Chapter Text
Donatella Una. Acclaimed singer and impoverished woman.
Tuesdays were favor nights. Thus decided, she pulled a dusty Versace chemise, letting the creamy furrows drape over her skinny frame. An old lover's gift. Once upon a violently crimson shade, over a decade since wearing the dress for the first time, it had faded into a dusty pink due from cycles of coin operated laundry.
Embroidered birds ate her up; She was not glossy magazine skinny.
With nothing by a meager wage to wring into the month's living expenses, she was lunches neglected, dinners ignored, and a daughter fed.
This was the emaciation that Donatella occupied, and in exchange for the premature aging of her gaunt face, her daughter seemed to glow with quiet, nervous energy.
Shabby chic, she eventually called it. A balm on the lack of choice. Stirring sauce on the stove pan as her baby girl perched, tiny legs dangling from the counter, or straining her attention in the dull, administrative temp jobs that ebbed and flowed, Donatella kept her sharp mind trained on her true passion.
She had, after all, being a concert singer. Could still be a concert singer.
Even as the technology and the demographics changed rapidly, the kindling in her heart did not stop burning. Immolation on a bed of tradition. Even if pop music cared for her voice that could fill a room; ignored her age (to recording studios, a woman of 25 was a woman at the brink of death), she would have snubbed her nose all the same.
Passion didn't pay bills.
All of Trish's clothes were hand-me-downs. Practically new, sheathed in plastic covers.
"Were you a princess? A countess?" Donatella's daughter asked.
Primary school fees demanded pressed polo shirts, wrinkle resistant and poly-blend khaki skirts. For lack of affording contemporary uniforms, the girl's mother would lend her own work clothes so her daughter could attend school. Styles of a decade before Trish's birth: broad collared blouses, cool to the touch in flaky rayon. A-line skirts lined in boat motifs.
Yes-- A grown woman's petite garments seemed to do the trick. And if school administrative disapproved of the pretense, they could not protest. The student was clothed.
"Well," the girl's mother replied.
Despite smoothing the shirts and tugging at the hems every morning, the woman balefully noted that the darts of the fabric, or the cut of the style would hang too loose on the child. Unsurprising at this age, there were yet to be any semblance of curves or figure to fill their tailoring.
"Real noblewomen rise above their station."
This wasn't a firm or sensible answer to give a smart child.
But wincing, Trish didn't say anything. Pressing her mom too far would only incite the kind of quiet rage that manifested in seething, polite remarks, oftentimes about personal grooming or academic performance.
At this impossible point, she generally raised her arms. Shakily, she was lifted by her mother.
Donatella deposited the girl back to the floor. When they finished talking in the kitchen, this maneuvering was necessary. The kitchen was so small that the oven nearly scraped the opposite wall.
"Sing for me later," pleaded Trish.
"Little sparrow," chided Donatella, darkly. "Don't ever ask for anything in that tone of voice. It's yours. Anything you ever want; You have to say it like it's already yours."
---
Regardless of the unpaid rent she owed, the once-famed singer Donatella Una measured dignity by three primary qualities.
Firstly, the stoic slope of her rod-like shoulders. Accents and enunciation could open doors, but good posture could keep them wedged open, forcibly gaining entrance in spaces too haughty and old school to install shuttering, automatic entrances. Rather notoriously, she once rammed her thin frame against an impatient director's closing door. The long bruise running down her chest had flashed purple, then yellow in the healing process, but this pain was nothing compared to the flashing glory of the spotlight heating her powdered face as the regional show ran its season.
Following this priority, the grandeur of her personal style occupied her nervous hands. Everything from crepe-y lounge robes to snapped slingback heels could be efficiently rummaged out of the bins of neighborhoods she once labeled home. There was nothing that her deft and increasingly talon-like fingers could not stitch, hem, or otherwise replenish. Steam and effort. The rest was restored by a quality above confidence: the wearer's energetic entitlement.
Last, but above all else. Donatella treasured the well being of her daughter.
Words failed her.
A tired head rested in her lap. Face freckled like her father's, Trish bore little other resemblance. Even after growing past the chicken pox age and, chillingly enough, the nits and lice in the hair caught from the playground, in her adolescence she was still as prone to cold weather migraines as ever. Maybe this too, was inherited from the absent paternal side. Whether or not Trish would develop similar guarded and reticent nature, a barely suppressed revulsion for touch, Donatella was avidly determined to support her throughout all of the turmoil.
"My talented lamb," whispered Donatella.
She carefully placed another cooled towelette on her daughter's forehead, wondering if the child dreamed of the same stages. The same escalation of a star.
