Page 2 of Promised to the Don of Naples
"Luca Moretti."
The house didn't collapse. Outside, the sea kept glittering. The clocks in the room kept marking off the seconds. But something inside me—some small, specific organ that lived between the heart and the stomach and existed for exactly this kind of news—quietly stopped working forever.
Luca Moretti.
The Don of the Naples Camorra. The man whose name my father had been spitting out for five years like venom. The man who killed my brother.
"When?" I asked—somehow, my voice steady.
"Three months from now, in Posillipo. You leave for Naples next week and you'll live there until the wedding. You'll be introduced to the family, trained, prepared."
"Trained?"
"You heard me."
I smiled. The smile I'd learned from the Mother Superior for dealing with tiresome bishops.
Inside:Trained like a bitch. Like a purebred mare being handed over to the neighboring family's stallion to produce offspring that'll end the war.
"Va bene, papà," I said.
He looked at me, suspicious. He'd expected resistance, expected tears, shouting, broken vases.
Then he stood. The two men stepped away from the door to let him pass. But before he left, he stopped in the doorway and said, "It was the best I could get you, Valentina. You don't understand yet. But you will."
I climbed the marble staircase with the calm of someone who still owned the house. Then I greeted Rosalia in the hallway.
I closed the bedroom door and locked it. And only then, with my back against the wood, did I slide down to the floor.
I didn't cry. The tears came, but I didn't cry—crying is a thing of the lungs and the throat, with sound. Mine just fell, in silence, while I stared at the white ceiling of the room, thinking about Matteo. About my thirty-two-year-old brother in a closed casket, because what was left of him at the morgue wasn't something you could show the family.
I made a vow that day, my forehead pressed to the wood of the casket:One day, Matteo. One day I'll look this man in the face and kill him.
And fate, with the cruel sense of humor only fate has, had decided I'd look him in the face at the altar. In a white veil. Arm in arm.
I got up and went to my mother's vanity. I opened the secret drawer behind the mirror—she'd shown me that drawera week before she died, when I was thirteen and still thought secrets between women were a game.
One day you're going to need this, amore mio,she'd said.
I took out the family dagger. Ivory handle, Toledo steel blade, the Rossi crest engraved on the guard. Three hundred years old. The daughters of the family had carried it to protect themselves from the husbands they were handed as gifts. I tested the blade against my thumb, and a drop of blood welled up right away.
I'm getting married,I thought, watching the blood run.
I had no choice, but if he was the one who killed Matteo, one of the two families wouldn't make it to the end of the year alive.
Maybe his, maybe mine. But it'll be one of them, without a shadow of a doubt...
I called Francesca at three in the morning.
"Bella?" Her voice was groggy. "What time is it, woman?"
"Fra," I whispered. "I'm marrying Luca Moretti."
The silence on the other end was so long I thought the call had dropped. When she spoke again, her voice was wide awake.
"Madonna santa."
I told her everything. In a low voice, with Rosalia asleep in the room at the end of the hall. Francesca listened without interrupting, the way she does. At the end, she took a deep breath and made a joke, because that was how she'd been saving me since I was fourteen:
