Chapter TWO
Aurelio
The morning starts the way most of my mornings start, with Adelina already seated at the breakfast table when I come down, dressed as if she has somewhere formal to be even though she hasn't left the palazzo grounds in longer than I can remember,
a pot of coffee between us and a folder of correspondence she reads through with the small reading glasses she pretends she doesn't need.
"The Loschi situation," she says, without looking up, "is no longer a situation. Marzio sent word last night that he considers the matter of the eastern groves settled in his favor, which means he intends to test you on it within the month."
"Let him test me."
"I'd rather you not need testing." She sets the folder down and finally looks at me, a cold look she's given me since I was eighteen years old and she handed me a crown too big for my head — assessing, patient,
the look of a woman who has spent her entire adult life deciding what a Bruzzano man is and is not yet ready to know.
"There is another matter. Older. I think it's time you handled it yourself."
This is how she tells me about the Vrenna debt — not as a story, not as an explanation, but as an instruction, the way she has delivered every important fact of my adult life, in a tone that makes refusal feel like a kind of disrespect I was raised not to commit.
A family in Cosenza, she says. An object that was promised to our house generations ago and never properly surrendered.
A debt that has simply been waiting, the way certain debts in our world are permitted to wait, for someone with the authority to finally collect it.
"Why now," I ask, the same question I will spend the better part of this book failing to ask loudly enough, soon enough, of the right person. "Eleven years I've held this crown. You've never once mentioned a debt in Cosenza."
"Because I didn't think you were ready to collect it correctly."
Adelina folds her hands on the table, rings catching the morning light, and for just a moment something moves behind her eyes that I will not have the vocabulary to name as fear, or guilt, or grief, until considerably later in this story.
"You are now. Send Marco. Tell him to bring the object, and the woman who has it, with appropriate care. She is not to be harmed. She is not, in fact, to be treated as anything other than precisely what she is."
"And what is that?"
My grandmother looks at me for a long moment, and then she does something she has not done in eleven years — she looks away first.
"Family business," she says, which is not an answer, and stands, smoothing her skirt, the conversation closed the way she closes every conversation she has decided is finished, regardless of whether I agree. "Send Marco this morning. I'd like the matter settled before the harvest blessing."
I should have pressed her. I am the King of Aspromonte; there is no man on this mountain who would dare end a conversation with me before I was finished having it, and yet I let my own grandmother do exactly that, three times a week, for eleven years,
because some part of me — the part that was eighteen and grieving and desperate for someone to just tell him what to do — never fully stopped being grateful that she was willing to decide things for me.
I spend the rest of the morning in the study that was my father's and is now mine, working through correspondence with three of the smaller families along the coast, settling a dispute over fishing rights that has dragged on since before I was crowned, the kind of small,
grinding administrative work that no one ever mentions when they talk about what it means to rule a mountain.
By early afternoon, Costanzo brings word that Marco's car has reached Cosenza, the household having gone about its business with the careful, self-contained rhythm of people long accustomed to days that turn on a single phone call and require no explanation from the man who sends them,
and I catch myself, for reasons I do not examine closely, unable to concentrate on anything else.
I tell myself it's the Loschi matter. I tell myself it's the harvest blessing, three days away, the first major ritual I'll oversee since the spring.
I do not tell myself the truth, which is that I have been turning the words the woman who has it over in my mind since breakfast, with a curiosity that has nothing to do with debts or objects or family business,
and everything to do with the kind of quiet stillness in my grandmother's face when she refused to tell me what, exactly, I was sending four men to collect.
Costanzo finds me on the loggia at four in the afternoon, where I've been standing for the better part of an hour doing nothing more useful than watching the bergamot groves go gold-green in the slant light and turning the same five sentences over in my head, none of which I intend to say to anyone.
"They've left Cosenza," he says. "Should be at the gate within the hour."
"And the consulta?"
"Loschi knows already. Don't ask me how, because I don't know how, and I don't like that I don't know how."
