Page 19 of Promised to the Don of Naples
She let go of my arm, still watching me.
"The story was beautiful too. I cried and I believed it. You're younger than I was, bella. You'll believe it faster."
She took the last sip and walked off across the garden gravel, leaving a scent of Chanel hanging in the air.
I went up the west-wing stairs.
I didn't think, I just walked—crossed the upstairs corridor, turned left, and stopped in front of the door to his office.
The door was unlocked.
I pushed it open. The room was empty and the window open—the wind off the bay coming in, stirring the white curtain. The smell of last night's cigar still in the air. And on the mahogany desk facing the bay, exactly where he'd left it, exactly as Bianca had described...
The leather folder.
I looked at the door behind me. No footsteps, no voices. I walked to the desk and picked up the folder, then the envelope, and opened it.
The papers were all there. The letters, the broken contracts, the transcribed recordings. I started going through them—my hand shaking a little, I'll admit—page by page, reading the dates.
It was a letter from my father to Luca's father, handwritten, with the Rossi crest at the top. I recognized my father's handwriting immediately—the way he makes a capital S, with the bottom curve wider than the top. I recognized it like it was my own.
The date, in the top right corner, read: 15 ottobre 2019. But the 9 had been written over another number.
I moved closer to the window to see better in the light.
The number underneath was a 5.
October 15, 2015.
Summer of 2015.
Someone had changed the date, taken a letter from four years before the war and altered the number to make it look like it dated from the break.
And I didn't know if it had been Luca, or his father, or my father, or someone who still didn't have a name.
I heard footsteps in the corridor. Boots. Heavy. Coming toward me, slow, unhurried, the way a man walks through a house that's his.
I looked at the letter in my hand, then at the door.
I had three seconds to decide what to do...
CHAPTER7
"The day you discover that two men can be telling the truth at the same time is the day you lose your innocence."
VALENTINA ROSSI
The footsteps stopped at the door.
I didn't turn around. I kept holding the letter, my hand steady, because if my hand shook in front of him, I'd never forgive myself.
"Allora. You decided not to pretend."
"No."
"Why not?"
Then I turned.
