Page 132 of Promised to the Don of Naples
I laughed when I saw the sign. Laughed to myself, in the back seat of the car, with Matteo looking at me without understanding.
Hotel Lucia, on Via Velia, in Salerno. My mother's name, in blue neon letters on top of a four-story building at the edge of the gulf.
The room was a corner one. A view of the sea, a big bed, a heavy wine-colored curtain. Luca was already there when I came up.
He came to me, didn't say anything, just took my face in both hands and kissed me—brief, held back, the way a man does when there's work before pleasure.
"Bella mia."
"Twelve days," I murmured.
"Twelve." He rested his forehead against mine. "We'll talk after; right now it's work."
Raffaele was at the table, the map open.
I took the hotel's letterhead—Hotel Lucia at the top, and I laughed again on the inside—and drew Villa Salina with the pen from the room.
I'd been there three times in childhood, but a house stays in a child's head forever.
"The main staircase is here," I said, marking it. "It goes up in a single flight, turns right. Salvatore's study is here, at the end of the east wing, window to the sea." I marked more. "The kitchen is down here. There's a service door that opens onto the back garden, by the old tank. No one watches that door because no one remembers it exists."
Raffaele took it down.
"And the safe?" Luca asked.
"Behind our great-grandfather's portrait, on the study wall." I set the pen down. "But I don't care about the safe, Luca. The documents that matter are already with me, in the Mondello box. The safe is money."
Luca looked at me, nodded once.
"Brava."
Matteo was standing behind me, looking at the map over my shoulder. When Raffaele's finger passed over a name written in a corner of the planning sheet—Acquaviva, internal contact, 2018–2025—Matteo locked.
"Carlo?"
Luca turned to him.
"Sì."
"Carlo Acquaviva."
"He's dead, Matteo."
My brother sat down on the edge of the bed, slowly, running a hand over his face.
"He came to see me in Capri."
The sentence from the cellar.
"When?" I asked.
"Twice." Matteo looked at the floor. "In 2022, and again at the start of 2024. He brought books, said he was negotiating my return with Papa, that I had to be patient, that he'd get me out of there when it was safe." He laughed, bitter. "I believed him. Cazzo, I believed him. I was happy to see him, I thought he was a friend."
And there, in that hotel room with my mother's name on it, the sentence my brother had given me in the cellar—ask her who else used to go to Capri to visit me—finally closed.
Bianca wasn't the only one.
Carlo had been confirming to Salvatore that Matteo was still alive and held. The two of them kept my brother as a chip.
