21. Lydia
LYDIA
The water off Sorrento glows a bruised yellow, and dawn is coming up slowly underneath it.
I sit across from Nico on the boat, knees almost touching his, and watch the coastline shrink behind us.
Capri sits ahead, pale and jagged. Its cliffs shoulder straight up out of the sea.
My hands won't stay still even as I fold them and unfold them before I decide to tuck them under my thighs.
Ten days I've been married to this man. Ten days of learning the sounds he makes when he thinks nobody's listening, and looking at the exact spot on his jaw that goes tight right before he speaks.
But the part that messes with my head the most is that somehow I'm more nervous as hell about meeting his mother for the first time than the time I literally saw him kill a man in front of me.
The silver frame keeps surfacing in my head. That somber woman, serious and unsmiling. The boy standing in front of her, Nico's exact scar cut into his young face, his body angled to block whatever might come at her next.
I've looked at that photo more times than I'd ever admit to him. Studied the set of that woman's mouth. Tried to read the boy's eyes.
I still don't know what I was hoping to find.
"We won’t be staying the night," Nico says. No preamble. He just drops it into the space between us.
"Why not?"
"I'm not allowed on the island past sunset. No D'Ambrosio is." His jaw works. "No exceptions."
"Your own mother won't let you sleep under her roof?"
"She stopped being my mother a long time before she stopped letting me stay."
I want to ask him what that means. I don't. I've learned that with Nico, pushing before he's ready just makes him go quiet, so I let it go.
The boat cuts closer to the island. Salt spray needles my cheek. Under it, so faint that it’s almost not there, is Nico’s cologne as he adjusts himself while the towering cliffs of Capri grow larger and larger.
"What is she like?" I ask anyway, unable to help myself.
Nico looks at the water for a long moment. His hands are loose on his knees, but the muscle at his jaw hasn't stopped moving since we left the dock from Naples.
"You'll see," he says.
That's all I get.
Martina's house sits low and white against the cliff, walls the color of bone, a garden running right up to the edge of nothing and stopping abruptly, the drop just beyond it.
A woman waits for us at the far end of it, framed by a stone balustrade and an entire sky behind her.
Dark hair streaked silver, pulled back hard enough to hurt.
High cheekbones, all the softness gone out of them years ago.
Amber eyes, exactly Nico's amber, looking out of a face simultaneously familiar yet new.
A blanket, folded neat, sits across her lap even in the morning heat.
Her hands rest on top of it, perfectly still.
She decided a long time ago that stillness was its own weapon, and she's never put it down since.
It takes me a moment to realize that she’s sitting in a wheelchair.
Suddenly everything in the silver frame starts making sense. But I don't dare open my mouth to ask. Something in the set of her shoulders tells me that's not my place to ask.
"Mamma." The word comes out of him smaller than anything I've ever heard him say.
His shoulders drop half an inch. His chin comes down. For one second he isn't the Don of anything. He's a boy standing in front of a woman who used to be able to hurt him with a look, and some part of him never stopped expecting it.
"Nico." She doesn't smile.
Something in my chest twists sideways.
"Step away, so that I might speak to your wife alone.” She pauses, and then when she speaks again, there’s an unmistakable bitterness in her voice. “One D'Ambrosio wife to another."
Nico's whole body goes still. Then he steps back, out past the balustrade, down toward the water, and doesn't look at either of us again.
"Sit," Martina says once we’re alone, and I take my seat in the iron chair across from hers.
The sea drops away behind her shoulder.
"Do you love him?"
The bluntness of it stops me cold. I don't answer. And that was all the answer she needed.
"My father didn't want me to marry Leo D'Ambrosio," she says. "He said no, of course. So Leo put a gun to my father's head while his loyal men held a knife to my sister’s eye, and asked him to reconsider." Her mouth flattens. "He did."
I go cold, fast, from the inside out.
“Nico won’t hurt me.”
"That wasn’t what I asked," she replies. "One day, you'll realize he's got a chain around your throat."
"He's not..." I start, and stop, because I don't actually know how that sentence ends.
"Once a D'Ambrosio man gets what he wants out of you, he'll throw you aside like a used condom. Never forget that, girl."
Those words settle under my ribs and stay there. I want to defend him. I open my mouth to do it and nothing comes out, because some ugly, cowardly part of me has lain awake wondering the exact same thing at three in the morning with his arm around me.
Martina watches me not answer. Something old moves behind her eyes. It's older than cruelty. She's carried it for thirty years and never once put it down.
"You want to know why I’m in a wheelchair."
“That’s not…."
"No, it’s important. You’re a D’Ambrosio wife now, so you should know what that all means."
She turns her face toward the water, and for a moment I think she isn't going to say anything else at all.
