I knelt at the little back altar with the marks still red on my wrist and prayed for an escape that wouldn't cost Carina her mother's medicine.
All I got for my trouble was the sound of the door opening behind me.
Dario: Keep praying. It's the prettiest thing you do.
I didn't turn around, because if I turned around I'd have to look at him, and I wasn't ready to be looked at back.
He walked around me slow and set a folded page on the altar cloth like a man laying down a card he'd been saving all night.
Dario: Aldo's contract. Read it, then tell me again how your family sold you paper.
The handwriting was tiny and cramped and legal, and at the bottom sat my uncle's name in blue ink, pressed so hard it had almost gone through.
Bride delivered Sunday. Dowry in cloth and candles. She obeys her husband before God and the family.
He'd signed me away twice in one week, and the second time he'd thrown in the shop.
Dario: Aldo. Get in here.
My uncle came in with his cardigan buttoned crooked, and Carina came right behind him, because she never once let me stand alone.
Dario: Look at her, you coward, and tell her to her face what she sold herself for.
Aldo: It was only to cover the debt, Nico. I never wanted you to...
Dario: You wanted your name off the hook, you sniveling old bastard, so don't you dare cry at her now.
The slap cracked across his mouth before I could even move, and when he stumbled into the shelf there was already blood on his chin.
Dario: That's for the word paper.
Carina: You don't get to hit an old man in front of her and call it discipline, you sick fuck.
Dario: Careful. Your mother's medicine is my money, and I can have her wheeled out of that clinic with the drip still in her arm.
Dario: And you. You're the only thing in this shop worth the ink, and you know it now.
His thumb pressed in until my eyes watered, and I felt the bruise starting under my skin like a thumbprint in wax.
I should have spat in his face and taken whatever came after.
Instead I got up on my toes and kissed him, because his mouth was the only thing in that room that felt like a choice I was making.
He made that low rough sound against my mouth and walked me backward until my hips hit the altar and a candle rolled off and died on the stone.
His hand slid under my skirt, flat and hot on my thigh, and my body forgot it was standing in a church.
His palm climbed higher and I grabbed his jacket with both hands and pulled him closer instead of shoving him off.
Dario: You're soaked through that cotton already. For a holy girl, you're a fucking natural.
A sound came out of me that I'd have to confess to a priest, and shame climbed my throat while the wanting climbed right along with it.
Carina: Get your filthy hands off her! Nico! Nico, push him off!
Then Bruno's hands were on her shoulders and she was fighting him like a cat in a sack.
Her shoulder caught the door frame hard and she cried out, and blood welled at her lip where her own teeth had cut it.
Dario: Take her out to the car. Don't be gentle.
I shoved at his chest and he didn't move an inch, and Carina's voice got farther and farther away down the stairs.
Dario: She'll live. She'll live even longer if you stop making me repeat myself.
I stood in the smell of wax with his hand still warm on my skin and my skirt still crooked and my mouth still tasting of him.
Sunday was coming, and I had until then to find one choice in this that was actually mine.
He'd already decided what I was for, and every soul in this shop had signed off on it with candles and prayers.
So the only question left was whether I could keep one piece of myself out of his hands before he took the rest.