My Father Chose His Whore. So I Buried Them Both.

My father is the Don of Marchetti family and tonight, seven of his men walked out of my mother's bedroom. He's standing in the doorway with his new whore on his arm. They both stare at my mother lying motionless on the bed. And he smiles like she's the entertainment. "You used to look down on Bianca, Isabella. And look at you now, the great Moretti princess, not so high and mighty anymore." His voice makes me want to throw up. "I think it's time you let me make Bianca my second wife." My mother doesn't scream or cry. She forces herself up off the bed, every movement shaking. This time, she pulls the diamond pendant off her neck—the one he gave her the night he proposed—and drops it into the fire. The next morning, my father throws a wedding. Bigger than the one he gave my mother fifteen years ago. Three hundred guests from every family on the East Coast, all here to watch my father make his mistress official. I'm wearing a black dress. Nobody notices. Halfway through dinner, the lights flicker. The big screen behind the head table turns on by itself. It's my mother. Naked. On her own bed. Seven men taking turns. The video is high-definition. Someone wanted us to see every detail. I lunge for the screen, trying to block it with my own body. "What the fuck is this?! Turn it off! TURN IT OFF!" The guests are laughing. Some of them are filming. Some of them are pointing at the men in the video and naming them out loud, like it's a party game. My father's face goes purple. "You like showing off so much, Isabella?" He's on his feet, champagne flute shaking in his hand. "Fine. I'll give the whole family a turn." He snaps his fingers. "Take her to the Room." I scream and throw myself at him. The housekeeper catches me from behind, one hand clamps over my mouth, and drags me out of the ballroom while my mother is hauled in the opposite direction. The guests' laughter follows me into the hallway. "Once a woman's been in the Room—passed around to every man in the family—she doesn't walk right again. Wears diapers the rest of her life. Might as well bury her." "Generous of the Don, though. Sharing his own wife with the boys." "A Moretti princess. Soft hands, soft skin. Bet she moans prettier than the club girls..." The housekeeper drops me in my bedroom and locks the door from the outside. I sit on the floor in my black dress and ask her, "What's the Room?" She whispers, through the door, "The worst thing the Marchetti family does to a woman, Cleo." ... I don't sleep. By noon the next day, they let me see my mom. The smell hits me before I'm through the doorway. Blood. Sweat. Strangers. My mom is on the bed. Eyes open. Not blinking. Under the thin white nightgown they put on her, every inch of her skin is bruised. "Mama—" My voice cracks. My fingers hover over her arm; I can't bring myself to touch her. I turn to the door to scream for the family doctor— The door swings open first. My father walks in with Bianca on his arm, both of them in fresh silk, both of them perfumed. Bianca makes a tiny gagging sound and covers her nose. My father looks at my mother the way you look at a stain on the carpet. "Isabella. Drop the act." I freeze. "I gave the men orders. Nobody actually touched you." He's bored. "Stop performing." I open my mouth and want to shout—she's bruised, she's bleeding! But my mother's hand closes around my wrist to stop me, and she reaches under her pillow. It's divorce papers. Already signed. "Dante." Her voice is a husk of itself. "Sign them. I don't want the money. I don't want the house. I don't want the name." "I just want Cleo." My father's eyebrow lifts like he's heard a child threaten to run away from home. "Don't be stupid, Bella. Your father's dead. Your brother's dead. Your mother's been dead for ten years. Where the hell are you gonna go?" I stare at him. So he remembers. He remembers that Uncle Rafael took six bullets covering his retreat in the northern territory war. That Rafael's body is still buried under a warehouse floor in Buffalo because we never got it back. He remembers that my grandfather—the old Don Moretti—put a gun to his own temple in front of the Commission to force them to back my father up. He remembers kneeling in front of the Moretti family crest the day he married my mother, swearing on his blood and his bones: I, Dante Marchetti, will protect Isabella Moretti until the day I die. One wife. One love. No exceptions. But "until the day I die" is a long time. Three years into the marriage, he came home from a job up north with Bianca Costa. Said she'd saved his life. Said my mother needed to be understanding. When my mother grew tulips in the garden, Bianca said the pollen made her sneeze. My father had every flower torn up by the roots. When my mother got pregnant with my baby brother, Bianca cried and said that something terrible would happen to her if my mother kept the baby. That night, my father held my mother down himself and forced the pills down her throat. She bled through her dress and onto the rug. She screamed for six hours. While he was three rooms away, listening to Bianca sing. I bet he heard every second of it. But He didn't move. That was the night I understood: my father—the man who used to lift me onto his shoulders to watch the fireworks— was already dead.

