Page 74 of Mafia Billionaire's Surprise Baby
“Why does Elio have an accent and you don’t?”
Gia raises her eyebrows at me over the rim of her glasses. “You, master of all languages, want to know why I learned to assimilate in America?”
I tilt my head. “I know why I learned to speak so many different languages. I’m asking you why you learned to blend in with one.”
“To be fair,” she stretches her legs out in the train car, her smile a flirtatious glimmer. “I know how to blend in pretty much everywhere.”
That, I’ll give her as well. “Fair.”
She sighs. “People trust me when they think I’m like them. Being an American, and sounding like one, was more important to me than it was to Elio. He could walk around as the Italian guy and have it work. He needed people to notice him. Needed people to go ‘oh, that’s Elio Rossi. The boss.’”
“And you needed people to think you were their best friend.”
She winks. “I knew you’d understand.”
The remark is confusing. It simultaneously makes me happy and sad. I know that Gia and I are often well in alignment, and her seeing that makes me feel like she sees it too.
But then, her comments earlier make it clear that she either doesn’t understand…
Or she doesn’t want to.
I sigh. “So. No accent.”
“No accent. I thought about doing the accent that actors used. What did they call it? Mid-Atlantic?”
I laugh at that. “The one in all the black and white movies?”
She nods. “Better that than Italian, that’s for sure.”
“I’d love to hear what you sound like with an Italian accent, Gia.”
Gia’s gaze turns wistful. You know, I don’t even think I remember how anymore.”
She looks out the window, and my heart aches.
I wonder if she’s unhappy about that.
The train zips along until finally, we stop in Marseille. I hold Gia’s hand, escorting her off, and we enter into a world of bright sun, azure seas.
And the criminal capital of Europe.
The air smells like the ocean, with a slight tinge of something burning. Not a clean scent, like the woods.
Like something that shouldn’t be burned in the daylight.
It suits.
Marseille is the type of city that has never pretended to be highbrow.
This is the place where crime has reigned supreme for hundreds of years. Corsica, Sicily, Marseille.
The places where law and order is neither lawful nor orderly.
On average, tourism bureaus across the globe do not recommend travel to any of these places, outside of specifically named, heavily ‘safe’ destinations, aka places where the staff and the surrounding people are paid quite handsomely off of tourism dollars for their participation.
It’s like protecting a cash cow, so you can milk it as often as you want. There’s a vested interest in keeping tourists safe in certain areas of all three of these places, but I think Marseille may have given up on that a while ago.
The tourists stay far away from Marseille these days.