Mafia Girl by Deborah Blumenthal Read Free Book Online

wouldn’t be around to pay?
    Without warning all this emotion that must have been barricaded behind the laughter rears up like a tsunami and I don’t know why, but everything gets less funny and backslides and grows darker and tragic and suddenly we’re sobbing and, God, how did that happen? And we’re feeling sorry for everything that’s wrong in our lives and not the way we want it to be, although we know we don’t have the power to change any of that. So we sob harder and I can’t breathe and Clive is gasping for air too with tears running down his cheeks. And how pathetic are we, lost and alone even though we’re not now because we have each other. And I don’t even remember how all this started now, but I wish I could figure out what it means because my insides are collapsing.
    It’s been one week, sixteen hours, and thirty-seven minutes or so since I’ve seen Michael. I check my phone every time I inhale to see if he might have broken down and called. Or left a message. Or a text. But no. He is playing hard to get or not playing at all and just being a dick because he’s so into the good cop thing, trying to do right and be ethical and all, despite the fact that I’m sure he’s up nights thinking about me and suffering too because even his tough impassive cop face is not good enough to hide what’s behind his eyes.
    If there’s one thing I am sure of, it’s that I have an unfailingly sharp radar when it comes to picking up vibes on how men feel about me. And even though, yes, I might be completely deranged, I am convinced that I just have to work on Michael Cross. And that is what I’m going to do if I can get near him.
    What I need is a way to track his whereabouts, which makes me think of the electronic ankle bracelets that they clamp on felons’ legs and that my dad walked around with one time so they always knew where he was so he couldn’t flee to a safe house in Reggio Calabria or wherever to hide. But how ridiculous is that? So I have to come up with a real plan.
    But then my phone rings. And of course it isn’t Michael. It’s Vogue magazine. W-H-A-T?
    I’m not sure what I’m hearing at first. But then I realize that the assistant to the fashion editor named Clotilde Marie Saint-Just is asking me to pose for them for an upcoming issue called “Under Age and Over the Top,” which would basically be about famous young girls in the news, even though I’m not exactly famous and not exactly in the news either—not unless you count the TV cameras they stick in our faces whenever our family goes out somewhere together because they love to stalk my dad. But, whatever, because if they do the story, I will be famous in a different and better kind of way, so the idea blows me away.
    I mean me ? In Vogue magazine? GET OUT. I call Ro.
    “How do you know it’s not some perv who wants you to take off your pants, Gia?”
    “To start, the caller ID said Condé Nast, okay, and I don’t think you can set that up on your own. So, no, it wasn’t bogus. And then they gave me the name of the photographer who’s shooting it and his name is John Plesaurus and he is big and does a lot of their covers and you can find his name in any issue. And anyway I called his studio to check and they said yes, yes, yes, the shooting is scheduled for four weeks from now and it’s legit and yada, yada, yada.”
    “One other thing, Gia. Your dad will never go for it.”
    I don’t answer.
    “Gia?”
    “I’m thinking.”
    My dad is nothing if not vain, and I am his daughter with his DNA and his looks. We both have honey-blond hair, tawny skin, and green eyes. Me in the magazine would be a compliment to him. So bottom line, I have my game plan.
    “I can do it.”
    “Do what?” Ro asks.
    “Convince him.”
    “How?”
    “I’ll call you back.”
    Whenever my mom makes pasta con sarde, no matter what, my dad comes home early. His grandparents grew up in a small town near Palermo and they fed him pasta con sarde