Metamorphosis, p.1
Metamorphosis, page 1
METAMORPHOSIS
BELLA DI CORTE
Copyright © 2022 by Bella Di Corte
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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This book is a work of fiction.
Names of characters, places, and events are the construction of the author, except those locations that are well-known and of general knowledge, and all are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental, and great care was taken to design places, locations, or businesses that fit into the regional landscape without actual identification; as such, resemblance to actual places, locations, or businesses is coincidental. Any mention of a branded item, artistic work, or well-known business establishment, is used for authenticity in the work of fiction and was chosen by the author because of personal preference, its high quality, or the authenticity it lends to the work of fiction; the author has received no remuneration, either monetary or in-kind, for use of said product names, artistic work, or business establishments, and mention is not intended as advertising, nor does it constitute an endorsement. The author is solely responsible for content.
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Disclaimer:
Material in this work of fiction is of graphic sexual and violent natures and is not intended for audiences under 18 years of age.
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Copyright © 2022 by Bella Di Corte
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Editing by: Alisa Carter
Cover Designed by: Najla Qamber Designs
CONTENTS
Introduction
Machiavellian
Metamorphosis
Prologue
1. Mari
2. Mari
3. Mari
4. Capo
5. Mari
6. Mari
7. Capo
8. Mari
9. Mari
10. Mari
11. Capo
12. Mari
13. Mari
About the Author
Also by Bella Di Corte
Want more?
The Rose Room
INTRODUCTION
Dear Reader,
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Metamorphosis is a Machiavellian short story. It takes place after Capo & Mari’s wedding. To get the entire story, please check out Machiavellian, the fist book in the Gangsters of New York series. I tried to write ‘Meta’ as spoiler free as possible.
Also, cast from The Fausti Family (Rocco, Rosaria, and Captain) make appearances in this book.
I hope you enjoy reading about this special time in Capo & Mari’s life as much as I did writing it. I love spending time with them and I love their world. I hope you do, too.
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Much love,
Bella
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P.S. The blurbs for Mac & Meta can be found after this letter.
MACHIAVELLIAN
I hungered to be seen.
There were three things I knew about Capo Macchiavello:
He was gorgeous.
He was reclusive.
He was considered one of New York’s most savage animals.
And he wanted me as his wife. A simple arrangement – you do for me, I do for you. Nothing owed, no expectations. Except for one: never leave.
Life was never that simple, though. By the age of twenty-one, I was parentless, jobless, and homeless, and I had come to learn the hard way that nothing was ever free. Even kindness comes with strings.
Capo might’ve been the only man to ever see me, but I had made a vow to myself: I would never owe anyone anything. Most of all, the man I called boss.
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I killed to stay hidden.
Mariposa Flores thought she owed nothing to no one, but she owed everything…to me, the ghost the world had once called The Machiavellian Prince of New York.
METAMORPHOSIS
A MACHIAVELLIAN SHORT STORY
They say the most beautiful things in life come at a price—and that price has nothing to do with money.
I should know. By the age of twenty-one, life had taxed me beyond what I could afford.
So, when one of New York’s most elusive and dangerous men, Capo Macchiavello, came to me with an arrangement, it was a deal too good for me to refuse. And it wasn’t all about the security it offered me either. There was something about those electric-blue eyes that made me want to jump in, no life preserver.
Stormy emerald waters or clear blue sea—I had no idea what was waiting for me on the other side.
I'd always admired things that had to struggle to become beautiful. My name, Mariposa—the name he gave me—meant butterfly. It might as well have meant a fight for change. Because since meeting Capo, I felt trapped in my cocoon like never before. And on our honeymoon…I wanted to know how it felt to earn my wings and fly.
PROLOGUE
MARI
The stages of how a butterfly becomes a butterfly all seem so simple:
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The egg
The larva (caterpillar)
The pupa (chrysalis)
The adult butterfly
How easy it is to list each stage, but then to skip to the transformation, especially since it’s kept under wraps until the reveal. We see the butterfly flitting from one spot to another, empathizing with her struggle but not truly feeling it. We admire the result but not the ugly phase that helped transform her into who she becomes—a winged beauty that represents life, rebirth, change, and…love.
I’ve always felt the stages of my own metamorphosis. From having it all—a mother who loved me—to becoming an orphan. From having a safe home to knowing nothing but destitution. From wishing for so much more than I had to having that wish fulfilled right before life kept me hostage as a chrysalis forever.
All of this by the age of twenty-one.