Like he's afraid she'll say the word divorce again, my father snatches the papers out of her hand and throws them in the fireplace. The paper curls. Blackens. Gone in three seconds. He sighs—soft, the way he used to sigh when I was little and skinned my knee—and reaches out to smooth my mother's hair. She turns her face away. His hand hangs in the air for a long, ugly second. Then he yanks it back and his jaw locks. "Tonight," he says, voice flat, "I'm taking Bianca to the Commission's annual gala. Give her your Bulgari set." "No." I'm already in front of the bed before my mother can speak. "That's my grandma's. She left it to my mom. Nobody touches it." Bianca's eyes well up on cue. The tears actually slide down her cheeks; I have to give her credit, she's good. "Dante, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have asked. I'm not worthy of the Moretti family heirlooms." She presses a hand to her mouth. "It's okay. Just let them laugh at me. I'm used to it..." My father's face goes to stone. "Isabella. This is how you raised our daughter? Mouthing off, no manners, no respect for Bianca?" His voice drops. "Maybe Cleo should move in with Bianca. Learn some respect." My mother's face goes white. She pushes herself upright on the bed and puts herself between me and him. "Take the jewelry. Take all of it. Don't touch my daughter." Bianca's mouth twitches. For half a second, I see the smile she's trying to hide. Then she wipes her tears and says, very softly, "Dante, I'm scared I'll embarrass you tonight. I'm just a club girl. I don't know how to act around those people." She squeezes his arm. "What if Isabella came with us? As my maid? Just so I don't make a fool of myself." The Don's wife. A maid. To his mistress. In front of every family on the East Coast. My father doesn't even hesitate. "Done." ... At sunset, they throw a grey servant's dress through the door. I watch my mother peel off her silk slip and pull the cheap dress on. There's not a clean inch of skin on her back. I'm crying before I know I've started. She wipes my face with her thumb. Then she pulls something out from under her pillow and presses it into my palm. A small gold cross on a thin chain. "Cleo, baby. Listen to me." Her eyes are clear for the first time in months. "I'm not going to be here much longer. I need you to listen." "Mama, don't—" "Listen. When I'm gone, you take this cross. You get on a plane. You fly to Los Angeles. You go to Luca Moretti." I know the name. The Don of the West Coast. The man who spoiled me rotten when I was little, who treated me like his own kid—until he and my father started hating each other for reasons nobody would explain, and he stopped coming around. "Show him this cross. He'll know what it means." Her voice catches. "He'll keep you safe. He'll do it for me." "I'm sorry I won't see you grow up, baby." I close my fist around the cross so hard the edges cut my palm. I know exactly how worn down she is. She fought. God, she fought. When Bianca first arrived, my mother put her in an apartment across town—a nice one, paid for, just not in our house. The next morning, my father called it jealousy. He made her walk barefoot down Fifth Avenue in a silk robe to bring Bianca home herself. Six months ago, after the miscarriage, my mother came at Bianca with a kitchen knife. My father dragged her to the cemetery, stood her in front of my grandmother's grave, and told her if she touched Bianca again, he'd dig the body up and dump it in the East River himself. Three days ago, somebody leaked Bianca's old videos from her stripper days to half the families on the coast. My father decided my mother did it. That same night, he had her drugged and locked in the basement with a dozen men who'd broken family code, and he let them have her until morning. After that night, she stopped fighting. I lean my forehead against her bony shoulder. I can feel every rib through her cheap dress, and I choke on a sob. "Mama."

