfather's consigliere, forty years ago. Dante will not object. Dante never objects to my Friday dinners."
"He was shot," Sienna said softly, "four nights ago. Across town. By people my husband believes to be De Luca soldiers."
"Sienna, caro." Isabella looked up for the first time, eyes wide, horrified, as if Sienna had just said something deeply tasteless at a wake. "We do not know that. Guessing is for the vulgar. And in any case, tonight is not about business. Tonight is about family."
Sienna set the coffee pot down.
"Fine," she said.
Isabella blinked.
"What?"
"Fine." Sienna picked up her cup. Her hand was steady. She was astonished, privately, by how steady it was. "I'll wear something nice. Will I be seated by Mr. De Luca, or across?"
A small pause.
Then Isabella, recovering, smiled.
"Across," she said warmly. "So that he can see the new Mrs. Russo properly."
"Across it is."
She walked out of the breakfast room with the coffee cup in her hand and she did not let her knees go until she was three hallways away.
Dante found her in the library at noon.
She was in an armchair by the unlit fire, a book open on her lap that she had not read a word of. He came in quietly, closed the door, and sat down in the armchair opposite hers. His left arm was still stiff, but the bandage was smaller. He looked like a man who had slept for three hours and thought about something else for the remaining four.
"Isabella told you," he said.
"Yes."
"I know. I'm going to cancel it."
"Don't."
He went very still.
"Sienna."
"Don't cancel it," she said evenly. "She wants you to. If you do, she'll know you believe she called them. If you don't, she won't be sure."
Dante looked at her for a very long moment.
"You," he said, almost conversationally, "are not the woman I signed a contract with."
"I'm exactly the woman you signed a contract with."
"No."
"Yes, Dante."
"The woman I signed a contract with," he said, "had a trembling hand and a five-million-dollar hospital bill. She did not strategize against my stepmother before lunch."
Sienna set the book down.
"The woman you signed a contract with," she said quietly, "grew up the only person standing between a man who sold her for five million dollars and a little girl with leukemia. If you thought she didn't know how to strategize, Don Russo, you weren't looking at her very carefully."
A long beat.
Then Dante, very slowly, let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"Amore," he said, "I am looking at you now."
The dress for dinner was emerald green.
She picked it herself. Long sleeves. High neck. No necklace — nothing to distract from the single small piece of jewelry that, when she pulled her hair up, was visible just at the nape of her neck.
The Vitale wolf.
Small, under the knot of her hair. Not obvious unless you knew. But if you were a man who had burned a family alive in Palermo twenty-one years ago — if you had laid awake some nights and wondered whether a three-year-old had also burned — you would know what to look for on the back of a young woman's neck.
Dante came into her dressing room as she was fastening her earrings. He looked at the neckline. He looked at her hair.
"…Tesoro."
"I know."
"You are baiting a man who employs professional killers."
"I am showing my husband's stepmother," Sienna said calmly, "that I am not afraid of her friends."
"There is a distinction," Dante said, "and you are trying very hard not to see it."
"I see it." She met his eyes in the mirror. "I am doing this anyway."
His jaw set.
Then he reached into his pocket, took out a small velvet box, and opened it. Inside lay a thin platinum chain with a single green stone the size of a pea, oval cut, deep and clean and cold.
"Wear it," he said. "Emerald, not diamond. It will draw the eye from your neckline."
She looked at the stone.
"Dante — "
"I didn't buy it for you tonight," he said. "I bought it before the wedding. You were supposed to wear it at the altar, and we did not have an altar, because your father got drunk and we ran the ceremony in my grandfather's office, so. You are wearing it at dinner tonight instead."
She turned on the vanity stool to face him.
He clipped it around her neck himself, good hand at the back, the clasp a small cool brush under the knot of her hair, and for one full second, his fingers rested there — deliberately — over her birthmark.
A claim.
A shield.
A message, from me to the room tonight, do not look.
She did not thank him.
She did not have the voice for it.
The dinner, for an hour, was boring.
The Morettis were there. Valentina was there, in a violently red dress, studiously ignoring Sienna and re-reading the menu three times. Isabella held court. Two of the Ferranti sons tried very hard to speak charming English. Dante, beside Sienna, ate quietly and put his hand on the small of her back between courses.
Matteo De Luca watched Sienna the whole time.
He was even older than she had expected. Seventy. A neck like a bulldog. A thin, kind smile. Opposite her, across the long polished oak, his wife and his daughter-in-law chattered in overlapping Italian, and Matteo — he smiled, and he said all the right things, and he ate very little, and he watched Sienna with the kind of patient, slow curiosity that reminded her of how a cat watches a thing it is not in a hurry about.
Halfway through the main course, he finally spoke to her.
"Mrs. Russo."
"Yes?"
"How is your sister."
The whole table did not hear him. Dante, beside her, did.
"Recovering," Sienna said. "Thank you for asking."
"St. Mary's," said Matteo De Luca, "is a good hospital."
"It is."
"My granddaughter was treated there many years ago. We have fond memories of the staff."
Sienna kept her face still.
"I'm glad," she said.
"Though," he added mildly, "the cafeteria, I think, is not what it used to be. I understand there was an unfortunate incident there yesterday."
The whole table did hear that.
For a second, the whole table did not breathe.
Dante's hand, on the small of her back, went very light. Not tensed. Not pressed. Just there. A hand saying, I am here, I am listening.
