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.
And coming down the steps to meet me, it wasn't him.
It was a younger man, maybe early thirties, with enough of a family resemblance that I knew who he was before he said a word.
Taller than most, but shorter than his brother, I imagined.
Black hair cut short, easy smile, light gray suit, Italian shoes, the air of a man who'd never walked into a room where he wasn't welcome.
Charming in a way the Church would have condemned.
"Valentina Rossi," he said, stopping on the last step, right in front of me. "Welcome to Posillipo. I'm Raffaele Moretti, Luca's brother."
He held out his hand, but I didn't give him mine right away. I looked at his hand a second longer than was polite. He noticed, but he didn't pull it back.
"My hand doesn't bite," he said, with a crooked smile.
"I'll make a note of that," I said.
I gave him my hand. He kissed it—light, professional, a millimeter above the skin, the way men raised in good houses kissed the hands of women they didn't yet know were allies or enemies. I caught his scent, cedar and something like new leather.
Not him, I thought. This isn't the smell of the man who killed Matteo. This one's the brother—the charm, the bait, the man who greets the guests so the monster doesn't have to come down.
"My brother sends his apologies," Raffaele said, with the calm of a man who'd been apologizing for his brother for twenty years. "A meeting in Rome. He's back tomorrow."
"What a shame. I was so looking forward to meeting him today."
Raffaele laughed. A real laugh, just for a second, and he looked at me differently—like a man who'd realized the package that had arrived from Palermo maybe wasn't what he'd expected.
"Vieni. I'll show you the house."
The house was a living museum.
Travertine marble, Murano crystal chandeliers, seventeenth-century tapestries on the walls, a dining room that could seat thirty guests comfortably.
Raffaele talked as we walked—the family history, the furniture that had belonged to his grandmother, the winery down below, the music room upstairs. I listened without paying much attention, mostly because I was mapping exits, counting guards, memorizing routes.
Three soldiers on the ground floor, two on each floor above, one at each end of the garden—I saw them through an upstairs window as we passed. Cameras at the corners of the hallways. A sensor on a door Raffaele didn't open—"Luca's office, he prefers it closed."
We went up to the west wing. Raffaele stopped in front of a double oak door.
"This one's yours," he said. "It used to be my mother's room."
Then he opened it.
A huge room, a canopy bed, a balcony facing the bay, a bathroom the size of my living room back in Palermo. Fresh flowers in three vases, an upright Steinway in the corner, tuned. Clothes already arranged in the closet—new dresses I'd never seen before.
"My brother asked for everything to be ready. The dresses were chosen to your measurements. If any of them don't fit, the seamstress comes tomorrow."
"How thoughtful. Tell him I'm grateful."
Raffaele looked at me again, that same way.
"You're not what he expected."
"We'll see if he's what I expected," I countered, with a brief smile.
He laughed again, then bowed his head for a fraction of a second—an old gesture, a gesture of reluctant respect—and left the room.
When the door closed, I waited. I counted to thirty, then went to the door and tried the handle.
Locked from the outside.
I paced the room in circles for ten minutes before I made myself stop.
The balcony was open. I took a step to the edge and looked down: a forty-foot drop to the garden stones, and two soldiers standing in the rose bed where they could see me perfectly. They looked back at me—they even seemed polite. Then one of them tipped his head in greeting.
I went back inside and closed the window. I sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the room that was supposed to be mine for the next three months. I looked at the dresses I hadn't chosen, the perfumes I hadn't chosen, the flowers I hadn't chosen.
Then my eyes went to his dead mother's piano, the one he'd asked to have put in the room. As if it were a kindness. As if I didn't know that a rich man who prepares the ground before the woman arrives is a rich man who's already decided what he's going to do with her.
I took Francesca's letter out of my pocket, held it in my hand, but didn't open it.
Then I went to the wall between two windows, where a large picture hung. A family portrait—a photograph in a silver frame, blown up, the size of a door. It must have been from the nineties.
Mother, father, and three sons. I recognized Raffaele, the child on the right. I recognized Luca for the first time, in the center—a young man, maybe eighteen, tall for his age, the scar through his eyebrow already there, a closed-off look even in the photograph.
And then I looked at the other son, the middle one, between the two brothers.
A boy of about twelve, with the open smile of someone who hadn't yet learned to distrust the world, one arm slung around teenage Luca's shoulders and the other around little Raffaele's. I knew that smile. I knew that smile for certain, because I'd grown up looking at it.
It was Matteo, my brother...