Page 78 of Promised to the Don of Naples
"Sooner."
I set the cup down. My hands were shaking a little.
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to ask you for one thing, bella. Wait two more weeks. Don't go to Mondello. Don't go looking for the steel box. Don't try to prove anything on your own. In two weeks, Acquaviva will find out who in this house handed over the layout of the south wall. Then I'll know who your father's talking to inside these walls. And then I go to Palermo with you, and we end this together."
"End this… You mean kill my father?"
"It means whatever it has to."
"Luca. I can't sit still for two weeks."
"Bella."
"I can't." I looked at him. "I sleep in your bed, I eat your breakfast, I'm bella mia on your lips, I'm signora Moretti on Donna Beatrice's lips. But inside, I'm still Salvatore Rossi's daughter, and until I know for myself what he did to my mother, to my brother, to me, I can't be a whole bella mia, Luca. I'll only ever be half."
"Capisco."
"Then let me go."
"Bella…"
"Let me go, Luca. Alone, two days from now. I leave in the morning, I come back at night. I get what I need in Mondello and I come back."
"I'm coming with you."
"No," I said firmly. "If you come, it's war. If I go alone, with a small bag and a family excuse, it's just a daughter visiting her dead mother's house. No one attacks me in Mondello. Not even my father, not there."
"You can't be sure of that."
"I am sure of it. Mondello was my mother's. He doesn't touch my mother's house."
Luca looked at me for a long time, and then he nodded.
"Two days. You're back before dark."
"Before dark."
"Bella. You take the dagger."
"I always take the dagger."
"Brava."
He leaned in and kissed my forehead slowly, like a man committing a person's position to memory, to remember it later.
"Bella mia. If you're not back before dark, I go to Palermo that same night with fifty men. And I burn your father's house to the ground with him inside it."
I looked at him, but I wasn't afraid.
"I know."
And for the first time, I was at peace with the man he was.
CHAPTER 24
"A dead mother always writes letters too late. It is the nature of motherhood."
