CHAPTER 43
"My mother wrote that he would lose both his children."
Valentina MORETTI
Villa Salina sat on the tip of the peninsula, with the sea on both sides.
Five in the morning. The sky still black, turning gray at the line of the horizon. The house was big and white and old, the paint peeling near the roof, the shutters crooked, the garden untended.
The house of a man who'd shrunk along with his empire.
We went in through the service door.
The one I'd drawn on the Hotel Lucia paper. The one by the old tank, that no one watched, because no one remembered it existed. Raffaele went first with four men.
The lock gave way in silence. Then it was fast.
The first shots came from the kitchen—one of Salvatore's men who was awake, making coffee at five in the morning, and who didn't have time.
Raffaele handled it before I understood what had happened.
Then two more, in the corridor. The sound of the shots muffled by the suppressors, dull, dry, like a cough.
We reached the hall.
And that was where Luca grabbed me by the arm.
"You stay here," he said, low, in the middle of the noise. "With Matteo. Don't go up."
I went still.
"Luca…"
"You came in, now you obey me. For what you're carrying."
The breath went out of me.
For what you're carrying.
He knew about the pregnancy. How long had he known? Since Capri? Since the road? He knew, and he'd let me think he didn't, the same way I'd let him think he didn't, and we'd both pretended all night at the Hotel Lucia, and—
"Valentina."
My father's voice.
I raised my eyes. Salvatore was at the top of the main staircase—the staircase I'd drawn. A suit too big, shrunk inside it. White hair. The skin of his face fallen. The whites of his eyes gone yellow. A pistol in his right hand, and the hand trembling a little, the way an old man's hand trembles.
His three soldiers had already fallen. He was alone at the top of the house.
"You brought him into my house," he said. His voice was thinner than I remembered. "You brought the Moretti into your mother's house."
"This isn't my mother's house. My mother's house is in Mondello, on the beach. This is the house where you hide."
Matteo appeared at my side. He came up the corridor with two soldiers. When Salvatore saw Matteo, something in his face collapsed.
"Matteo."
"Father."
"You're alive."
"No thanks to you," Matteo said. "Seven years, Father. Switzerland. Capri. Seven years."
My father came down a step, the gun still in his hand.
"I did it for you," he said. "Everything I did, I did for the family."
"I read the letter," I said.
He stopped.
"What letter?"
"Mamma's. April 2012." I took a step forward, and Luca tried to hold me back, but I took the step anyway. "She warned you, Father. She wrote that if you didn't stop, you'd lose both your children. You kept the letter, but you didn't stop."
My father's face trembled.
"Lucia," he murmured.
"She was right. You lost us both. We're here, on the other side, on the side of the man you wanted to kill. You're the one who did this—Mamma warned you, and it was you."
For a second—just one second—I saw the old man inside the monster. I saw the man who'd kissed my forehead when I was a child. I saw the father Mamma had loved once, in 1986, on that first night in Mondello.
Then the second passed, and the monster came back.
Salvatore raised the gun, but he didn't aim it at Luca.
He aimed it at me.
"If I die," he said, his voice shaking, "you die with me, daughter. You chose the wrong side. You're not mine anymore."
Matteo threw himself in front of me.
The shot went off. My father's trembling hand missed—the bullet hit the wall behind us, tearing out a piece of the plaster. And before he could fire again, Raffaele appeared from the side of the staircase, went up three steps, and disarmed my father with a sharp blow to the wrist.
The pistol fell, rolling down the stairs.
And my father, disarmed, old, alone, was forced to his knees by two soldiers in the middle of the hall.