The Body #2: Lucio and Janie

Prologue 2 (Ginevra/Janie): My New Life

Five years ago...

We'd been married three hours. Immediately after the ceremony, my new husband drove me to his home, walked me inside and told me curtly he'd be back in a few hours. No explanation. No kiss good bye. No smoking hot look to let me know he was looking forward to our wedding night.

But I'd grown up in the Body, so I knew there weren't always explanations or kisses or glances. After changing out of my wedding gown, which I carefully hung on a hanger in his closet, I changed into my sexy, sheer nightgown that was in the overnight bag I'd carried inside Lucio's house with me. I'd gone through Lucio's room, looking through his dresser and his closet, just wasting time until he came back for our wedding night. I wasn't a nervous person -- with the way I'd grown up, that wasn't an option -- but my wedding night filled me with both anticipation and dread. 

So I paced, snooped, paced some more and waited. Wondering where my clothes were that had been sent over earlier. (No idea.) Wondering if Lucio would finally tell me he loved me tonight as I'd loved him since I'd turned sixteen. (Probably not since Body men weren't known for those finer feelings. Except for my papa.) Wondering if the soft, gentle kiss he'd given me after we were married had meant as much to him as it had to me. (Again, probably not. Lucio had experience and I'd...had experience kissing my pillow.) That kiss just a few hours later still had the power to make me touch my lips with my fingertips and sigh in awed remembrance of how my heart had fluttered when his mouth had met mine for the first time.

Finally, at midnight I heard steps in the hallway outside Lucio's bedroom. I stood up from Lucio's bed. I sat down on it. I stood up again. By then, my beautiful husband stopped in the doorway, his large frame filling the space.

"Ginevra," he said. "I thought you'd be asleep in your room by now."

My room? Is that why I couldn't find any of my clothes that had been sent over earlier in the week?

"This is my room, " Lucio explained. "Not yours. You're not to come in here ever. I'll come to your room when I want you. You're in the east wing."

"Well, I thought you'd want me in here since it's our wedding night." My voice came out snippier than I wanted.

Oops! Lose the attitude, Ginevra! Don't give yourself away.

He reached a hand out and pulled a redhead over to stand next to him. She'd obviously been standing in the hallway, just outside of the doorway, out of my line of sight. Cheap trash, I thought with contempt. Black, sparkly dress that looked two sizes too small and heels so high she looked like she'd topple over if the wind picked up unexpectedly. 

"I have Chiara for our wedding night. I'm not interested in amateur hour with you at this time."

Then he pressed an open-mouthed kiss to her lips, and looked back at me, daring me to say a word, daring me to not be a well-bred, submissive, obedient girl of the Body. That kiss had been nothing like the one he'd pressed to my lips earlier. Mine had been like pee-wee football and hers had been like the Super Bowl.

Lucio was a typical male in the Body -- they ruled their homes like kings of old, they were not to be questioned, and we women had to take what they dished out to us with a smile. If Lucio wanted a mistress, if he moved her into his house, I would be expected to sit across from her at dinner.

With a smile. 

Because it was what my husband wanted and I lived to serve.

Yeah, if he tried to move any woman into his home, she and I would be taking a ride.

My father had not been like that. "Your mother, I couldn't do that to her, Ginevra. Lucio, I hope he will be good to you. Dario said he's nice boy, but time will tell. You capture Lucio's heart, Ginevra, like your mother captured mine, and you will bring him to his knees."

Lucio was continuing. "You're welcome to stay and watch, but my girl here isn't big into sharing me unless she has to. And she only has to share with you on occasion until I get you pregnant."

"Very well," I said calmly, remembering my father's first rule. He was a Body man through and through and had taught me how to approach life with his rules. The first rule was Never seem upset. His second rule was If you are upset, plan for revenge.

I was a master at all of my father's rules, and he'd been drumming them into my head since I was thirteen.

As I walked past my husband, I bumped his arm, and continued past his mistress.

"If she was any smaller, Lucio, she'd fit in your pocket," she murmured to him. "No wonder you wanted a real woman. Does she even have tits yet?"

Since I had ears like a bat, I heard every word, and I mentally moved that remark into the She Needs To Pay For That column. 

I'm small but I could kill you in two moves, bitch.

As I dressed in my room and left my husband's home while he was busy giving my wedding night to another woman, I thought about my father's third rule: Have two completely different, untraceable escape plans.

I'd had two since I turned fourteen and had been fine-tuning and tweaking them for years. The final plan I would execute that night was one of two that I'd formed and re-formed in my head hundreds of times, looking for all of the weaknesses, looking to see where I'd left myself exposed, looking to see if I'd made any obvious moves that would telegraph my whereabouts or my next move. I looked up nothing on my computer -- except inane, girly motivational sayings and kitten videos to throw anyone off track -- and I kept nothing online. I was untraceable.

So I left and disappeared on Lucio, my husband of mere hours, that night.

On the way out of town, I broke into City Hall -- you would think they'd have better security, but it took me less than eight minutes to shut down their security and get inside -- and I eventually located the marriage license that Lucio and I had signed mere hours ago, with Dario as a witness. In our state, no marriage license meant you weren't legally married. I tucked it into my shirt, and I would eventually burn it on my first real stop, two hundred and forty miles away from here.

"Good bye to the world's shortest marriage, Lucio. Enjoy your whore."

Getting back into my car, I drove twenty miles away to a truck stop off the highway in the opposite direction I would be heading. I taped my wedding rings securely with duct tape -- I had learned its many and various uses from my father -- to the underside of a tractor trailer whose driver had stopped for a bathroom break.

Getting back into my first untraceable car that I would soon be ditching for a second untraceable car, I drove off to begin my new life.

That day, Ginevra DiPaulo was reborn as Janie Paulson, far away from my non-husband, the cheating Lucio.

He would come to regret that night.

I'd make sure of it.