“Dario – ” Niccolo began –
Without looking away from his daughter, Dario raised one hand to silence him.
But Niccolo wouldn’t be deterred.“Icounseled you to do it. The fault is mine and mine alone.Ifailed you – ”
Dario snappedhis fingers angrily, and Niccolo went silent.
“Imade the decision,” Dario said quietly. “The burden is mine alone.”
“So fuckingDOsomething about it,” Adriano barked.
“It’s not that easy,” Dario said, his voice once again muted and toneless. “When I proposed to Alessandra, I swore I would put our family on a different path. That our children could be anything they wanted to be… but that they would never follow in my footsteps. I promised her our family would go legitimate – that we would forsake everything Papa built and start anew.”
“That was then,” Adriano insisted. “This isnow.”
Dario shook his head. “Thereisno ‘then’ and ‘now.’ I swore on our family name.”
Adriano looked exasperated beyond belief. “SO?!”
Dario turned around.
The look on his face made even Adriano step back nervously.
“So I made an oath,” Dario said, “and there is only one person on earth who can release me from it.”
With that, he walked out into the hallway.
We followed him to Alessandra’s room.
Six armed foot soldiers stood guard outside in the hallway. Their clothes still stank of smoke from the burned-out mansion.
When they saw Dario coming, all six stepped aside, their heads bowed in respect.
Dario entered first, and the rest of us – Niccolo, Adriano, Roberto, Massimo, Lars, Valentino, and I – followed.
Inside the room, Alessandra lay partially reclined in her hospital bed. There was an IV tube in her arm for morphine. The left side of her face was horribly bruised and scabbed, and her eye was swollen shut. One arm and leg were in casts.
I noticed that she wasn’t holding her rosary. It lay discarded on a bedside nightstand, far out of reach.
The women of the family were all gathered around her.
Caterina sat next to her in a chair, puffy-eyed from crying, as she held Alessandra’s undamaged hand.
The others – Bianca, Lucia, Mei-ling, Rachel, and Sofia – stood around the bed, trying to comfort her with their presence.
But Alessandra stared into the distance as though no one else was there.
When I saw her, my heart ached for her…
And I thought of Emilia.
The horror of something like this happening toher…
I couldn’t imagine the pain that Alessandra had gone through.
And I couldn’t imagine the rage and guilt that Dario felt now.
When the men entered the room, only Lucia was brave enough to speak up.
