Chapter 11
RENZO
It’s just past midnight.
I’m pacing while the palazzo drowses like an old cat.
Somewhere on the far side of the island, a bar is closing with laughter and revelry and a fraction of the horn blaring that makes me miss the carnage of New York.
I miss the charged and primal purpose of enforcing Salvatore will on someone deserving. It takes a fraction of time to realise this is the longest I’ve gone without shrugging into capo-mode or race-driver suit. Also the longest I’ve been separated from my twin since we left the womb.
It takes another stunned moment to realise that while it makes me itch to be separated from the life I’ve known, I don’t miss either roles as frantically as I thought.
Fuck.
Sure, I fully intend to get back to the race track and to cracking skulls as soon as I’m able, but right here, with the only sounds my bare feet on marble and the sea’s patient whisper under the terrace, I’m mildly… unbothered by outside life.
What I am bothered about is that if I stop pacing, I’ll run back to her door.
If I stop, I’ll see the imprint of my mouth on her mouth.
That kiss is a bruise I keep pressing. Every time I blink I feel it again: the way she rose into me like instinct remembered, the way her fingers bit my shoulders, the falter and then the fall.
I tasted confession on her tongue and didn’t take it, because for once in my life I wanted the thing clean. Not stolen. Not extorted. Given.
It should scare me that wanting her clean and remembering is a more dangerous addiction than taking her dirty and ruthlessly seduced. I’m not a fucking saint so I know I can seduce Giada Mancinelli in five minutes flat.
Have her flat on her back before she can draw breath.
I lean my forearms on the balustrade. Far below, waves comb the black water into shards.
I catalogue what I’ve done and the list reads like a case file: crashed and nearly died; woke and stole a nun; bribed a doctor; moved off-grid; turned off my phone; told my family to mind their own business and then made it their business by breathing.
I tell myself it’s temporary. A stopgap. A chamber I’ve carved in time to keep her and the rest of the world from touching long enough for the shape of us to harden.
I’m a Salvatore. Even my tenderness comes with an exit strategy.
The phone I swore I wouldn’t switch back on sits on the console table, humming with a battery like a beating heart. I turned the thing off outside Modena and, for six days, the quiet has been a drug.
No Bibiana pressing sponsor crises into my ear like poison.
No Orazio booming commandment through the receiver.
No Rafa laughing as he threatens to kill me if I die.
No Cesare counting sins and exchanging them for alibis.
Bliss. Isolation. A lie.
With a sigh I turn it back on. The screen lights, once, as if offended by my thoughts. Immediately, it rings. I let it vibrate a second time before I pick up.
‘Tell me you’ve learned how to be boring,’ I say.
Rafa doesn’t bother with a greeting. ‘Did you really think you could pull a fucking stunt like that without us finding out?’
I smile into the dark. ‘Got away with it for six days, haven’t I?’
‘Six fucking days,’ Cesare cuts in before Rafa can snarl again.
He’s scarily measured and precise, the ice to Rafa’s fire.
‘You vanished with our medical staff, disappeared from team operations, and turned your fucking phone off. Six days isn’t a success, Renzo. It’s a countdown to complete insanity.’
‘Nah, I’d light a candle,’ I say mildly. ‘It’s a miracle.’
‘You smug bastard—’ Rafa starts.
‘Language,’ I say, because I can’t help myself, and because it makes him growl like a dog on a chain.
‘You want language?’ he spits. ‘Here’s language. Orazio has a team ready to yank you home by your pretty hair. The F1 calendar is a knife and you’re lying across it, and the press are calling you Lazarus with a sponsorship deal. Where. Are. You.’
I grin harder in the dark. ‘My little scrambling software fucking you up, frate? You should be proud, you taught me well.’
At his low growl, I laugh. ‘I’ll teach you how it feels to have my boot up your ass if you don’t tell me where you are,’ Rafa barks.
‘I’m somewhere warm. Somewhere the only thing that smells like combustion is candle wax.’ I look at the lemon trees in the courtyard, the way their shadows make lattices on stone. ‘Somewhere with old bones and good doors.’
‘Sicily,’ Cesare says, and it’s not a question.
My skin jumps in mild apprehension I swat away. They’ll find me… eventually. But I still have a day. Two, tops. ‘You always did have a talent for maps,’ I say. ‘I’ll send a postcard.’
‘Don’t be cute,’ he says, and the tiredness under the threat is the thing that scrapes at me. ‘We held hands and sang fucking kumbaya around your bed. You owe us the right to see you’re well. Stop fucking around and come home.’
Silence. I can hear Rafa exhale, Cesare recalibrate, the sound of a lighter and a swear as someone – Sofiya? – steals the cigarette before Rafa can ruin his lungs with it.
Nostalgia seeps through me, but it pales in comparison to the sweet angel sleeping upstairs. The answers I need.