---
In their one bedroom apartment, Trish perched on the twin size mattress they shared for lack of affording separate bedding. She was growing taller, somewhat broader than even her full grown mother. Space was becoming more contentious.
Her trained pupils, sharp and vibrant as sea glass beads, scanned a yellowed page of sheet music with avid hunger. She was nearly 15 years old, and she longed to have an audience's eyes scan her talents and form with desire. In the narrative of her heart, she would occupy luxuriant quarters. Her mother would be-- somewhere else. But there was no question as to who held the key to the large kitchen, palace bathroom, and boudoir stocked with the kinds of perfumes that pouf at the ends in order to release sweet and sharp notes wafting across the vanity mirror. This was her most cherished fantasy, thicker than pudding. Ownership. The steering of her own destiny, away from the clandestine behavior of other adults.
Cruelly, for the first time in her life, she felt denied for something she wanted. A recent argument set the boundaries on her freedom. There was something shocking about having the pan eye shadows and stage foundations locked away after experimenting with certain looks one night. Within their small space, the only living space Trish knew, no secrets could be hidden.
"I just want to look classy," implored Trish, an appeal to her mother's tastes that only seemed to further irritate the overworked parent.
"Fourteen!" Donatella steamed. Angels were skewered alive by the contempt in her shrill, octave-leaping pitch.
"The boys and--" Her lower lip curled in. "--Men you would get at this age aren't worth the soil on your boots. Pull your tee-shirt up. Or you'll be stuck with that until you go to college."
What college, Trish wondered dully as she obeyed without protest, tugging uselessly at a permanently modest shirt. What men.
Something worse than quiet. An inability to speak and cast it out.
"Did dad think you were a whore?" asked Trish, her voice scratchy and tired.
Too exhausted to rise to the bait, her mother responded, "That scrawny boy?"
No albums. The weight of no camcorder footage, odd postcards, or ill-fitting sweaters.
"I was his world," Donatella said, quietly. Softer than hand-shielded light. "I used to chase the troubles out of his mind. I tell you once, I'll tell you again a thousand times even if you use nasty words: He liked the way I sounded. Maybe he found help. For his-"
Her girl is fourteen. If her daughter was dim (but she was made of radiance), and if she was saintly (but she knew of intimacy), Donatella would still speak frankly.
"-I think your father was sexually abused multiple times in his life. I never knew when, or how. But he would reference it indirectly. Bitterly, or I just. He looked pained even when I reached for his hand."
Hesitantly and so fragile, on the verge of bitterness, it seemed that her speculation was based out of similar experiences within her own comet life. Trauma does not express itself identically within everyone, but those subjected to certain abuses may see the lifelong consequences in others.
Her eyes closed. "I am not a mind reader. I am not a therapist. And I am not particularly mentally healthy myself."
She blinked, her eyes refocusing on the perturbed expression of her daughter. "Solido Naso-- If that was his real name-- made each other a happy distraction until I was a worse distraction." Her hand drifted towards her paneled, nearly concave midriff. "And you are the love of my life. So I went back to my hometown after taking vacation by his shore."
Silence broke up with the blasts of compressed air that froze Donatella's coiffure in place. Shaking the hairspray again with brutal determination, she made peace by offering to do the same for Trish's heat sculpted curls.
The girl accepted.
All they really had was each other. Fierce pride boiled, but never pushed the lid over.
---
Even without the visual component, she and her mother had a rare radio showcase coming up in the next week. Their fourth mother and daughter duet, followed by Trish's first solo. The nervous, jittery girl would get to sing Vogliatemi bene ("Love me, please.") from the opera known as Madame Butterfly.
They were dressed to the nines, although their clothes were the same as Donatella had owned all her life. Finery restored to the best that it could be in the 21st century. To Donatella's chagrin, the growth of Trish's body meant that the petite clothes could not help but enshrine a supple growth. Of course the girl was headstrong and direct about her wants and boundaries; she was raised to be. But still. Fear of unwanted situations planted anxiety in a mother's heart.
Neither one of them had crossed the door. They needed a last minute rehearsal, all on Trish's part.
Lip tucked in, the girl released her nervous bite, licked her lips, and began to hum the opening bars of her operatic melody.
The first bullet cracked through the plaster wall.
"Stay," said Donatella, plainly. The roof of her mouth was dry. Aside from a chest of drawers that held their clothing and cash, there was nothing but the mattress that her daughter now collected all her limbs in a tense ball, hugging herself so tightly that her knuckles and complexion flashed white. Hiding would not be possible.
In the grainy film of dissociation and hunger, Donatella understood.
Murder was cheap. But at least one of their lives was priceless, enough that the assassins did not care to kill them right away.
