Page 141 of Promised to the Don of Naples
Valentina was at the service door, being led out by Matteo. But she'd stopped, she'd turned, and she was looking at me—the green eyes, the pale face, her hand open on her belly without realizing it was there.
I looked at her. She looked at me. And she nodded.
Once, slowly.
Permission.
She wasn't going to kill her father, I wasn't going to let her carry that, and she'd accepted it. But she looked me in the eyes and nodded, and I understood: she wasn't running from the decision.
She was giving it to me. The revenge was hers, and she was handing it to me, the same way she'd handed me the dagger.
Brava, bella mia.
I turned to Salvatore.
"Mors potius macula," I said, low. "Death before dishonor. It's been tattooed on my chest since I was nineteen. I swore to my mother I'd never be the kind of man she hated in my father." I tightened my grip on the ivory handle. "You were the kind of man your wife hated. To the end."
Salvatore opened his mouth to say something.
There wasn't time.
It was fast. It was clean. It was the old way, with the dagger the women of his family carried to defend themselves from their husbands. The three-hundred-year-old Toledo blade did what it had been forged to do.
The man who'd called himself her father fell to the floor of the hall.
The shooting had been over for minutes, and I hadn't even noticed. The whole house silent. Only the Mondello sea hitting the rocks on both sides of the peninsula, outside, the same way it hit when those boys—me, Matteo—ran on the beach back in nineteen-something.
I wiped the dagger on the hem of my own shirt and put it away in my jacket.
I looked at Valentina at the door.
I took care of it, bella mia. For what you're carrying.
I crossed the hall, passed the body without looking down. I reached the door where she was, with Matteo holding her shoulders.
I didn't speak.
I just held her, pressed her against my chest, against the Latin tattoo, with the dead house behind us and the sea hitting outside.
She didn't cry. I didn't cry.
Her hand came up and closed on my shirt, over my heart. And we stayed like that, in the middle of the hall of Villa Salina.
CHAPTER 44
"I thought I'd cry when he died. I didn't. I cried later—but it was for what was beginning, not for what had ended."
VALENTINAMORETTI
I didn't cry leaving Villa Salina.
I thought I would. My whole life I'd imagined that day—the day I'd look into the face of the man who destroyed my family. I thought I'd cry, or scream, or feel something big and clean, like revenge completed, like justice.
But what I felt, in the back seat of the car, with Mondello passing by the window, was something mixed and dirty.
Relief that hurt. Emptiness. A hole where the hatred used to live, and the hatred had gone away with him, and left the hole empty without saying what to put in its place.
"Bella mia."
