Chapter ONE #2
"Home." The word comes out of me sharp enough to draw blood, my own, from the inside. "She's not going home. She's going to be locked in some palazzo by men who think gold leaf is the same thing as ownership —"
"You can discuss the theology of it with the King himself, if he's of a mind to listen."
The man's patience finally shows its edge, thin and final.
"Or you can come quietly and keep both your hands intact for the work he's going to want from them. Your choice, Signorina Vrenna. But it's the only choice on offer today."
I look at the icon, wrapped now, cradled against a stranger's chest like a sleeping child.
I think of my grandmother's locked chest, of eighteen years of not yet, of a debt with my family's name on it that I am apparently inheriting along with the gold leaf and the brushes and the workshop lease, none of which I asked for, all of which is now, somehow, the entire shape of my life.
I understand, too, in the strange sideways logic fear produces, of the half-restored saint on my easel by the window, a fourteenth-century Saint Nicholas I was supposed to deliver to the bishop's office on Thursday, and the absurd,
useless worry that no one will think to call and tell them I won't be making the appointment.
I do not scream. I think about it — I think about it the whole walk from the worktable to the black car idling outside with its engine already running, the late afternoon light hitting the Sila hills gold and indifferent above the rooftops,
the last ordinary moment of my life closing behind me like a door I didn't know was the last door — but I don't scream, because screaming has never once, in the whole of human history, made a locked door open from the wrong side.
The drive south takes the better part of two hours, the city giving way to terraced hills and then to the long green spine of the Sila plateau before the road begins its slow, switchbacking descent toward the coast.
I have made this drive before, as a child, with my grandmother — to visit a cousin in Locri, to deliver a restored frame to a church in Gerace — and the dissonance of seeing the same hills, the same chestnut forests,
the same roadside shrines to the Madonna with their plastic flowers gone faded pink in the sun, from inside a car I cannot leave, is its own particular kind of cruelty.
The landscape doesn't know anything has changed.
The world keeps being beautiful around you, indifferent to the fact that you've just been taken.
No one speaks to me for the first hour. I sit wedged between two of the men in the back seat, the icon — wrapped, secured, treated with more visible care than I am — in the front, cradled across the lap of the man who walked into my workshop and called my own family's history a debt.
I watch the back of his neck, the gray hair cut close and military, and I do the only thing I know how to do with fear that has nowhere else to go.
I start cataloging. It's a habit from the workshop, the same instinct that makes me list a panel's condition before I ever touch a brush to it — surface losses, flaking, prior interventions, anything that tells me what I'm actually dealing with before I commit to a course of treatment.
I apply it now because it is the only tool I have.
The scarred man's left hand, missing the top joint of one finger, old injury, knife not gun, the kind of scar a man gets defending himself rather than attacking.
The driver's accent, coastal, vowels flattened in a way I associate with Locri or somewhere close to it.
The particular silence between the two men in front — not the silence of strangers, but the silence of men who have worked together long enough that conversation has become unnecessary, which tells me this is not the first time they have done exactly this.
"What's your name," I finally ask the scarred one, somewhere past the second hour, when the road has straightened out along the coast and the Ionian Sea has appeared on the left, flat and silver-blue in the last of the light. "Since you seem to know mine so thoroughly."
He glances back at me in the mirror, something that might be respect crossing his face before it's gone again. "Marco."
"Marco." I file it away with everything else. "And the man you're taking me to. The King, you called him."
"Aurelio Bruzzano." He says the name the way you'd say a fact of weather, something only true regardless of opinion. "You'll meet him soon enough."
Promessa. Tradimento. Whatever my great-grandmother promised, whatever the Bruzzanos believe was betrayed, I am about to be delivered to the man at the center of it with nothing but unfinished sentences in a dead woman's handwriting and hands that still smell, faintly,
of gold size and rabbit-skin glue.
I think of the underlined word in the margin — bugia, lie — and wonder, with a coldness that surprises me, whether the man waiting for me at the end of this drive knows he's the inheritor of a story that isn't true, or whether he believes it as fully as the men sent to fetch me clearly do.
It is not enough. I know already, with the same cold certainty that told me the bell over the door was ringing wrong, that whatever I think I understand about my own family's history is not nearly enough to survive what's waiting for me at the end of this road.
It will have to be enough anyway. The cypress-lined drive rises ahead of us in the dusk, gravel crunching under the tires, and somewhere above the trees, lit gold against a sky gone the deep blue of the hour before full dark, a palazzo waits with its windows already lit,
as if it has been expecting me for far longer than the two hours I have spent learning the shape of my own captivity.