"So you're going to torture me for showing up unannounced in your city." It wasn't quite a question.
"Discuss, not torture." I watched the corner of her mouth move. She was trying not to react and not entirely succeeding, which I found more interesting than I probably should have. "Although I understand why you'd assume the worst."
"Yeah, that's what all the mob bosses say."
"I'm not the boss." I leaned slightly closer to her, dropping my voice. "I have no idea what he will do to you." I sat back and let that land.
She turned to look at me with an expression that told me she knew exactly what I was doing and wasn't entirely opposed to being amused by it. "That's not funny."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't."
A pause. The city slid past. She was thinking, I could almost feel it — the rapid internal assessment of a woman who had survived long enough in a dangerous world to know that information was currency and she needed to figure out the exchange rate before she spent any.
"The families have hated each other for a long time," she said finally. Not a question.
"Since before either of us were born." I looked out my own window. "Our great-grandfathers were friends. Close ones. Avola was my family's consigliere — he managed the legitimate businesses, advised on dealings, kept things running. He was supposed to come to Chicago when my great-grandfather took on the role of Don here." I paused. "He wasn't invited."
She was very still beside me. Listening in the way people listened when they were hearing a version of a story they'd only ever heard from one side.
"My great-grandfather moved on without him. Built something significant here. Avola stayed in Italy and decided that what had been built should have been his." I kept my voice neutral. These were old facts, old wounds, the kind that had calcified into something harder than anger over the generations. "There was a bloodbath in the town. Men my great-grandfather had left behind — family, associates, people who had nothing to do with the politics of it. Avola ordered it. Appointed himself Don afterward."
"He was asserting dominance," she said quietly.
"He was." I glanced at her. "Is that the version you were told?"
"I was told your family abandoned his and took everything that should have been shared." She said it without defensiveness, just the flat recitation of received history. "I was told the Venosas were aggressors and thieves and that the blood between the families was on your hands."
"And now?"
She was quiet for a moment. Outside the rain had started again, running down the glass in thin tracks. "Now I'm sitting in the back of your car instead of my father's, so I think my relationship with the official version of events is already complicated."
I looked at her properly then, and she looked back at me without flinching, and I thought that whatever I'd expected from Cecilia Avola when I'd seen her photographs two days ago, it hadn't been this — this particular combination of wariness and dry precision, this woman who had crossed an ocean alone and built a life from nothing and was now sitting in enemy territory making quiet observations about the unreliability of inherited narratives.
"My family still hates yours for more personal reasons," I said. "Beyond the history."
"Your mother." She said it carefully. "She's a Lombardi."
I looked at her sharply.
"I paid attention," she said simply. "I listened when they thought I wasn't."
I filed that away. "Then you understand."
"I understand enough." She turned back to the window. "I want you to know that I didn't choose Lombardi. I want you to know that I would rather have died on the road between my father's house and that airport than become his third wife. Ineed you to understand that before whatever conversation we're about to have."
The car slowed. Through the rain-blurred glass the gates of the house were coming into view, the long drive beyond them, the house at the end of it.
"I understand more than you think," I said.
Arriving at the house, I watched her see it for the first time. The rain had softened the light, giving the stone facade a quality that was almost atmospheric — three stories of English architectural ambition transplanted to Chicago soil by a great-grandmother who had loved a dangerous man enough to follow him across the world and asked only that he build her something that reminded her of home.
He had vowed to honor that dream. It was the first Venosa vow I knew of, and in some ways the most human one.
Cecilia turned to look at me, her mouth open, the careful composure momentarily set aside. "No wonder my family hates yours." She shook her head slowly, turning back to the house. "They will think all of this should have been theirs."
"Some of them probably still do."
She got out of the car without waiting for Lorenzo to open her door, which he noted with an expression I chose not to acknowledge. She stood in the rain looking up at the house for a moment longer than necessary, the water darkening her hair, and then she turned and walked toward the entrance like a woman who had decided something.