"The night my husband gave my son that scar.”
She closes her eyes as her hands ball into fists.
“I was too old then to give him another child,” she says. “And I suspect that was the real reason why he didn’t kill Nico in front of me. You see, nobody had ever dared to interfere whenever he put his hands on me. Not his men, not my own Vincent. But Nico did.”
Despite the thin quiver in her voice, there’s an unmistakable air of pride that I can detect.
“But you don’t ever get between a Don and his victim. So as Nico lay bloodied and barely conscious, my husband yanked him up by his hair, and told him to watch.”
Her eyes open, and those familiar amber are now wet with tears. “He made Nico watch as he broke both my feet with a hammer so both of us would understand what happens to someone who dares to get in a Don’s way.”
I can't breathe right for a second. The whole garden seems to tip.
"Nico didn't tell you that part, did he?”
"No."
"He wouldn't. He carries it like it's his shame instead of Leo's." A pause, and something in her voice cracks open just enough to show what's underneath. "Two years later, Leo put a knife in his hand and made him use it on a man. That was the day my son died, and Don Leo’s son took his place."
I don't ask either. I sit very still and let it settle into me, heavy and unfinished, something I'll be carrying long after this boat ride is over.
I think of him at the piano in the Sorrento house he won't sleep in tonight. His hands there, so careful with the keys. So careful with me.
Now I can see what he's been guarding against the whole time.
"Bring him back," Martina says, not to me. A man in black steps out from the shadow of the doorway, and a moment later Nico crosses the garden toward us. He reads my face before he's even close enough to touch, and I watch him go rigid, already bracing for whatever she's told me.
He stops beside my chair. Close enough that his hand could find my shoulder. He doesn't let it.
"You swore to me that you'd never become him." Martina's voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to. "But I know that this girl did not agree to put that ring on her finger by her own will."
Nico says nothing. His jaw sets into a hard, straight line.
"I summoned you here because I needed to see the monster you've become, Don Nico. And suffice to say, you didn't fucking disappoint."
He stands perfectly straight through it, chin level, absorbing every word without a flicker. I've seen him face down men holding guns without blinking. I have never once seen him hold this still.
"You pretend that you're better, but his blood runs in your veins. Sooner or later, you're going to hurt her the same way that he hurt me."
Nobody moves. The wind off the sea pulls at the hem of Martina's dress, at my hair. Nico doesn't so much as sway.
"We're done here," he says finally, quiet, and it isn't to her. It's to me.
I stand. Martina doesn't say goodbye. She watches us go, hands folded, spine straight in the chair she's been sitting in since her son was nine years old, and I feel her eyes on my back the whole way down through the garden to the water.
On the boat ride back to Sorrento, neither of us talks for a long time.
I keep coming back to the photo. The somber woman. The boy standing in front of her, angled to take whatever came first. I always read that picture as two people who loved each other once and stopped.
I can't read it that way anymore. Now I see a woman who broke her own silence today just to keep protecting him from three feet away, the only kind of protecting she's got left in her.
Now I see a boy holding still in front of a camera, already bracing for something he knew was coming, the same instinct I watched him fall back into an hour ago in that garden, fifteen years later and still nine years old underneath it.
I don't know what kind of man I married.
I think, watching the water slide by, that maybe Nico doesn't fully know either.
Maybe that's the actual thing sitting between us, not the ring, not the debt I owe my mother, not any of it.
Just two people trying to figure out what they're made of out of the wreckage somebody else left behind.
The Sorrento house waits at the end of the dock, pale stone, shutters closed against a pale, early sun.
It looks staged, waiting for someone to actually live in it.
No shoes by the door. No photographs on the walls.
No mail piled on a counter, no jacket thrown over a chair.
Just rooms, kept, waiting for someone to finally move in and mess them up.
Nico unlocks the door and stands back to let me through first, quiet, and there's nothing easy in it. Something in him cracked open back in that garden, and he's been holding the pieces together with his own two hands the whole ride home.
I don't let him keep doing that alone.
I turn in the doorway and reach for him instead, both hands flat on his chest. For once, he doesn't step back from it.
He doesn't change the subject. He doesn't reach for a joke to put between us.
He just stands there and lets me hold on, his heart going hard and fast under my palm, his forehead coming down to rest against mine.
"I'm sorry," I say, and I mean all of it. The chair. The knife. The name he's never once said out loud, not even to me.
"Don't," he says, but there's no edge in it. Just tired, all the way down.
We stand like that in the doorway for a while, his breath slowing against my hair, mine slowing to match it.
My stomach picks that exact moment to growl, loud enough there's no pretending it didn't happen.
Nico huffs something that's almost a laugh, low in his chest, his mouth moving against my hair.
"Come on," he says. "I'll make you dinner."