Page 1 of Promised to the Don of Naples
CHAPTER 1
"A closed mouth catches no flies."
VALENTINA ROSSI
I could feel my mother's hand over my fingers when I started to play.
Not literally—she'd been dead for ten years. But every time I sat down at this piano in the music room, it was as if she came back and laid her fingers over mine, guiding the Chopin nocturne she used to play on the Sundays when the house was still a home and not a fortress.
Op. 9 No. 2.Her favorite. The one piece of her that time hadn't taken yet.
It was early afternoon on a Tuesday in Palermo, and the sun came through the louvered shutters in golden stripes that cut across the floor. Outside, the Tyrrhenian Sea glittered like a mirror of molten silver.
The whole house silent—except for the music, the soft flames of Chopin spilling from my fingers.
I closed my eyes during the second movement.
I thought about Bologna, about the acceptance letter tucked in the top drawer of my desk, sitting on top of an envelope with twenty thousand euros I'd been saving in secret since I was nineteen.
Modern Literature. Dante. Calvino.
The life I'd chosen for myself at night, in silence, in my room at the convent, with the moonlight and no witness but God.
Three more months,I thought.Three months and I'm out of this house.
The music room door opened without a knock.
I didn't have to turn around to know it was him. I'd known the smell of my father's cigar since before I could walk—Cuban tobacco, with a note of the old leather of the desk where he kept the box.
Today, though, another smell came with it.
Men's cologne. Two of them.
Soldati. My father didn't bring soldiers into the music room unless he was closing something big.
I kept playing. My right hand climbing into the high notes. Four measures. Five. I hit the wrong note on the sixth. An A instead of a G.
My hand trembled. I stopped and closed the piano lid more gently than I needed to—because anything sharper would have been a confession.
I turned around slowly.
Salvatore Rossi, my father, capo of the Rossi family, sixty-two years of Palermo in his bones, sat down in the armchair across from me without asking. The two men stayed standing behind him, hands folded in front of them. I knew the stance. It was the stance of a man who was armed and wanted you to know it.
My father lit his cigar, the lighter's flame wavering for a moment and then steadying. He drew on it, letting the smoke out the corner of his mouth, looking at me the way he looked at his men when he was about to give an order that left no room for an answer.
"You're getting married in three months, Valentina. Don't ask me to whom. You don't have the right to ask."
There was something I'd learned at the convent that he never understood: silence was a weapon. Silence was the only weapon a woman could carry inside a house full of armed men without anyone disarming her.
I stayed quiet, sitting with my back to the closed piano. Hands in my lap, my mother's rings on my fingers. I looked at my father with the polite patience of a nun receiving penance. He looked back at me and drew on the cigar again, waiting for me to give in.
I didn't give in.
And then, because he is who he is, and because I am what I am, he gave in first.
"Ask."
"Who?"