Sienna picked up her wine glass. She took a small, deliberate sip. She set it down.
"Yes," she said pleasantly. "An old man was shot in the head, I believe. The security guard said it was probably a drug-related incident. Which seemed strange to me. Because the dead man was about eighty, and he looked, to me, like he had just come off a plane from Italy."
The table was watching her.
She looked across it at Matteo De Luca.
"Signor De Luca," she said sweetly, in the quietest voice she had used all night. "Do you know why an eighty-year-old man from Sicily would fly to New York to be shot in a children's hospital cafeteria?"
A very small silence.
Then Matteo De Luca smiled.
"Signora," he said, "I do not know."
"Neither do I."
"But perhaps," he said, "he had something to say."
"Perhaps."
"And perhaps," Matteo added gently, "it is a blessing, for him, and for those he might have said it to, that he did not have time to say it."
Sienna took another sip of her wine.
"Perhaps," she said, putting the glass down carefully. "Or perhaps, Signor De Luca, you would like to tell me what you think he was going to say."
Valentina Moretti burst out laughing.
It was high, and it was loud, and it was exactly one half-second too late. "Oh, my God, is this a mystery dinner? Are we playing a game?" she said brightly, reaching for her wine, wobbling it on purpose. "Don Russo, your wife is an American — she watches too much television — "
The wine came across the table with her outstretched hand.
The glass tipped — accidentally — and the whole red-stained contents arced across the linen, across Sienna's plate, and onto the bodice of Sienna's emerald-green dress.
It was beautifully done.
Sienna felt the cold wet hit through silk. Isabella's mouth, across the table, twitched almost imperceptibly — good girl, Valentina — and Sienna understood, with absolute clarity, that this was the moment the entire table had been set up to produce.
The gold digger. Crying. Running upstairs. Small. Dismissible.
Sienna did not stand up.
She picked up her napkin. She dabbed at her sleeve. She looked at Valentina across the length of the table with the same calm gentle expression you use on a child who has spilled her juice.
Then she reached, slowly, deliberately, for the large crystal decanter of red that stood between them — full, because they were only an hour into the second bottle — and she picked it up.
"Sienna," Dante said quietly.
"Mm."
"Tesoro."
"I heard you."
She stood up.
She walked — walked, unhurried — around the end of the table, past the Ferrantis, past Isabella, past Matteo De Luca, who turned, slightly, in his chair to watch her — and she stopped beside Valentina's chair.
Valentina was still smiling, but her eyes had begun to lose certainty.
"Cara," Sienna said warmly, "let me help you with that."
She tipped the entire decanter of wine, with great ceremony, directly over Valentina Moretti's head.
Red ran. Down Valentina's blow-dried hair, down her face, over her shoulders, into the scarlet silk of her dress, and pooled on the chair between her legs. Valentina screamed. Someone — the younger Ferranti — laughed once in shock and cut it off.
Sienna set the empty decanter carefully back onto the table.
She turned to the room.
"In this house," she said, quietly, pleasantly, "I am Mrs. Russo. You are a guest in my dining room. Behave like one, Valentina. And you," she turned, smoothly, to Isabella, "are going to apologize to me, in front of these people, or you are going to spend tomorrow morning calling each of them personally to tell them that the new Mrs. Russo is a gold digger with her own ideas."
Dead silence.
Every face at the table — Matteo De Luca's wife with her napkin halfway to her mouth, the Morettis, Isabella herself — was frozen.
Then, slowly, Dante started to laugh.
Not loudly. Not cruelly. Just — a quiet, stunned, delighted laugh, low in his throat, as he put his own napkin on the table and stood, and walked around to his wife, and set his hand, deliberately, on the back of her neck — over the emerald, over the Vitale wolf — and looked at his stepmother with a face that had suddenly remembered how much he enjoyed this kind of evening.
"Isabella," he said, still smiling. "My wife is waiting for your apology."
Isabella did not move.
"Now," Dante said.
The next two and a half minutes were Sienna's favorite of her life so far.
She did not eat dessert. She did not need to. Dante saw her up to the bedroom at ten, closed the door, locked it, turned, and looked at her standing in her wine-soaked green dress with her hair still pinned up and her husband's hand still faintly humming against her neck where he had touched her.
"Sienna," he said.
"Don't."
"I am going to, tesoro."
"Don't what — "
He crossed the room in three steps, took her face in both hands — both hands, including the one he was not supposed to be using yet — and kissed her.
It was not a stage kiss.
It was not for the cameras.
It was slow, and warm, and deeply furious, and it lasted long enough for Sienna's hands to come up on their own — one gripping his shirt, one at the side of his neck — and long enough for her body to betray her entirely and lean into him, and long enough for both of them to know, with absolute clarity, that the contract had just quietly, inconveniently, and without anyone's permission begun to die.
When he finally pulled back, his forehead on hers, his hand still in her hair, Dante Russo said, very softly:
"Piccola, you are going to ruin me."
Sienna looked up at her husband.
And, with her mother's letter sewn into a stuffed rabbit in the closet behind her, and a photograph of a dead aunt downstairs in the library, and the name Isabella Russo's father ringing quietly in a corner of her skull that Dante did not know about and would not forgive if he did —
— Sienna Vitale smiled.
"You already signed the contract, Don Russo," she said.
And she let him kiss her again.
- Writer
