Page 6 of Promised to the Don of Naples
CHAPTER 3
"The wolf changes its coat, but not its nature."
VALENTINA ROSSI
I barely slept.
I sat on the bedroom floor, my back against the side of the bed, staring at the family portrait propped against the opposite wall. I'd taken it out of the frame. The photo loose in my hand, the glass shattered across the Persian rug, the shards glinting like little teeth in the moonlight coming in through the balcony. One of the shards had cut my bare foot when I stepped on it without looking, and the blood had drawn a small trail between the wall and the bed.
I didn't even clean it up.
I stared at Matteo's smile until the smile turned into a shape with no face. I stared at his hands on the shoulders of the two Moretti brothers until the three figures turned into shadows with teeth. I stared and stared and stared.
They were friends.
It was the only thing my head could think, on a loop, from two in the morning to four.
They were friends.
My brother smiling, his arm slung over the shoulder of the man who, according to my father, had him killed twenty years later. My eighteen-year-old brother, in some villa I'd never heard of, in a summer no one ever told me about, with the Morettis.
Why did no one ever tell me? Why did my father never tell me? Why is my father hiding that his son and the man who killed his son had known each other since they were boys?
The question started small, at the back of my head, and grew until it was the only thing in the room.
Why?
And then, at ten past four in the morning, I did something the convent Valentina would never have done.
I got up and went to the second suitcase. I took the dagger out of the silk scarf and slid it into my boot, along the inner shaft—leather against leather, it held firm, invisible under my pants. I put on my black coat, took Francesca's letter from the inside pocket, and kept it on me. Then I turned off the bedroom light and went to the door.
It was still locked from the outside, but the room had a side door that opened onto a service corridor—the kind old houses have so the staff can move around unseen. I'd mapped that door on my first walk around the room, twelve hours earlier. The Morettis had locked the main entrance, but they hadn't locked that one.
Idiots,I thought.Or just forgetful.
I went out through the service corridor barefoot, boots in my hand. I went down two flights of dark wooden stairs without a sound, crossed the empty pantry, found the back door to the garden. Then I pulled on my boots and opened the door slowly.
The Posillipo air hit my face—salt, jasmine, damp earth, cigar smoke. Predawn, the sky already starting to gray, but still dark enough.
I looked out at the garden and saw two soldiers in the rose bed on the south side. One in the pergola and another on the main path. I knew the positions from the day before—they were the same. But the north side of the property, where the wall dropped down to a vineyard, was empty.
I'd noticed in the morning, from the balcony. Empty because it's harder—the north wall is taller from the outside, but if you're inside, on the house's side, the terrain works in your favor.
I ended up going north.
I crossed the low courtyard and the olive grove. The grass was wet with dew and soaked my boots up to the ankle. Then I reached the wall. I looked up—sixteen feet, thick ivy, old stone with enough cracks for footholds. I'd climbed worse at fourteen, up the convent walls, sneaking out to look at the stars.
So I rolled up my sleeves and started to climb.
The first stone gave a fraction, and I slid a foot and a half before I caught myself again. My heart hammered, and I waited a few seconds. No one came, so I kept going.
At the top of the wall, I sat on the edge a second, legs dangling over the far side, looking down. The other side was a slope—loose dirt, rows of vines, and down below the stone path that led to the Posillipo road.
Fifteen minutes,I calculated.Fifteen minutes to the road and another twenty to the first open café in Mergellina. Then I call Francesca.
I jumped, but I landed wrong. I twisted my right ankle on the way down—it didn't break, but I felt the pain shoot up my shin. I swore under my breath, but I got up. Limping, I slipped between the first rows of the vineyard.
And that was when I saw the ember. Small, red, off to the right, about thirty feet away, against the trunk of a lone olive tree in the middle of the vineyard. Rising and falling in the rhythm of someone taking a long drag.