Each one of my stages were ugly, the beauty in the fleeting moments a taste of what I’d always hoped for. Over everything, I knew there was only one thing that would start the transformation of my life.
Love.
I craved it like I craved clean water, nutritious food, a good night’s sleep.
And that love hit me like a storm. It shattered every piece of me that I’d hastily put together, pieces that didn’t always feel like they were in the right place.
And now?
After that first shattering impact, the feeling, the sensation, began in the beating of my heart and then spread to my veins…my chest, my hands, my arms, my stomach, all the way down my legs and to my feet.
Love was not a soft thing for me, but a struggle that had started the transformation of my life.
I just hoped the man I’d vowed to spend my life with would be in awe at my wings, instead of ripping them away from me after I earned them.
1
MARI
My heart felt as unsteady as my feet. It wasn’t just the water beneath me that made me feel that way, either.
It was the man next to me, my husband, who sent the butterflies flittering around in my stomach, making my heart feel like it had wings. I knew he was into some bad shit, but I never thought he could steal the color of the water and use it as the color of his eyes.
As if he could read my mind, he shook his head, and the slightest of grins touched his mouth. He found me…interesting, sort of like a new species of bug that he’d discovered and decided to keep. I’d decided to keep him, too, this big, bad wolf that I had married and vowed my life to.
In one sense, our marriage wasn’t a traditional one, but in another, it was. Italians sometimes had arranged marriages. The details surrounding ours was somewhat different, but at its core, it was based on the same principles as any normal arrangement.
The details of it made me feel secure, rooted. We both knew what to expect and vowed to uphold the terms. Love not being one of them. After I stood before a church filled with people and sealed those vows with a kiss, and then we had sex, something inside of me changed. A vulnerable part of me was hit, shattered, and all the pieces floated in a space that had no name, trying to figure out where to settle.
Was it normal to not have told your husband that you loved him? Not even once?
Yeah, to my husband, love wasn’t an option, and I was becoming increasingly aware that the feeling—or reality?—had invaded my life. I wasn’t sure if it was the kind of thing that ever went away. It felt permanent, like a soul.
I turned my face back toward the water, not wanting him to see. Because he missed nothing with those eyes, an electric blue that stood out against smooth, tan skin and silky black hair.
He felt like a storm over the water while I was in it.
My breath came fast, too fast, and I took a deep breath of fresh air, then released it slowly, enjoying how smoothly it came and went. Even though my feelings were all over the place and strong, it was what it was between us. As the air moved inside of me, so would how I felt, and I’d release it when I could. For the moment, I’d direct my thoughts down another path.
We were in Greece.
Greece!
On a yacht, bobbing above the water like a toy on an endless paradise of blue. No true direction but where the day or night brought us. Maybe the captain had an itinerary, but no one had told me, and I wanted to keep it that way.
It felt almost magical, falling asleep in one place and waking up i
When Capo had told me where we were, it took a minute for the news to settle. Once it did, I found the balcony and, still in my silk pajamas, gazed out at the view. It felt unreal to me.
Not only the view—my entire life.
From dumpster diving to...this.
Then my eyes found the man next to me, and between him and the view, he almost seemed more unreal to me. I had a feeling that he’d read Journey, the journal I’d kept with all the desires of my heart in it, and was making them all come true.
Greece was on my list, and he brought me here for our honeymoon.
I cleared my throat and turned my eyes away from his. All I could think was…the color of the water doesn’t even compare to his, or how much his eyes unnerve me when he looks at me that way. Like he was determined to see into all the places I hid my secrets. For a man like him, a man who always got what he wanted, it almost seemed like a challenge to find them.
“How long do we get to stay?” I asked.
Despite myself, after he didn’t answer, I turned and met his eyes again.
One of his brows lifted. “Thinking of the ending already?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Preparing for the inevitable.”
He laughed, a guttural sound deep in his throat. I stashed the impulse to reach out and touch his neck, where a jagged white line scarred his skin. Sometimes, when his reactions to me surprised him, his laugh sounded like paper tearing away from a notebook. Or maybe he just didn’t laugh that much before me, and when he did, it sounded raw.
“You can never prepare for that, Mariposa,” he said. “That’s why it’s important to live for today.”
“Oh,” I said, smiling. “I’m living. This. Just being here.” I took a deep breath of warm, salty air and then released it in a slow push, hesitant to give it back. Something about it was healing me already. Like our time in Sicily. “This feels like life to me.”
“Your feet are still on the boat,” he said.