Costanzo leans against the stone balustrade beside me, close enough that I feel rather than see him studying my profile, the way he's done since we were boys, since he learned that I'd tell him more with my silences than most men tell him with their mouths.
"You could have sent me for her, Aurelio. There was no reason for you to put four men and a car on a debt collection."
"It isn't a debt collection."
"No," he agrees, quiet. "I didn't think it was, the third time you asked about the route they'd be taking."
I don't answer that, because there isn't an answer that doesn't make me sound like exactly the kind of man my grandmother raised me to become and I have spent eleven years resenting — a man who has decided something about a stranger before he's even seen her face,
on the strength of nothing but a name in a ledger I haven't opened in eleven years and the small, hot, wholly unfamiliar feeling that has been sitting under my sternum since the morning Adelina sat across from me at breakfast and said, without preamble, The Vrenna debt has come due,
and I think it's time you collected it yourself.
She did not say why now, after eleven years of letting it sit. She did not say why this particular ghost, of all the ghosts our family keeps, was suddenly worth waking.
I should have asked. I am the King of Aspromonte, I have ended blood feuds with a sentence and ended men's lives with less, and I did not ask my own grandmother why, after eleven years, she wanted a debt collected that predates my father, predates his father, predates — by her own account,
given once, decades ago, in a voice that did not invite follow-up questions — the modern history of our family entirely.
I didn't ask because some part of me already understood that I didn't want the answer disturbing whatever this feeling under my sternum turns out to be.
The car comes up the cypress drive at five minutes past five, gravel crunching under the tires in an old hush of a household that has learned to go quiet when something important arrives.
I watch from the loggia rail as the doors open.
I watch Marco — gray at the temples, missing half a finger since a debt collection in Gioiosa Ionica that went sideways fifteen years ago, the most careful man in my employ for precisely that reason — circle to the back door and open it himself, which he does for no one,
which tells me something has already shifted in how my own men are choosing to handle this.
And then she steps out of the car, and I stop thinking about ledgers entirely.
She is not what I expected, though if you'd asked me an hour ago what I expected, I couldn't have told you.
Dark hair pulled back in a knot that's come half-loose from what was clearly a long, badly cooperative afternoon.
A workshop apron still tied at her waist, stained at the hem with something gold — gilding size, I'll learn later, the particular amber-brown of rabbit-skin glue — like she didn't have time to take it off before four strangers walked her out of her own life.
She is not crying. She is not shaking, or not shaking in any way visible from forty feet and a stone balustrade.
She is looking up at the palazzo's facade with an expression I recognize immediately, because I have worn it myself in rooms full of men trying to decide whether I'm afraid of them — the careful, deliberate blankness of someone doing arithmetic and refusing to let the answer show on her face.
Marco says something to her I can't hear.
She doesn't look at him. She's looking at the upper windows, at the loggia, at — I realize with a small, strange jolt — me, though she can't possibly see me clearly from that distance, can't know that the man standing very still at the rail, doing nothing, saying nothing,
already feels something has gone sideways in his chest that eleven years of careful discipline did not prepare him for.
"Bring her to the east salon," I tell Costanzo, without looking away from her. "Not the cells. The salon."
"Aurelio —"
"The salon." My voice comes out flatter than I intend, the register I use in rooms where men need to understand a decision has already been made and discussion is a courtesy, not an invitation.
Costanzo goes quiet beside me, an absolute quiet of a man recalculating, and I don't blame him, because I am recalculating something myself and arriving, with every second I watch her cross the gravel without once letting her shoulders curve into anything that looks like surrender,
at a conclusion I do not have a name for yet.
Golden retriever energy with her, lethal with everyone else.
I didn't have the phrase then — wouldn't have one for months — but I had the fact of it already, standing on that loggia, watching a woman who had every reason in the world to be sobbing on her knees instead walk into my house like she was still deciding whether the house deserved her.