‘No.’
‘No?’ Cesare repeats flat as a dead snitch.
‘I want time,’ I say. ‘Alone.’
‘Bullshit,’ Rafa says immediately. ‘You’ve never wanted time alone. You want an audience when you set the room on fire.’
‘I want a room that doesn’t burn when she walks into it,’ I say, and the words are out before I can decide whether they’re wise.
‘She?’ Cesare’s voice goes soft. ‘Who the fuck is she?’
Jesus. You’re a fucking idiot.
‘Benedetta,’ I toss out, because part of me is perverse enough to play this stupid game with my own brother. There’ll be hell to pay when he finds out.
Or not.
None of us have forgotten he was the first to openly claim a Mancinelli, nearly got himself torched, pitch-forked and ex-communicated from the family for it. I was a lead pitch-fork holder. Now I love Maddie like a sister.
Go figure.
‘And who the fuck is this Benedetta?’ comes a new voice, older, heavier, threaded with the weight of decades. Orazio doesn’t shout. He wraps the line around your throat and waits for you to pull it tight. ‘A prayer?’
‘You’ve never had use for those, Nonno.’
‘Don’t test me, boy. You’re not the first Salvatore to fall in love with a woman who will cost him blood.’
There’s a shock of silence at that.
We don’t say the word ‘love’ in this family unless it’s followed by a show of power, of victory, or of God.
I choose not to answer. He takes my quiet for confirmation. Of course he does.
‘You will come home,’ he says, final. ‘Or I will bring you home.’
‘Two problems with that,’ I say softly. ‘One: you don’t know where I am.’
Rafa snorts. ‘You left a trail of expensive footprints. Only a matter of time, stronzo.’
‘Two,’ I continue as if he hasn’t spoken, ‘I won’t be alone when I come.’
‘Absolutely not,’ Orazio says, voice flint. ‘This family—’
‘This family,’ I cut in, ‘has already made room at its tables for two of our enemies’ daughters because my brothers decided they’d rather be happy than right. Don’t torch your own hypocrisy because my mess looks different.’
‘Mind your fucking tongue—’ he begins.
Rafa laughs once, sharp. ‘He’s got you there, old man.’
‘Shut up, Rafaelle,’ Orazio says without heat, which is how I know he’s rattled. ‘Renzo.’
‘Sì?’
‘Did you take vows on my behalf? On your father’s? On your mother’s grave?’
There’s a catch on that last word; if I were a better grandson I’d let it pass. If I were a better man I’d rip my own tongue out to avoid the thing I’m going to say next.
‘My mama’s grave,’ I repeat evenly, ‘is the reason I want answers from the damn source. Not the half-baked story we all know is bullshit. The problem is it’s become back-burner shit for everyone.’
There’s a crackle on the line.
Rafa’s tone shifts to sharp, defensive. ‘Careful. You don’t get to take swings at the family for trying to survive it.’
‘Survive it?’ I snarl, heat flaring under my ribs. ‘You all made your peace with the version that hurt least. Meanwhile I’m still choking on the parts that don’t add up.’
Silence. Heavy. Loaded.
I drag a breath in, force it out through clenched teeth. The rage is still there, snarling under my ribs, but I cage it. For a moment. ‘I just need time,’ I say, steadier. ‘Time, space, and the courtesy of not being hunted by my own blood. I’ll reach out when I’m ready.’
We all know they won’t give me that grace.
But the lie is worth the try.
There’s a long breath on the other end. When Cesare speaks, it’s the voice he uses when he’s already decided the bad thing has to be done and he’ll be the one to do it.
‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Interesting fact though. Dr Conti’s wife’s phone pinged with a call from the Sanctuary of Saint Cecilia. Seems he’s taken an unscheduled trip to Sicily?’
Shit.
So Rafa wasn’t bluffing. Of course he wasn’t. I glance at the corridor as if the walls might tattle. ‘How devout of him.’
‘“Devout” is one word,’ Rafa says, the grin back in his tone. ‘“Extracted” is another. And it looks like some random Madre Superiora has been whisked somewhere quiet after a skirmish at her convent. Know anything about that?’
At my stubborn silence, he chuckles. ‘A burned convent isn’t your style, frate. That was someone else’s flourish. But care to explain why your doctor and a disgraced nun were at the same GPS coordinate I visited over a year ago?’
‘I care to explain nothing,’ I say, but my mouth is dry. My mind isn’t in the room; it’s back in that ash-scarred cloister.
Nightowl better not have taken matters into his own hands. His message flashes in memory: New scenery. Better lighting for interrogation.
I’d thought it was for my interrogation.
Fuck, was it something else I misunderstood?
‘You’re a Salvatore, but you’re not invincible,’ Cesare says, softer. ‘You don’t get to drag some poor chick into the undertow of whatever’s going on with you because you’re bored of the surface.’