I’d called it a boat when I’d first seen it, but it was much too fancy for that simple term. It was a floating mansion, in my opinion. Or as Capo had called it, a yacht.
Aphrodite was her name, and she reminded me of a stout dolphin. The front came to a point, like a long nose or beak, then widened to encompass seven decks, including two helidecks (a term Capo used) and a hangar belowdecks. The very top reminded me of a fin. It even had an underwater observation room, which was super cool. The captain mentioned on the tour that the yacht could accommodate twenty-eight guests and had a fifty-six-member crew. He seemed to only mention it for my benefit, because I was sure Capo know the statistics on it already. Since the Fausti family either owned the boat or called in a favor, it made sense that she was as posh as she was. She even flew an Italian flag.
I wiggled my toes. “I know where my feet are,” I said. “They’re basically floating above this water with the yacht. In Greece!”
He grinned and my heart dipped into my stomach, following the motion of the ocean. “Being here pleases you.”
“Pleases me.” I could barely get the words out after the word “pleases” rolled sensually from his lips. What those lips could do to me… “Yes,” I whispered, then took my voice up a notch. “But ‘pleases’ is a weak word to describe how I feel right now. About being here.”
… with you. The last two unvoiced words were simple, but I had no idea how much it was going to cost me in terms of emotional spending if I added them in. Even though it seemed like something had changed between us after what happened to Nonno, his grandfather, I still had no idea what he would do if he ever found out how I felt. It was as uncertain as what lay beneath my feet. Maybe a lot of treasure, or maybe a bunch of monsters I didn’t want to face, either.
“Get dressed, Mariposa,” he said. “Living means getting dirty. And right now, you’re too fucking clean.”
After I stepped a few paces away from him, I squared my fingers, set them in front of my face, and then made a click noise when the sight I never wanted to forget was perfectly in frame.
My husband, no shirt on, gazing out at the sea.
2
MARI
The first thing Capo did after the tender brought us to land was buy me a fancy camera. He told me it was unacceptable that I was making a clicking noise when I took a mental picture. If I wanted a camera, I’d get a camera.
After the man at the shop plugged it in and charged it for me for a while, it took me two hours to figure out how to work it, and then I was unstoppable.
We were only at our first stop on a who-knows-how-long nautical journey, and I must have taken over a hundred pictures. The view was breathtaking. I’d never seen water so clear in my life, except in Sicily. Blues and greens reminded me of melted gems in a sea of crystal. The beaches were bright, the sand a light tan. The mountains towering in the distance only seemed to add to the beauty, and in some areas, they gave the island a secluded vibe.
It was like we were in our own little ancient bubble of paradise.
The sun was relentless, and the weather was hot. Even the breezes were tepid. And the smell? I inhaled deeply, wishing I could keep the freshness of it forever in my lungs.
Heaven.
Pure heaven.
I’d decided to wear a teal bathing suit and cutoff shorts and sandals so I’d be able to absorb as much of it as possible. I wanted to feel it deep down in my bones. I’d carry it with me back to New York for the winter.
I kept the camera close to my heart, the strap around my neck, as we hiked up to a monastery on a cliffside, the sea shushing tranquilly below. Someone would have to break my neck for it if they decided they wanted it bad enough.
No one was around, but I still looked, just to check.
“What are you grinning for?” I looked at Capo from underneath the beach hat he’d bought for me. The sun was bright, and the hat was shielding my eyes some, along with a pair of glasses I’d gotten from the same market.
“You think someone is going to jump out of a bush and steal your camera?”
I waved a hand. “Happens all the time in New York. You know how many times I’ve had my bag almost stolen?”
“How many?” he asked after I didn’t go on, narrowing his eyes at me.
“That was kind of a rhetorical question, Capo.”
“What did I tell you before? It is or it isn’t. Erase kind of, sort of, maybe from your vocabulary, Mariposa, when it comes to me.”
“What about everyone else?”
“Fuck them.”
Okay then. “It is a rhetorical question,” I said, emphasizing is.
He nodded in all seriousness. “How many times?”
“Oh.” It took only a few seconds for me to switch gears and change the direction of my thoughts. The monastery was in close distance, and my feet were hustling to get to it, my mind already there. “I didn’t keep count, but let’s just say it was a bunch.”
“You fought them for it.”
It took me a second to answer. I didn’t like the tone of his voice when he’d said it, like if he could, he’d go back and fight for me. From recent history, I knew this to be true. It made me feel flighty, like I could run and then jump from this cliff, gliding. But in another way, it brought back memories of things best left in the darkness, weighing me down.
