Page 23 of Promised to the Don of Naples
Someone who walked these halls without being questioned, someone who had a copy of my key or the patience to wait for the door to be left open.
Pericolosa.
But this time it wasn't Valentina—it was someone in my house whose name I still didn't know.
And Valentina, up there in my mother's room, locked in from the inside, would be the reason I found out. Because she wasn't going to stop looking, and whoever set this up was counting on that.
CHAPTER 8
"There are books you take down from the high shelf because you want to read them—and there are books someone left up there because they wanted you to reach for them."
VALENTINA ROSSI
I woke at six thirty, put on black linen pants, a white cotton blouse, and pinned my hair into a low bun.
No makeup. No perfume. No red.
I went down and crossed the silent house—only a maid wiping down the marble hallway, who lowered her eyes when Ipassed. I looked for the library. It was in the east wing, behind a set of dark mahogany double doors with a bronze handle.
The whole house was a museum, but the library was a cathedral.
Twenty-foot ceilings. Shelves from floor to ceiling covering all four walls. A bronze ladder on a rail, the kind that slides from one side of the room to the other. A big desk in the center, facing a tall window that looked out over the vineyard. The smell of old leather, old paper, and cigar—always cigar, in every room of that house, as if the Moretti men had smoked so much over four generations that the wood itself breathed it.
I closed the door behind me.
"Good morning, library," I whispered.
I started with the shelf closest to the window.
"You're up early, cognatina."
I jumped, and almost dropped the book in my hand.
Raffaele was leaning against the door frame—how long, I didn't know. Navy shirt, no jacket, a cup of coffee in his hand.
"Cazzo, Raffaele."
He came in, walking slowly to the desk in the center, then sat on the edge of it and took a sip of coffee while he watched me.
"Looking for something?"
"Reading."
"Old Italian, page twenty-two, and you never even opened it."
I looked at the book in my hand. He was right—it was a commercial-law treatise from some century I had no intention of figuring out. I closed it and put it back on the shelf.
"Yes, I'm looking for something."
"Brava." He smiled. "Looking for what?"
"A Moretti family photo. The nineties or the two-thousands. Summer on Capri, with you in the corner looking like a kid."
"You won't find it here, cognatina. Family photos are in my brother's office."
"You know I'm not going back there anytime soon."
"Ah." He looked at me more closely. "So it's true. You two fought yesterday."