With the same efficient mother's love that she always dispensed, two fingers clipped Trish's shoulder (in love; goodbye; urgency) before she carefully clambering into the fire escape, where the assassins were waiting.
Two decades later, a man she meets for the first time would ask, "Do you think it was trauma that kept you from remembering the sound of their guns?"
And Trish Una would tell Bruno,
"I did not care to remember them. The most important thing-- or the only thing-- was the echo of her padded slippers striking against the metal landing. That's all."
Even so.
She would never confide the following details:
Two assassins, men who preferred to work in a pair despite only needing one, stepped into the apartment from the fire escape.
And the one with a severe hairline like slicked oil looked at her.
Eyes widening at her expression, he said,
"Please don't hate us. You know, it's just our job."
---
Someday, towards the crown of legal adulthood, Trish Una will cross paths with a different, deadly assassin known as Sheila E.
Formidable blows would be exchanged between these two killers. Physical, as well as emotional. And while a kiss between lovers may as well be the same as punching each other gently, on the mouths, Sheila E would use her thorny stand, Voodoo Child, to actually punch Trish across the face, blooming another set of lips that are waxen with crimson lipstick. The sound of guilt only repeats what has already festered in Trish's heart. Thanks to the vindictive usage of Voodoo Child, the pink-haired dame holds a conversation with her mother.
"Did you offend someone?" asked the survivor.
"Nobody," says the sound of her mother.
"Who sent these assassins?" asked the survivor.
"I'm not sure."
"How did you know you were about to die?" pleaded the survivor.
And those ruby lips pursed in disapproval, before sinking into absence. The stand's effect had ended, but the peal of the final note rang across the warehouse as clear as unblemished skin:
"Jealousy, my love."
---
Three days after the assassination of her mother, her captors stopped asking if the chopping block was soft enough to suit her preferences.
C sharp, B, B flat, C sharp.
The napkin ran out of space.
Trish halted the motion of her cheap pen, legs dangling off the bar seating.
Illuso, sitting adjacent to her, looked up at her from over the rim of his drink. He was good at what he did, and even shifting for a more comfortable position to glance over her musical composition, this failed to jangle the cuff on her ankle.
"How is the aria?" he asked.
Trish didn't even blink. How is the aria? How is the aria. Ad nauseum. Even the calmest of suggestions took an intrusive root in her brain. She kept them at bay by suppression the taste of revulsion before it could rise up her throat. Even as the calm establishment bustled around them, waiters ferrying neat platters of elegance meals to the young adult clientele, she was disgusted that no one yet, staff or customer, had pulled her aside and asked whether she was too young to accommodate the less-than-young adult pressing against her side.
The smell of beer wafted from his breath when he asked again. She didn't consider the question, but rather the man asking it.
He may be a very kind man. He may be a very cruel one. She didn't know him at all. This was their first time actually talking.
People were layered, so both qualities were possible.
Whichever feature he would be for her in that moment, neither mattered. He was her captor, instructed to kill her the moment she displayed any sign of resistance.
So long as she held her behavior with still rigidity, everyone played nice.
Alive or dead, the negotiation with the hidden boss of Passione continued.
For a few hours, it seemed that this figure wanted her alive; next, he seemed to be generating a price figure that would end her life. Given the negotiating power of these men, the elite assassins pressed for higher and higher sums of money. Whichever intermediary on the phone kept the grim leader of the assassins locked day and night to the side of the phone. Whoever the boss was, he seemed to be changing his plans every second. Deliver the girl. Don't deliver the girl. But even this uncertainty paled before the smirking of the rest of the group, each one versed in a different style of murder.
On and on, the roulette for her life continued to shift. So La Squadra di Esecuzione kept her well and alive because the price on her head kept fluctuating, faster than stocks choking around her neck. Shuttered from apartment to apartment like a particularly ill-liked foster child, for all intents and purposes, she slowly resigned herself to the fact that she relied her continued existence on mafia members who could twist the artery out of her heart before her phone stroked a button on the telephone for the police.
Less of a childish exaggeration and more of a stunning truth: She had watched this on multiple occasions, the few times she screamed at passerbys for help. They prevented any further attempts to get help by putting bodies on her conscience. An older academic, a woman who dressed like she had a stable home waiting for her, and once, a boy her own age.
Murdered, by mysterious and invisible forces. All because of her attempts to get help.
Whoever's housing she was held hostage at for the night or the week, she tended to sleep for 11 to 13 hours at a time.
Broken out of her focus, she realized where she was again. Sometimes, the particularly cruel took her out with them on their normal life runs. Not indecently. And never, to her relief, with any sexual interest. They treated her as an interesting house pet.
