CHAPTER 21
"There are nights that begin in marriage and end in war. In this house, both things happen."
VALENTINA ROSSI
I spent the day watching the clock.
I looked at myself in the mirror at seven-thirty. The Valentina in the mirror looked back.
For the first time in four weeks in that house, she and I were the same person.
At eight forty-two, I heard the first shot.
I was in the music room, sitting on the piano bench, playing Chopin softly to pass the time.
Two.
Three.
And then—very close, in the south garden—a whole burst.
I stood up; my hands stopped playing on their own. Before I could think what to do, the double door of the salon opened and Donna Beatrice came running in—for the first time in thirty-two years in that house, her bun had come loose.
"Signorina!"
"Donna Beatrice…"
"Come with me, now."
She pulled me by the wrist and we crossed the salon. The shots kept coming—farther off now, in bursts, from two different points on the perimeter. I could hear men shouting in Neapolitan, hear the neighbor's dog barking like it had never barked before.
"Donna Beatrice, Matteo…"
"Acquaviva is with him. Move."
We ran across the east corridor. We went up the service stairs. She pushed me into a room I'd never seen—a small room between two bedrooms, windowless, with stone walls thicker than the rest of the house.
"Here, signorina." She locked the door from the inside with a key she took from her apron pocket. "A foot of stone. A bullet won't get through. Don't come out until I come for you."
"Luca…"
"He's on his way."
"Donna Beatrice. Are you armed?"
She opened the side of her apron and showed the grip of an old Beretta tucked at her waist.
"Thirty-two years, signorina. I don't serve coffee with my right hand for nothing."
She left and locked it from the outside.
I was left alone in the stone room with my heart in my throat and the sound of the shots coming like waves.
Twenty minutes.
That was how long it lasted.
Twenty minutes sitting with my back to the wall, hands in my lap, the dagger in my boot because I'd put on boots under the dress out of habit—every time I went down stairs in that house, I put on boots.
A Moretti woman's habit, Raffaele had said.
The shots tapered off. First the bursts stopped, then the single shots, then there was only the noise of men running, a voice giving orders, car engines coming and going.
And then silence.
Five minutes of silence.
And then footsteps. They weren't Donna Beatrice's; they were heavy and coming toward me, unhurried, like someone who lives in the house.
The key turned in the lock, the door opened, and Luca stopped in the doorway.
White shirt torn at the left shoulder. Blood on the right sleeve. Blood on one side of his jaw—not his; I saw in his eyes that it wasn't his. His hair mussed from the trip or the fight, I didn't know which.
The black eyes.
Alive.
"Bella."
I got up. I didn't walk. I ran.
I didn't think. Sixteen feet of room that I crossed in three steps, and I threw myself against him with the full force of my body.
His arms caught me before I reached him—one hand on my nape, the other on my back—and I buried my face in his chest, in the blood, in the torn shirt, in the smell of cigar and gunpowder and sandalwood.
"Luca. You're alive."
"I am."
"The blood..."
"It's not mine."
"Whose is it?"
"Later, bella."
He held me tighter. Both his hands firm on my back, holding, the way he'd held me under the arbor, but with force now—the force of a man who's just killed, who's just not died, who's just come down off the wave of adrenaline without switching off yet.
I lifted my face, and his mouth found mine before I had time to ask.
It wasn't like under the arbor. It wasn't like in his room after Matteo.
It was hunger.
His mouth came hard, no longer asking, tasting of whiskey and something metallic—blood, maybe his after all, or he'd cut his lip on something, I didn't know.
His hands moved down from my back to my hip, and from my hip to my thigh, lifting me. I wrapped my legs around his waist without thinking; his back hit the doorframe, right on his wounded shoulder.
"Luca, your shoulder."
"It doesn't matter now."
His mouth moved down my neck, and I threw my head back. I felt his teeth lightly on my collarbone—not biting, marking—and something inside me I didn't know, something that must have been ancestral, that came from before the convent and before my mother and before all of Italy, answered.
"Bella. I'll kill a man a night until your wedding day if I have to."
"Don't say that."
"I'll say it."
"Luca. Take me to your room."
He stopped.
His mouth half a centimeter from mine, his breathing quick. The black eyes opened, looked at me, lingered.
"Are you sure?"
"I am."
"Bella. Do you know what you're asking? I won't stop again."
"I don't want you to stop."
He lifted me clear off the floor—effortlessly, and without care either, with the urgency of a man who'd waited several days to do it.
He walked out with me in his arms through the family corridor, and I gripped his neck with both hands.
And for the first time in my life, I didn't think of the Madre Superiora.
I didn't think of my father.
I didn't think of Matteo in the cellar.
I didn't think of Bianca, or the dagger, or Francesca's letter, or the Mondello key.
I thought of one thing only.
Of the man holding me...