CHAPTER 1
CECELIA
Row upon row of grape vines stretched out from our home. It was the most beautiful sight as the sun set, casting pink and purple shadows over the fields.
Some would think it was romantic.
Not me. It was my prison, and tonight I was finally getting out.
I'd spent twenty-two years watching that sunset from this window, and I'd spent the last six months knowing with absolute certainty that if I didn't leave, I wouldn't live to see twenty-three. Not because of anything I'd done. Simply because of what I was — a daughter in a family that treated daughters like currency.
I took one last look around my room. It was childish, all of it. A ruffled pink duvet over the white canopy bed that my mother had preened over for months after she bought it. I would have happily given it up to her, but she was sure I needed it, because apparently it was every little girl's dream. I'd stopped being a little girl the first time my father hit me, and I was seven years old.
A large oak trunk sat at the end of my bed, filled with all my hopes and dreams for the new life I was supposed to be startingin a month. A life that would end up with me dead, and that wasn't a life I wanted.
I knew what happened to Hector Lombardi's wives. Everyone did, even if nobody said it out loud. His first wife, a quiet girl from Naples named Rosa, had lasted eight months before she fell down the stairs in his estate. His second wife made it just over a year before she drove her car into the sea. The official story was grief. Everyone knew better. Hector Lombardi didn't want wives. He wanted obedient objects, and when they stopped being obedient, he disposed of them.
I had no intention of becoming the third.
My father knew. I was certain of it. The way he'd smiled when he told me about the arrangement, watching my face for the fear he knew would be there — that smile told me everything about what my life meant to him. I wasn't his daughter in that moment. I was a very valuable piece moving across a board, and the game he was playing had nothing to do with my survival.
I'd heard him say it himself.
Three months ago I'd woken at two in the morning to voices beneath my window. My father and his consigliere, Benedetto, speaking in low tones they thought couldn't carry. But sound moved differently at night, over the quiet fields, up through the old stone walls of the house.
She'll give him an heir and then we wait, my father had said. Lombardi is old and his health is failing. Two years at most. When he dies, the territory transfers and I control everything from here to Palermo.
And if he hurts her before that?
A pause. Then my father's voice, completely flat. Then she'll have done her part.
I'd lain in that bed for an hour afterward, staring at the ceiling, and somewhere in that hour something in me went very quiet and very decided. I was not going to do his part. I wasnot going to be a stepping stone for a man who looked at my potential suffering and calculated whether it was an acceptable cost.
I was going to disappear.
My father's voice cut through my thoughts now, rising up from below. Laughing and drinking with his men. The men I'd grown up around, the men who'd vowed to protect my family with their lives, and they were all laughing about the man I was being forced to marry. Someone made a joke I couldn't quite hear and the whole room erupted. I pressed my hand flat against the cool glass of the window and breathed.
One hour, I told myself. One hour and you'll never have to hear that sound again.
Glancing at my watch, I had fifteen minutes until I would put my plan into motion. Turning away from the window, I checked everything one more time. Passport, wallet, cash — every euro I'd been quietly setting aside for four months, skimmed carefully from the household accounts I managed because my father couldn't be bothered with such things. A small bag filled with the bare essentials that would get me through a few days. Nothing that would flag me going through airport security, and now all I needed were my boarding passes.
I was ready.
I'd thought about leaving a note. I'd even started one, twice. Both times I'd stared at the paper and realized there was nothing to say that wouldn't sound like either an apology or an accusation, and I didn't feel either of those things. I felt clear. I felt like a woman who had finally understood the terms being offered to her and had decided they were unacceptable.
I left the paper blank and put it in the trunk instead.
Walking out the French doors onto the balcony, I carried my shoes so I wouldn't make any noise. Over the last two weeks I'd made this walk so often I could do it in my sleep. The practiceruns had felt almost absurd at the time — creeping out of my own room like a thief in my own home. But I'd needed to know every loose board, every shadow, every guard rotation. My father hadn't raised a stupid woman, even if he'd never appreciated that particular result.
Passing my parents' room, I knew it was empty. They were both entertaining the soldiers. Keeping to the left, I went down the stairs, stepping over the last step that was loose and made noise.
My feet hit the tan dirt. I kept moving without looking behind me.
This was the thing nobody told you about leaving — that the hardest part wasn't the fear of being caught. It was the pull of the familiar. Even a prison gets its hooks into you. I knew every inch of this vineyard, every smell of it at every hour. I knew exactly how the light looked on the fields in October, and that I would never see it again. I knew my mother's face, and that I would never be able to tell her why I'd gone.
My mother, who had chosen this life with both eyes open, who had watched my father become the man he was and made her peace with it in ways I never could. She wasn't a villain. She was just someone who had run out of fight long before I was born. I hoped she understood. I suspected she would, and that was almost sadder than if she'd been angry.
Looking backward wasn't going to get me to a new future. I knew without a doubt what behind me looked like. I didn't need to take another longing look at a place that hadn't held love or safety. Not for a long time.
