Page 138 of Promised to the Don of Naples
He looked at me. Matteo had known me since before I could walk; he knew when I was lying.
"Sorella…"
He didn't believe me, but he didn't push.
That night, in the room, I took the dagger from my boot.
"Luca. I want it to be me."
He looked at me. Sitting on the edge of the bed, shirt open, his black eyes tired from the road.
"No, bella mia."
"He's my father."
"I know."
"It's Matteo's revenge. It's Mamma's prophecy."
"No." He took my hand. "You don't carry that weight, bella mia. That weight is mine. I'm the Don, I kill and you stay clean."
"Luca…"
"The child we'll have one day," he said, slowly, looking into my eyes, "isn't going to be born to a mother who killed her own father."
I went still.
He didn't know.
He was talking about the future, about a child he imagined for someday, not knowing the child was already there, in that exact moment, under the table between the two of us, inside me.
"Then use this," I said, pushing the dagger into his hand. "It was my great-grandmother's. The Rossi women carried it to defend themselves from their husbands." I felt a knot in my throat. "Let it kill the worst husband this family ever had."
Luca took the dagger.
"Va bene, bella mia," he agreed, low. "I'll use it."
He put the dagger in the inside pocket of his jacket, beside the pistol.
Then he came to me, took my face in both hands. He kissed me—slowly, deeply, with no hurry to turn into anything else.
"Sleep," he murmured. "It's tomorrow at five."
We lay down; he pulled me to his chest, my head over the Latin tattoo, his open hand on my back.
He fell asleep first, tired from the road, from the war, and from the weight.
I stayed awake.
CHAPTER 43
"My mother wrote that he would lose both his children."
Valentina MORETTI
Villa Salina sat on the tip of the peninsula, with the sea on both sides.
Five in the morning. The sky still black, turning gray at the line of the horizon. The house was big and white and old, the paint peeling near the roof, the shutters crooked, the garden untended.
