I felt a flutter in my stomach, and then I went down the stairs slowly.
Donna Beatrice was in the music room. She'd taken the black silk cloth off the piano, the piano that had belonged to Luca's mother. The white keys gleamed in the afternoon light.
"The signora will need this," she said, without turning. "Nonna Adelina will want to hear it."
I sat down on the bench. I rested my fingers on a key without pressing it. C. Just C.
Op. 9 No. 2. Mamma's nocturne.
I closed my eyes.
Five weeks until I'd play his mother's piano for his grandmother, in the dress his grandmother had ordered embroidered, over the corpse of the man who calls himself my father.
CHAPTER 27
"There are brothers who come back. There are brothers who merely reappear."
VALENTINA ROSSI
I woke up decided.
I hadn't slept well. I'd dreamed of white lilies growing out of Luca's mother's piano, and of Matteo opening the cellar door at my father's house in Mondello, twenty years ago, with that two-front-teeth smile of his, the gap between them just a little wide.
When I opened my eyes, Luca was already up, by the window, buttoning his shirt cuff.
"I'm going down today," I said. "I meant it."
"I heard you, bella mia."
I sat up in bed, pulled the sheet up to my chest.
"Luca…"
He turned and came over to the bed, sat down on the edge, close to my knee.
"The key's on the hall table." He reached out and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. "Acquaviva goes down with you. No argument."
"No argument."
"Brava."
He leaned in and kissed my neck, slowly, in the curve where the jaw meets the collarbone.
"Luca. If you do that again I'm not going down to the cellar."
He smiled low, against my neck, and I felt the laugh before I heard it.
"Va bene, bella mia."
The stairs to the south cellar were old stone, worn down in the middle of each step. The walls sweated a little—not much, because the Villa Moretti was well built even underground.The light was yellow, low, coming from bulbs fixed in old iron brackets.
Acquaviva went down ahead of me, the big key in his hand. He walked like a man who'd been down those stairs a thousand times.
I carried the dagger in my boot. Luca had sent word, through Donna Beatrice, that I could bring it.
"Signora," Acquaviva said, in front of the iron door, "anything at all, you just call me. I'll be right outside."
"Grazie, Acquaviva."
