Mercenary (Gangsters of New York #3) - Bella Di Corte Page 0,83

another full moon so he could find me again.

I looked away from him and back at his grandmother. “Did your husband watch you from the same window?”

“No,” she said, going back to digging. “He did not watch me at all. He saw his wife. The mother of his children. But he did not see me.”

I braced my hands against the bench, sitting up some. She did not look at me, but I knew she could feel me watching.

“This life of theirs becomes ours, too, ” she said. “It’s not business for them, it’s a way of life. When you choose this life, there is no other. We live on the outskirts of real life, even though we can see it happening right in front of us. We socialize with other wives—their children become like our own. We throw parties for our family—Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, Fourth of July, weddings, baptisms. It all looks so glamorous. It looks like we live the life.

“You’re a smart girl. I don’t have to lecture you on the realities. The constant scrutiny from the government. The constant hovering around your house. The other women—we go to some places, and they go to others. They can have a goomah, but they can’t disrespect us by bringing the woman, or women, to the same places. It’s expected that they have them. How can a man that powerful only have one woman? What would that make him?”

“A man,” I said. In this life, it would be harder to stand up to that particular expectation than bowing to it.

She stopped digging for a minute and grinned. “You are full of heat,” she said, and then she sighed. “Then the day comes when you have sons. And you ask your husband to spare them from this life. Yes, yes, they tell you. I will try my best. But it gets to them. It gets to sons, cousins, uncles. It even gets to the girls. They usually marry a son or a cousin. They become us.”

“You,” I said. “They become you.”

“You carry the Capitani name. You carry on the legacy. You carry many women who have sat where you are now—” she nodded to the bench “—with you. You are the Don’s wife. You are who I used to be. No matter how different we look.”

“It’s not the way we look,” I said. “It’s the way we react.”

She grinned again, and this time, it seemed out of pity. “Did Corrado tell you about my daughters?”

“Some,” I said.

She dug a little harder. Then she stopped after another minute, wiping the sweat from her brow. “I knew who his father was.”

“I thought—”

“They have their secrets. We have ours.” She looked at me then. Her eyes were dull, flat, even in the sunshine. “Luna fell in love with Corrado Palermo before she left home. That’s why she left, and Emilia went with her. We did not want her to leave, but she knew her father would never allow it. Corrado belonged to a different family, and at the time, there was a war going on.

“It would have caused even more strife if Emilio had found out. Luna was terrified that if he did, he would have him killed. At that time, Corrado Palermo was making a name for himself. Even I didn’t want her associated with him.” She touched her temple, leaving a dirt smear. “An idea made it here. To his head. It didn’t leave unless it was tired or done.

“My daughter was the same. So she left home and went to Vegas. She knew he would come after her no matter where she went, and her father would disown her when she did. Emilio did, Corrado Palermo followed, and she got pregnant not long after. But things were happening here, bad things, and since Corrado Palermo was like a son to Arturo Scarpone, he sent him to Italy to lay low for a while.”

“Corrado Palermo had a contract on his head. When things were safe here, he came back and broke it off with Luna. He had gotten married while he was in Palermo.”

She went back to digging, sighing. “He didn’t want anything to do with the baby or with Luna. She made us swear on each other, Emilia and me, that we would never tell. I have never spoke a word of this until today. My girls are gone.”

“Why are you telling me?” I whispered.

She brought her shoulders up to her ears and then let them fall. “I see that same