Page 136 of Promised to the Don of Naples
The nonna answered on the second ring. She never slept at night.
"Signora."
"Nonna."
"You're going into that house, aren't you?"
"I am, nonna."
"Then take your great-grandmother's dagger. And don't let your hand shake."
I swallowed hard.
"You knew I'd go."
"I knew when you played Chopin and didn't finish it, signora." Her voice was in no hurry. "A woman who doesn't finish the music is a woman who still has an account to settle."
I felt a knot in my throat.
"Nonna. Pray for us."
"I've been praying since 1995, signora. I never stopped. Come back," the nonna said, and her voice changed in a way that was almost imperceptible. "The house needs you. And you need to come back because of what you're carrying."
"Nonna…"
"Don't tell me anything, signora. I know. I knew before you did."
She hung up.
I sat on the edge of the tub at the Hotel Lucia, the silent phone in my hand, my free hand open on my belly.
She knows. The nonna knows.
I went back to the room. Luca was asleep, the dagger on the nightstand, beside his pistol, ivory handle next to steel.
I lay down beside him, put my hand on his chest, over the Latin tattoo.
Tomorrow I go back to the house where I was born with my great-grandmother's dagger in my boot and a child of my husband's in my belly.
CHAPTER 42
"You think you're hiding it from the other person, but there are things the body tells on its own."
LUCA MORETTI
The convoy left Salerno at four in the morning.
Three armored cars, headlights off for the first two kilometers, the old way. Raffaele in the first car with four men, me in the second, with Valentina. Matteo in the third, with the other eight. Twelve elite soldiers, hand-picked by Raffaele the week before—all with their families paid, all knowing that if they talked, the whole family paid.
Valentina slept on my shoulder for the first fifty kilometers.
I looked at her in the light of the highway lamps passing by the window. Her black hair fallen across my arm, her breathing deep, her hand open on my thigh, and my hand—my hand had gone, on its own, to rest on her belly.
The way it had been going for weeks.
Only this time I knew why.
She's been different since Capri.
