Page 3 of Promised to the Don of Naples
"Bella, honey, it's one of two things: either you run off to Bologna right now with your backpack on your back—and I'll drive you to the station myself—or you get married and become the first mafiosa with a degree in Modern Literature. At least there'll be a big library in his mansion."
I laughed for half a second, then went quiet.
"I'm not running."
"Bella…"
"I'm getting married. But I'm going to find out, inside that house, exactly who killed my brother. And then I'll decide what to do with Luca."
Now it was her turn to go silent. When she spoke, her voice was different, no jokes.
"Bella… what if it wasn't him? What if it was someone closer to home?"
"It was him, Fra."
"But what if—"
"It was him."
I hung up without saying goodbye, then set the phone down on the nightstand harder than I needed to and lay down. My eyes fixed on the ceiling. Outside, the sea beat against the rocks of Mondello, and the shape of the dagger under the mattress pressed against my waist.
In three months I'd be sleeping in the bed of the man who killed my brother. And I had to decide, before I got there, whether I was the bride.
Or the revenge...
CHAPTER 2
"The most beautiful prisons are the ones with a view of the sea."
VALENTINA ROSSI
The road between Palermo and Naples lasted a lifetime.
I left home on Sunday at six in the morning, still dark out, with Rosalia holding my hand at the kitchen door without a word—because she'd watched me come into the world and knew this wasn't a moment for talking. Salvatore had already sent ahead three cars: two of soldiers, and the middle one for me—armored, with blacked-out windows.
As if I were a shipment.
I sat in the back seat and put in my earbuds. I played my mother's nocturne in my head, in silence, for the first three hours of the drive. Then I gave up.
I looked out the window. Sicily turned into the crossing, the crossing turned into Calabria, Calabria turned into the impossible blue of the Tyrrhenian keeping pace with me on the right the whole way.
Inside, I took inventory of what I had. Four Bottega leather suitcases, full of dresses my aunt had picked out and that I wasn't allowed to object to. A three-hundred-year-old dagger wrapped in a silk scarf at the bottom of the second suitcase, which my father's men hadn't searched, because I was the capo's daughter, not a suspect. The acceptance letter from Bologna, folded four times, inside the Calvino book I'd brought—Le città invisibili, page 47. And a letter from Francesca, sealed with wax, that she'd handed me the day before, at the Palermo airport, where she'd taken me to pretend I was boarding a flight into another life.
"Don't open it now," she said, squeezing my hand. "Only open it when you need courage. When you don't have any left."
I tucked it into the inside pocket of my coat and felt its small weight the whole way there.
We crossed Naples at noon. The city was loud—car horns, the sea slamming against dark stone, baroque churches leaning under the weight of history. Then we climbed the hill of Posillipo. The streets grew emptier, the walls grew taller, the houses became estates, and the estates became fortresses. And then, at the end of an unmarked street, two twenty-foot black gates swung open to let the convoy through.
Villa Moretti.
I saw it through the window as we climbed the cypress-lined drive. A building from the early twentieth century—cream-colored stone, red roof, three stories, vineyards running down the slope to a cliff. Down below, the whole Bay of Naples laid out like a painting. Vesuvius sleeping in the blue water. Capri in the distance, gray on the horizon. The most beautiful place I had ever seen in my life.
Correction: the most beautiful prison I had ever seen in my life.
The car stopped at the main staircase, and a man got out first to open my door—a soldier, black suit, hard face. He waited, and I took a deep breath.
I put the right Valentina onstage—the convent one, the one who knew how to receive bishops, the one who smiled at the Mother Superior when she wanted to scream. I lifted my chin and got out.
