CHAPTER 4
"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.
I stopped, and held my breath.
The ember went dark, then glowed again.
"Vieni." The voice came low, in Italian, unhurried. "Now that you've come down, come here."
I knew that voice.
I knew that voice, because it was the voice I'd imagined a thousand times in my head over the last five years.
I knew that voice because it was the voice my mind had built on top of the portrait—the teenager who'd become a man.
I knew that voice because it had the thick Neapolitan accent of the Morettis, the one Raffaele didn't have anymore, because he'd lived abroad.
Luca Moretti.
He was leaning against the olive tree in the middle of his vineyard, waiting for me to run for the north side, precisely because he knew, because he was the one who'd designed the wall that way.
I thought about running, but my ankle reminded me I wouldn't make it, so I thought about the dagger in my boot.
No. Not here. Not like this.
I limped over to him.
The sky was starting to turn pink behind Vesuvius.
I saw him for the first time from ten feet away, the dawn light just beginning to trace his outline against the olive trunk.
Tall—taller than Raffaele, stronger. Black suit, no tie, white shirt open at the first button, the jacket hung on a branch of the olive tree, as if he'd stopped there specifically to wait.
The scar on his right eyebrow, exactly where it was in the photograph.
Black hair tousled from the drive, black eyes... and alive.
Alive in a way the old photo hadn't managed to capture.
He looked me up and down, unhurried.
"Ankle's screwed?"
"None of your business."
He laughed, then took another drag and blew the smoke off to the side.
"You come down better than you go up, Valentina. Next time, you'd do well to bend your knees before you jump. Don't land flat-footed."
I didn't answer. I stood six feet from him, chin up, weight on my left foot, hand at my waist—because from there it was close to the boot.
He caught the gesture. His eyes went down to my right boot, then came back up.
"Dagger?"
Casual, like a man asking the time.
"No," I lied.
"Three hundred years old? Ivory handle? The Rossi crest?"
My blood ran cold.
He smiled out of the corner of his mouth. A small smile, slow, with no joy in it.
"Your father showed me the collection once in Palermo, eighteen years ago. That was the only one missing. He said it had vanished mysteriously." He drew on the cigar. "It must be with you."
"You don't know that I have it."
"Bella." He raised an eyebrow. The one with the scar. "A woman who runs away from home at four in the morning, wearing tall boots under her pants in June, isn't dressing for the cold. If you take my meaning..."
I said nothing, just closed my hand into a fist.
He threw the cigar on the ground, crushed it underfoot, and took a step toward me. Luca stopped an arm's length away, and I could smell him.
"I'm going to ask you a question," he said, low and controlled. "And you're going to tell me the truth, because if you lie, I'll know, and the next time you feel like running, I'll have this wall locked too."
I looked at him without blinking.
"Ask, then."
"What are you doing in my vineyard at five in the morning, Valentina?"
The right answer would have been: running. The right answer would have been: what does it look like, idiot? The right answer would have been anything that kept a wall between the two of us.
But I looked at him, held his gaze a second longer, and the thing that came out of my mouth wasn't any of the three. It was the question that had been eating at me since two in the morning, the one that had sent me down the wall, the one my father had hidden from me my whole life:
"Why are you and my brother together in a photo in your house?"
He went still. For a very short moment I saw something cross his face. It didn't look like surprise—something else. Something more like weariness than shock, like a man who'd been waiting for this question and had expected it to come later than it did.
When he answered, his voice had changed.
"Go back to the house, Valentina."
"Answer me."
"Go back to the house."
"Answer me first."
He looked at me. And out of nowhere, he reached out and took my elbow. Not with violence—with firmness. Like a man steadying a woman about to fall, not like a man seizing a runaway.
"I'll answer you, but not today. And not before your father gets here, because your father arrives Friday for the engagement dinner, and I want him at my table when you hear the answer. Do you understand?"
I didn't understand, but I nodded. Because the way he said it—your father—wasn't the way a man talks about someone he's expecting as an ally, but the way a man talks about someone he's expecting as an enemy.
He let go of my elbow, then took his jacket off the olive tree.
"Come on. I'll walk you back to the house." And then, with a very small, very cold smile, he said, "Around the north side. Not over the wall."
He led me back through the vineyard, me limping at his side, without another word the whole two hundred yards to a service gate I hadn't seen, which he opened with a key he took from his pocket.
We crossed the orchard and went up through the pantry door.
In the corridor, before the stairs, he stopped.
"Valentina Rossi... Welcome to my house."
Then he left without waiting for an answer.
I climbed the two flights of stairs with my ankle throbbing, went into his dead mother's room through the service door that was still unlocked, and sat on the edge of the bed, holding my elbow at the exact spot where his hand had touched it.
My elbow was burning. And I hated, so much, so much, so much, that it was burning...