Good. They should be. Because this monster in my chest isn’t made of love and light.

  Loretta isn’t frightened. She’s in front of me, her hands on my cheeks the way Santino does, saying something I can’t hear over my own voice.

  She hugs me, and I run out of breath. I appreciate her embrace, but I’m too empty to cry. My fist with a ring and the hand with the baggie are folded between us, and I let Loretta hold me as long as she wants—not for me, but for her. When she lets me go, I feel the hard ball of knuckle in the bag, and for a split second, I’m reminded of Zio eating pig’s feet. Rosetta and I watching as he dragged his front teeth along the balls of the joints.

  The memory is wonderful, but the smile doesn’t find my mouth in the tangled route from my heart. Even so, I have to make sure the baggie contains a finger, not lunch. I open it and find a human finger, as promised—bloodless, grayish, with the skin shrinking away and the carpal bone poking out like a branch from the gristle of flexor tendon. Between the proximal and distal joints are lines in blue ink that make two words.

  LOVE RULES

  “Love rules without rules,” I say to my husband as if he can hear me.

  He can’t. But I hear him, loud and clear.

  The feeling of being stretched by an expanding force inside me—of molecules banging against containment—goes away. The anger is still volatile and hot. It doesn’t shrink or lessen.

  I am not soothed, but I am big enough to hold an exploding star.

  “We need to finish this,” Dario says. “Tonight.”

  “How?” I ask, still clutching the bag.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says dismissively. “You. Gennaro, is it? Let’s see what kind of ammo we have. We’re going to shoot through this problem and burn everything else. You, what’s your name?”

  Carmine stammers an answer.

  “Locations for every family member, friend, and mistress he’s ever had,” Dario says.

  This man…this stranger, is going to descend on Secondo Vasto like a blanket of fire. There will be mass killing. Maybe we’ll find Santino, and maybe we won’t.

  This is the war Santino was trying to avoid.

  We’re in it.

  Everyone knows it. Loretta, Celia, Vito, Gennaro, all know as they stand in silence, waiting to be told what to do.

  If I want control of this situation, I have to take it before Dario does. I have to earn it, and that won’t happen as long as I’m sitting here clutching a body part.

  I speak up. “I asked you—”

  “Ma’am,” Dario interrupts, “with all due respect, this has to be fixed before the sun comes up, or it’ll go on for a week…and we’re not fighting with glue guns and knitting needles.”

  By rights and experience, Dario should be in charge, but this fight isn’t his. I own this war, and it will be won or lost because of me.

  “With all due respect,” I say, standing, “this house and the town it protects are mine. The king you’re pledged to is mine. The crown they think they’re coming for…it’s mine.”

  “The kitchen is that way. Or we can lock you in the basement cucina until you cool down.”

  “That’s the only good idea you’ve had.”

  We stare at each other over Armando’s body. I don’t know what Dario’s thinking, but I use the time to inventory who’s in the room, how physically strong they are, and the depth of their roots in Secondo Vasto.

  “Vito,” I say, keeping eye contact with Dario. “Gennaro. Would you please escort Mr. Lucari to the basement?”

  “I don’t want to make this painful for you, Mrs. DiLustro,” Dario says. “But I will.”

  “Sure.” I break eye contact and jerk my head toward Vito. “Take the gun and the phone before you lock him down there.”

  I try to sound commanding, but I hear a voice that sounds small and feminine. I’m sure Vito won’t listen to me, and I’m going to end up in the basement, screaming while a war is waged over my husband’s death.

  Whatever weakness I hear in my voice must be inaudible to Gennaro because he reacts first, coming at Dario from behind and pulling his elbows together. Vito’s right after, reaching into Dario’s jacket for the gun. Dario fights for a moment, but when Carmine makes three—removing the small pistol from his ankle holster—and Vito bends him over Armando’s dead body, he calms down. There’s no use fighting this many.

  “This is a mistake,” Dario says to me.

  “Probably. But it’s mine to make.”

  Dario’s hauled to the basement and locked behind the door.

  The basement has food for an army and a bathroom, but he won’t be kept there for long. Now this really has to be done quickly.

  Behind the row of buildings on the opposite side of the lawn, between the bricks and the rock face, is a few feet of dirt. My shoulders touch wall on one side and mountain on the other, but I just about fit. When I kneel, my hips wedge me in tighter.

  Good. This is what I want. A space just for us.

  I turn so I can reach my pockets, getting out a gardening trowel. I dig. The hole is narrow and eight inches deep before I can go no farther. I take out the baggie with the zip that won’t lock.

