15. Bella
Bella
There has not been a Sunday dinner at Moretti’s since the night my father died. Tonight there is one, and it is mine.
I made it happen the way my father used to, which I am learning is most of what power actually is: I sent word, and people rearranged their lives around the word, and not one of them was asked.
The long table in the back room is full, both houses at it, the men who run the merged territories and their wives and a few of the old guard who knew my father when he was young.
The room smells of garlic and red sauce and bread.
The wine is the good Barolo my father kept for occasions.
Father Giuseppe said the blessing over it an hour ago, then ate like a man who has buried too many of these people to pass up a meal with the living.
It looks, for one warm hour, like a family.
I know better than to trust it. I let myself enjoy it anyway, because my father never did, and look where careful got him.
Dante sits at my right, not the head. He gave me the head of the table tonight without a word about it, and the giving was louder than any toast he could have made, and every man in the room read it. He is teaching them to see me at the head of a table by simply, repeatedly, putting me there.
Twice during the meal an old man I half recognize, one of my father’s generation, comes to my end of the table to pay his respects, the small formal courtesy these men perform for a boss and never once performed for me before tonight.
The first time it startles me. The second time I receive it as if I’ve been receiving it my whole life, because that is the other thing power turns out to be, the ability to accept a thing as your due until everyone around you forgets it was ever in question.
They are forgetting. I can feel them forget, one kissed hand at a time.
When the plates are cleared, Nico stands.
He doesn’t clink a glass. Men like Nico don’t need to; the room goes quiet the way a room goes quiet for an old soldier who has never once wasted its attention.
He has a glass of the Barolo in a hand I notice is not entirely steady.
He looks down the length of the table at me.
For a moment he can’t start, and the not-starting is the most eloquent thing he has ever done.
“I served Vittorio Moretti for thirty years,” he says finally.
“I stood up at his wedding. I carried his daughter on my shoulders at the lake when she was small enough to think I was a giant. And I buried him eight weeks ago, in the cold, with a hole in this family the size of the whole city, and I will tell you all what I thought, standing at that grave, because tonight I am old enough and have had enough of this good wine not to lie about it.” He breathes.
“I thought it was over. I thought the thing Vittorio built died on that sidewalk with him, and that we would spend the next ten years carving it up and calling the carving loyalty.”
Nobody moves. Down the table, Luca Rossi has gone very still, his own glass untouched in front of him.
“I was wrong.” Nico turns the glass toward me.
“I have watched this one, these eight weeks. I watched her walk into the Commission they handed her to and walk out with it listening. I watched her find the rot in operations grown men missed, and fix it, and never once raise her voice doing it. I watched her do, in two months, what most men in this room couldn’t do in twenty years, which is make me believe again that Vittorio Moretti is not entirely dead, because the best of him is sitting at the head of his table wearing her mother’s earrings and running his house better than he did.
” His voice cracks, finally, and he lets it, an old man past caring who sees.
“I served the father for thirty years. I will serve the daughter for whatever I have left. Isabella Moretti. The real heir. The only one I recognize. Salute.”
The room comes to its feet. Salute goes around the table in two dozen voices, the old guard first and loudest, the men who knew my father.
I sit at the head of his table with my mother’s diamonds in my ears and my dead father’s wine in my glass, and I do not cry, because we do not cry at this table.
But it is a near thing—the nearest I have come since the hospital.
Nico sees it and gives me the smallest nod, the one that says I know, and I’ve got you, and your father would be on his feet too.
And I watch Luca Rossi stand.
He has to. A man who stays seated when a room rises to toast its boss has confessed something, and Luca is far too careful for that, so he stands.
He lifts his glass, says salute with the rest of them, and his mouth makes the shape of a smile.
But the wine in his glass trembles, a fine high tremor he can’t still, and his eyes, over the rim of it, are running the cold calculation I have learned to read on him like weather.
Nico has just declared, in front of both houses, that the men of the Moretti family answer to me.
Which means they no longer answer to Luca.
Which means the thing Luca has spent eight weeks building, whatever it is, just got harder, because the rank and file he was counting on to follow him followed an old soldier’s toast to me instead.
I lift my own glass to him down the length of the table, warm and grateful, the perfect grieving heir thanking her father’s loyal man, and I watch him understand that I have won something tonight that he needed, and I watch him smile through it, and I think: soon.
He is going to have to move soon now. Good.
In the car home I don’t talk, and Dante doesn’t make me.
Nico gave me something tonight I didn’t know I still wanted, which is a man who knew my father telling a room full of witnesses that I am his equal and not his leftover.
I spent twenty-two years as Vittorio Moretti’s decoration.
Tonight an old soldier made me his heir out loud, and the strange thing, the thing I turn over the whole dark ride, is that it doesn’t feel like inheriting my father.
It feels like finally being allowed to be the thing he built and then hid.
I am done being hidden. I think I have been done since the alley on Taylor Street, and only learned tonight how to say it.
· · ·
At home the estate is dark except for the Christmas lights someone on the staff has strung along the eaves, small and white and absurd against all that stone.
They throw a soft grid of light across the bedroom ceiling.
And I decide, standing in the middle of my own borrowed life in a dress that cost more than my mother made in a year, that tonight I am going to take something instead of surviving something.
“Sit down,” I tell my husband.
It’s his line. He knows it the second I say it, the corner of his mouth moving the way it does when I’ve surprised him, which is rarer and therefore sweeter every time.
He could refuse. Twice my size and a man feared in every room in the city, he could pick me up and end the question of who runs this room in about four seconds.
Instead, Dante Salvatore looks at me for a long moment, and then he sits down in the chair by the window, and the powerful thing, the thing that goes through me hotter than any touch, is watching him choose it. Watching him hand me the room.
“Tonight you don’t get to run it,” I say, crossing to him, taking my time the way he taught me without meaning to.
“Tonight you got to watch me run a table full of men who’d have killed me in my crib for being born a girl.
So now you’re going to sit there, and you’re going to let me have you the way I want you, and you’re not going to manage it, or improve it, or take it over when it gets to be too much. Can you do that?”
“No,” he says, honestly, his voice already gone low. “But I’m going to try, because I want to see you take it more than I want to keep it.”
So I take it.
I undress in front of him slowly, because I have decided tonight that I am done being looked at like a thing.
I am going to be looked at like a choice.
There is a difference, and he taught it to me, and now I am going to teach it back.
His hands I take off the arms of the chair, put where I want them, and take them away again the moment I want them gone.
I take his hands as I lead him to our bed where I climb into his lap and I kiss him like I own the lease, and when he groans and his hands come up to take control out of habit, the deep reflex of a man who has run everything his whole life, I catch them and pin them back and say, against his mouth, “Mine. Tonight you’re mine,” and I feel the exact shudder that goes through him at being claimed, the great unguarded crack in Dante Salvatore that no one else on earth will ever see, the discovery that being owned by the right person is the one thing his whole life of owning never gave him.
I have thought about power every day since they married me to it.
I believed it was the head of the table, the room gone quiet, the men learning my face, and it is those things.
But this is power too, maybe the truest kind, a man who could break me with one hand choosing instead to be broken open by me, gladly, because he trusts the hands doing it.
No one warned me this was on offer. No one warned me I would be greedy for it. I take more.