Page 91 of Promised to the Don of Naples
VALENTINA ROSSI
I wasn't sleeping.
Luca was. Face down, head turned toward me, his arm thrown across my waist. His breathing deep and long, in the way of a man who learned to sleep in the middle of a war and never unlearned it.
The tattoo on his back rose and fell with the rhythm of his breath. The Moretti family crest, above his kidneys, in black ink almost twenty-five years old.
I couldn't stop thinking about what Matteo had said.
Ask her who else used to go to Capri to visit me.
The day had already come and gone. Dinner had already come and gone without a single word about what my brother had told me. But three in the morning arrived, I stared at the ceiling, and cazzo, I wasn't going to sleep anymore.
I took a deep breath and touched his shoulder lightly.
"Luca." He woke. His black eyes opened with no start, no confusion. As if he'd only been waiting. "I need to tell you something."
He pushed himself up, hair mussed to one side, the scar on his eyebrow more exposed in the weak lamplight.
"Bella mia."
"In the cellar today. Matteo told me something I didn't tell you. He brought up Bianca. He said she used to visit him in Capri, but that she didn't tell me everything." I clutched the sheet between my fingers. "He told me to ask her who else used to go to Capri to visit him."
Luca went still.
I didn't see his jaw lock. I saw his hand—his right hand, resting on the sheet—close slowly into a fist. Then open again.
"Capisco."
"Do you know who?"
"I suspect."
"You're not going to tell me."
"I'm not." He sat up. His back, the tattoo, the shoulder with the old bullet scar. "Bella mia, not yet. I'll handle it."
Look at the man I'm marrying in four weeks, asking me to trust him with something that has his own brother's name attached to it.
"Va bene," I murmured.
"Brava."
He reached out and touched my face with his fingertips, slowly, from my chin to my temple.
"I trust you," I said.
"Lo so, bella mia."
He turned slightly, and his gaze went toward the dresser. The dagger was there. Bare blade, ivory handle gleaming in the yellow lamplight, forgotten since the afternoon.
He stretched his arm out without getting up and reached it, turning the handle between his fingers.
"Three hundred years, huh?"
"Three hundred."
"I asked you to leave it in the room."
