Promised to the Don of Naples (The Vengeance Bride)

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?"

"Luca Moretti."

The house didn't collapse. Outside, the sea kept glittering. The clocks in the room kept marking off the seconds. But something inside me—some small, specific organ that lived between the heart and the stomach and existed for exactly this kind of news—quietly stopped working forever.

Luca Moretti.

The Don of the Naples Camorra. The man whose name my father had been spitting out for five years like venom. The man who killed my brother.

"When?" I asked—somehow, my voice steady.

"Three months from now, in Posillipo. You leave for Naples next week and you'll live there until the wedding. You'll be introduced to the family, trained, prepared."

"Trained?"

"You heard me."

I smiled. The smile I'd learned from the Mother Superior for dealing with tiresome bishops.

Inside: Trained like a bitch. Like a purebred mare being handed over to the neighboring family's stallion to produce offspring that'll end the war.

"Va bene, papà," I said.

He looked at me, suspicious. He'd expected resistance, expected tears, shouting, broken vases.

Then he stood. The two men stepped away from the door to let him pass. But before he left, he stopped in the doorway and said, "It was the best I could get you, Valentina. You don't understand yet. But you will."

I climbed the marble staircase with the calm of someone who still owned the house. Then I greeted Rosalia in the hallway.

I closed the bedroom door and locked it. And only then, with my back against the wood, did I slide down to the floor.

I didn't cry. The tears came, but I didn't cry—crying is a thing of the lungs and the throat, with sound.

Mine just fell, in silence, while I stared at the white ceiling of the room, thinking about Matteo.

About my thirty-two-year-old brother in a closed casket, because what was left of him at the morgue wasn't something you could show the family.

I made a vow that day, my forehead pressed to the wood of the casket: One day, Matteo. One day I'll look this man in the face and kill him.

And fate, with the cruel sense of humor only fate has, had decided I'd look him in the face at the altar. In a white veil. Arm in arm.

I got up and went to my mother's vanity. I opened the secret drawer behind the mirror—she'd shown me that drawer a week before she died, when I was thirteen and still thought secrets between women were a game.

One day you're going to need this, amore mio, she'd said.

I took out the family dagger. Ivory handle, Toledo steel blade, the Rossi crest engraved on the guard.

Three hundred years old. The daughters of the family had carried it to protect themselves from the husbands they were handed as gifts.

I tested the blade against my thumb, and a drop of blood welled up right away.

I'm getting married, I thought, watching the blood run.

I had no choice, but if he was the one who killed Matteo, one of the two families wouldn't make it to the end of the year alive.

Maybe his, maybe mine. But it'll be one of them, without a shadow of a doubt...

I called Francesca at three in the morning.

"Bella?" Her voice was groggy. "What time is it, woman?"

"Fra," I whispered. "I'm marrying Luca Moretti."

The silence on the other end was so long I thought the call had dropped. When she spoke again, her voice was wide awake.

"Madonna santa."

I told her everything. In a low voice, with Rosalia asleep in the room at the end of the hall. Francesca listened without interrupting, the way she does. At the end, she took a deep breath and made a joke, because that was how she'd been saving me since I was fourteen:

"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...