CHAPTER 22
"There are bodies we spend our whole lives waiting for, without knowing the name until we find it."
VALENTINA ROSSI
He carried me down the family corridor with both my legs wrapped around his waist.
I didn't look at anyone; I don't know if there was anyone to look at.
The house had just come out of a shootout, and someone was still shouting downstairs, someone calling for a doctor—but for the two of us, in that corridor, in those sixty-five feet of old marble, all that existed was the sound of his breathing close to my ear and the weight of my arm gripping his neck hard.
He kicked his bedroom door open.
He didn't put me on the bed right away.
He set me on my feet, slowly, sliding my body against his—I felt every inch of how much he wanted me, and I felt no shame. I didn't feel the convent's shame, didn't feel the capo's-daughter's shame, didn't feel the shame of the Valentina of three weeks ago.
His mouth found mine again in the middle of the room, more slowly now.
He pulled back an inch or two, his eyes close, the scar through his eyebrow nearer than I'd ever seen it. I saw the dried blood on the side of his jaw, saw the torn shoulder of his shirt, saw the exhaustion of a man who'd driven three hours and killed at least one man on arrival.
"Bella," he said softly, with a small smile. "I'm not going to bed with you with other men's blood on my face. I need to go to the bathroom. Five minutes."
"I'll go with you."
Without a word, he took my hand and led me into his bathroom.
The bathroom was white marble. A large glass shower. Black towels, folded. A scent of nothing but sandalwood and something of cedar.
He stepped back. He took off the torn white shirt—slowly, carefully over the wounded shoulder. For the first time, with nothing hidden, I saw Luca Moretti's chest.
I'd imagined it, but it didn't come close.
The Latin tattoo ran from his right shoulder to the middle of his chest—a phrase in old lettering that I could read now: Mors potius macula.
Death before dishonor. Another tattoo on the ribs on his left side, the famiglia's symbol.
His abdomen defined, without being cartoonish.
A long scar crossing the left side of his ribs—an old bullet, I recognized it from convent pictures, a nun who used to show us saints pierced by arrows.
He saw me looking but said nothing.
He opened the shower and turned on the water, then looked at me, seeming to wait for something.
I put my hands behind my neck. I found the dress's zipper and slid it down, slowly.
My mother's moss-green fell to the marble floor like a curtain.
What was left was me—a white silk slip, my mother's emerald earrings, knee-high boots. The dagger still inside.
Luca looked at me, and his black eyes traveled down slowly, and came back.
"Madonna."
"Sit, Luca."
He sat down on the edge of the tub.
I put my foot on his knee. He took off the right boot, took off the left, and took out the dagger without comment. Then he set the dagger on the marble counter.
"Next time you leave that dagger in the room."
"Maybe."
He laughed.
Then he stood up, took me by the waist and lifted me, carrying me into the shower. And then, with the hot water falling over us both, with his blood running down the drain in a red trickle that grew smaller and smaller, with the silk slip clinging to my body—he kissed me again.
Slowly.
And he began to take the silk off my body, strap by strap, with the patience of a man who'd waited a long time and wanted to make it last.
I'll be honest: I don't remember everything in order.
I remembered his mouth moving down my neck under the hot water.
I remembered his hand lifting me again, my wet body against the cold tile of the shower, my legs wrapping around his waist again.
I remembered his mouth moving lower—to the collarbone, to the breast—and the first time I made a sound I didn't know.
Short. Involuntary. Honest.
He stopped, looking up at me.
"Brava," he said, a small smile against my skin.
He carried me to his bed, still wet.
The black towel wrapped my shoulders for about thirty seconds before he threw it aside.
I lay down, and he lay down beside me, propped on one elbow, looking at me.
"Valentina, look at me."
I looked.
"If you want to stop, at any minute, at any second, you say so. Chiaro?"
"Chiaro."
"I won't hurt you."
"I know."
"I don't want to hurt you. Not in any way. Not at any moment. Are you listening to me?"
I looked at him, at the scar through his eyebrow, at the black eyes too close, at the jaw clenched the way a man's is when he's holding back a force he's afraid to unleash.
I put my hand on his cheek very slowly.
"I know, Luca."
"Bene."
And then he kissed me. Unhurried.
His hand moved down my neck, over the collarbone, over the breast. Slowly, discovering.
I closed my eyes, felt his mouth follow his hand down. I felt his fingers travel over places I'd never properly touched myself—because the convent teaches that those places are shame, and my mother died too soon to undo the convent.
That night, inside Luca Moretti's room, with the rain beginning to fall on Posillipo, I unlearned shame.
The first time he touched me there—I drew in such a deep breath that the air didn't come back right away.
"Breathe, bella."
"I am breathing..."
"You're not. Breathe."
I breathed, and he went on.
When he entered me, slowly, with his forehead resting against mine, I cried.
Not from pain. I cried over the stupidest thing in the world—over my mother.
I thought of my mother in that exact second, for the first time in ten years without guilt.
I thought of her as a woman, not as a mother.
I thought that maybe she'd been through this once, with my father when he was young, before the house became a fortress.
I thought that maybe this was the thing she meant by one day you'll need this, amore mio—not the dagger.
Something else: courage.
Luca saw the tear run down my temple and stopped.
"Bella?"
"Keep going."
"You're crying. Should I stop?"
"Keep going, Luca. Keep going."
He kept going. And I let the tear fall.
And at some minute I can't pinpoint, I stopped crying, stopped thinking of my mother, stopped thinking of anything. I met my own body for the first time in twenty-three years, and I liked it.
I came—it was the first time I'd ever gotten there—I said his name.
I didn't mean to. It came out on its own.
He came right after, collapsing onto me, with the full weight of his body, without ceremony, his forehead at my neck and his breathing broken.
I wound my hand into his hair, and we stayed like that.
The two of us wordless, for about ten minutes...