With the finest edge of annoyance lacing his voice, Illuso posed his question a third time. He was assigned to her and, the more locked in she became, he only grew more oddly determined to extract details of her life.
She ignored him in the loud way of children, plucking another napkin from the plastic holder and rigidly tracing a new set of musical bars. And perhaps this would have been laughable to his male ego, had it not been for the specific cast of her shoulders. A posture which clearly read: I am better than you. And you are only so much as nothing at all, but a buzzing in my ear.
His arm slammed out, prying the tiny squares of sheet music from her hands.
Without even an inch of his brow lifting, he mechanically ripped it to pieces only inches away from her face.
Trish did her best to look bored; ensconced in thin flesh and petite ribs, her heart hammered so fast she wondered if her body would obey under the directive to die on the spot.
"You chose this," murmured Illuso, scooting away the shredded music with the back of his hand. "You let this happen. It didn't have to be this way. I am a nice man, but do not push me."
Returning to calm, he ordered another drink.
"Do you enjoy music?" he asked, placidly.
She gave him a detached, haughty answer. And although she answered in a way that deliberately flung a classical reference way over his head, he replied with a vulpine smile. He managed to force her to converse with him. Open her mouth and offer a tune she never wanted to release.
---
After a month passed, this old stale joke became replaced by a newer, juicier joke: Instructing her to kill, or become killed.
This was funny to many members of La Squadra because somebody figured, the little primadonna could start paying her own rent. Death row is cheaper.
Their leader, Risotto, grunted and only said:
Her price dropped in exchange for better territories for us to extort. But I don't like those territories in the long run. The boss knows that those neighborhoods are stagnating due to drug usage. Send him a message by taking her out on a job.
--
Trish actually liked Melone, speaking relatively. He didn't pretend to be decent.
Heels hiked up on the dashboard, she tries her best to piss off the driver by gnashing her snack as loudly and slowly as possible. It was working because the smile on her driver's face did not budge a centimeter for the hour drive. Nobody in a good mood smiles that long.
A flip of bottle blond hair was the only thing separating Melone's teeth from pulling the girl's throat like party streamers. Only the promise of massive payout glued any semblance of civility.
Chips crunch between her teeth, meshed up with dull rhythm. Flecks of salt get lost in the stick of Chanel lip gloss, borrowed from her current kidnapper of the day. Everything is old news. Tastes waxen up and forgotten, like the floor of a meticulously polished art museum.
She thought about how uncomfortable she was, propped up and posturing out; her mother's undersized dress uncomfortable and far, far above the waist around her ribs because she was measurably too big to fit like intended. This was the same dress that she had worn for weeks since the day of her mother's killing, washed only when she could borrow overly large trench coats. This gentility shocked her, too: For all the rampant sadism, when it came to her physical decency, these men legitimately did not give her any trouble or harassment.
Nonetheless, Stockholm Syndrome was faraway: No one bothered to help her acquire any other clothes. They all still spoke of her as a life that could be easily ended, depending on the right price. In a way, she bleakly wondered if that was a part of the humanity, too. Of course she would want to be buried in a garment shared by her mother.
That was an imminent future. Time to deal with the reality of now.
Resigned, she knew that she had to act like someone who was about to kill a different, less fortunate someone. There was just no room to be an ordinary teen girl nowadays.
Not that she wanted to be-- what a nightmare-- but the choice would have been kind.
Tongue drags the crumbs off, unearthing all that spoiled lip gloss in the process. No sense in reapplying. Only idle habit moved her to bother applying make-up to a "date."
Why does a dead man need to look at a pretty face? Same goes for live men, but that would change swiftly.
The Esselunga looms ahead, dull as any other supermarket. A litter of shopping carts flood the lot. The vehicle jerks to a neck-snapping stop. Her knees fold towards her chest, feet clattering to the floor in a loud muffled thump.
"Did your heels turn into jelly?" simpers Melone. "Did I frighten you?"
Trish rolls her eyes. She doesn't degrade herself by answering.
"Oh, good," he says. He checks the rear view mirror, moreso out of vanity than anything else. "Get the fuck out."
She opens the door and gets the fuck out, tossing the chip bag to fall on his feet. He steps on it, runching up the bag before flooring the car.
The carpool was simple. If she succeeded under thirty minutes, someone at their base would intercept the police reports and pick her up. If she failed, then Melone would scoot around the back some hours later, retrieve the body, and hand it over to an intermediary, who would then ship the cargo to the unknown boss of Passione. Sweet and simple.
She walked in and for all the world, seemed to look like a normal teenager.
But she hid this even from herself: Apart from the detached mask of her expression, she felt ready to cry at a moment's provocation.
Please let this be easy, she prayed, doing as she was told and sweeping the aisles for her first mark.