Bianca isn't done with us. At the gala, she makes a show of it. Snaps her fingers at my mother to refill her champagne. Drops a napkin and waits, smiling, until my mother kneels on the marble to pick it up. Every woman in that room watches the Moretti princess serve drinks to a stripper Dante picked up in a back-alley club in Atlantic City. When Bianca's had enough sport with the crowd, she walks us out to the gardens behind the venue. There's a pond. No witnesses. She tugs off one of her diamond earrings and flicks it into the water. "Go get it." My mother doesn't move. Bianca's face goes ugly so fast I almost laugh. "Isabella. You're my maid tonight. I tell you to do something, you do it. Go get it." My mother looks at her for a long, quiet second. "A ring won't change what you are, Bianca. You're a mistress. You'll die a mistress." Bianca's hand flies up to slap her. I get there first. I shove Bianca hard in the chest—she stumbles back two steps in her heels—and I plant myself in front of my mother. "Get the fuck away from her." "You little bitch—" She swings on me. My mother yanks me into her arms a half-second before her nails connect; instead of my cheek, Bianca's nails rake down my mother's throat. Four red lines well up instantly. And for one beat—one single beat—my mother's eyes flash with something I haven't seen in three years. The old Moretti fire. The look she had in the photos from before she married him. Bianca actually flinches back. Then she remembers where she is, and she sneers. "You're all bark, Isabella. No bite." She turns to me. "Fine. Don't get it. But Cleo's marriage contract is sitting on Dante's desk right now, and I get a say. Want me to recommend the Falcone man? Or the Romano heir?" The Falcone man is forty-three and on his fourth wife. The Romano heir is nineteen and beat a maid to death last summer for serving cold coffee. His father paid it off. My mother's hand jerks against my shoulder. "I'll get the earring," she whispers. The water is freezing. My mother walks down the stone steps into the pond fully dressed. Her lips are blue inside of two minutes. "Mama!" Bianca slaps me. Hard. Then again, backhand. "Shut your mouth, you spoiled little bitch—" "What the hell is going on?" Dante's voice. Bianca reacts in a heartbeat. She grabs my hand—drives my palm into her own chest—and throws herself backwards over the low railing into the pond. The splash is theatrical. Then Dante is in the water before his jacket is off, and he hauls Bianca out cradled against his chest like she's made of glass. My mother is twenty feet away, drowning. A waiter from the gala—not family, not blood, just a kid trying to keep his job—is the one who jumps in and drags her to the edge. Bianca clings to Dante's lapels and shakes. "I'm sorry, Dante, I'm so sorry—I shouldn't have come tonight—" She sees me and screams, hides her face against his shoulder. "Don't let her hit me again, please, please—" "I didn't touch you!" I'm shaking. My cheek is on fire from her slap. "She made my mother get in the water for an earring! She called me a bitch! She's been hitting me, look at my face, look—" Dante looks at my mother instead. Bruised, half-drowned, lips blue, barely breathing on the wet stones. For one second, something flickers behind his eyes. Something that almost looks like he still loves her. Then Bianca sobs against him. "Dante, please—I know she hates me. Fine. But to drag Cleo into it? To make a child lie for her?" She lifts her tear-streaked face. "I admit it. I slapped Cleo. Because she called me a bitch. She said I spread my legs for every man and insulted my dead mother." Bianca's voice climbs. "I was nobody before you, Dante, but I have pride. I'd rather drown than be treated like that—" She lunges for the railing like she's going to throw herself in again. "Enough." Dante's voice is ice. "Take her to the basement. Twenty with the belt." "No!" My mother throws herself in front of me before the guards drag me. "She's mine. I raised her. Whatever she did—do it to me." Dante looks down at her. Cold as hell. "Forty." ... The basement is cold. Concrete floor. One bare bulb swinging from the ceiling. My mother kneels on the floor. By the tenth, I'm sobbing so hard I can't breathe. By the twentieth, my mom can't even hold her head up. And I taste blood where I've bitten through my lip. I'm on my knees outside, screaming at the men, screaming at Dante, screaming at God— "Please. Please! She's my MOM! Please stop!" By the end, she coughs up blood and collapses face-down on the concrete. I get her back to her room. I pay the family doctor double to come at midnight. Until dawn, I can't hold it anymore and pass out beside her. I wake up again because someone is in the room. Dante. He's kneeling beside the bed. He lifts the back of her nightgown with hands that are actually shaking, and a tear lands on her shoulder blade. He cleans the wounds himself. He whispers to her, voice broken. "Bella. Bella, why do you have to be so stubborn." "Bianca's a good girl. She saved my life. You don't know what she did for me. You don't know." "Just let her have a baby. Once she gives me a baby, I'll send her away. You and me and Cleo. Back to how we were. Like before." I shut my eyes quietly. There is no "how we were."

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