  LOVE RULES

  I don’t know how the message wound up between Santino’s knuckles. Did he write it, knowing they’d cut it off and send it to me? Or did Gia and Damiano write it there? They’re definitely Santino’s words.

  Love rules without rules.

  He’s telling me to do whatever I need to do to win, and he will do the same.

  There are no rules for us.

  I smile. Silly man.

  After all he’s seen from me, he still thinks I need his permission.

  A dozen men stand around the perimeter of the office. Gennaro and Carmine sit in front of me. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I sit behind Santino’s desk anyway. It’s too big. The chair is too high. I look like a child playacting in her father’s office.

  I’m prepared for this. I have to use both my power and vulnerability to everyone’s advantage.

  “I know it’s upsetting that Armando’s dead. I know it pisses you off to get our king’s finger detached from the rest of him. I want to go down there and burn it all down too. But you know why we can’t do that.”

  The men look to me for a plan—but only so they can dismiss it. In the end, at least part of it has to be their idea.

  “We don’t know where they are. Descending on the city not knowing where to look leaves this compound exposed. It leaves us spread out all over to get picked off.” Looking from man to man, I take the temperature of the room. Lukewarm.

  “Yeah,” Vito says with a nod. “She’s right.”

  His approval warms the room a few degrees.

  “They know where we are,” I say. “Obviously. And they expect us to come for them. They’re waiting for it.”

  “There’s no one at the bottom of the mountain,” a man says, stepping into the room. “If you don’t mind me saying.” He’s so cartoonishly deferential, I barely recognize him. It’s Fat Lip. The guy I punched the first day of my marriage. “We got cameras on some of the trees, and there’s nobody hanging around waiting. At least not there. Could be anywhere else, I guess.”

  “Good,” I say. “Are there cameras all the way up?”

  “No. Just where the road goes private. That’s how we knew Mando was coming, but we couldn’t tell it was him.”

  “Thank you. Anything else I need to know?”

  The negative answer comes in murmurs and gestures. They’re not convinced I should be followed, and the benefit of their doubts won’t last long. Everyone in this room has been trained from birth to dismiss women, including me. I have to come at this obliquely. Don’t tell them what I want. Tell them what we need.

  “They don’t want to come up here. If you’re uncertain about that, just look at how hard they’re trying to draw us out. We’re near the top of a mountain. There’s one narrow road up to a fortress. Blind turns. A dozen places we can shoot them from. So first, someone’s gotta be in the cupola twenty-four hours a day, watching. Yes?” I take their temperature again. No one’s abandoned ship yet, but once someone does, they all could follow. “Second, all guns out, loaded, and lining the ridge overlooking the road up.” The last thing to do after flexing my muscle is to let them know I’m not trying to be a man. “Celia, Loretta, and I will keep the home fires burning until they come or we figure out where he is.”

  Laying hard on the last possibility—that we have to find out where Santino is—seems to go unnoticed. Doubts creep in like spiders under the door. I’ve left too much to their discretion. I don’t have the knowledge I need to give them more detailed instructions. And yet—they haven’t come up with enough of it themselves.

  I am not Santino. I can’t lay out the whole thing. They need to feel as though they’re not taking orders from a woman.

  “Yeah, but…” The man who breaks the tension is tall and gangly—middle-aged and set in his ways. “I don’t like waiting. It doesn’t feel right.”

  Vito turns in his chair. “I don’t remember her asking you to have feelings, Benny.” He says feelings as if it’s a rotten lemon on his tongue.

  Benny whips his hand in a gesture that means both “fuck off” and “never mind.”

  “Do we have a problem?” I ask. “Please. Write it down so I can share it with Re Santino when he gets back.”

  “He could be getting chopped into pieces right now, is all,” Benny protests. “And we’re sitting up here like pussies.”

  He’s driven by loyalty. I appreciate that, but we can’t fall into disarray over it.

  “You’re right,” I say. “But how can we do something without risking our position?”

  He makes a constellation of gestures—a shrug, another wrist flip, a glance around the room, and a bigger shrug.

  “I tell you what,” Benny says. “Someone goes down. Maybe me and one other guy… We go before dawn, down into the city. Talk to people. Find out where he is. If we know that, the wait is over. We go get him.”

  They all look at me.

  “I like it,” I say as if it wasn’t the last part of the plan to begin with. “Good idea.”

  I can’t sleep thinking about Santino.

  What is he going through?

  Am I actually lying here in our bed while it’s happening?

  Am I taking a shift in the cupola for four hours, scanning the city, wondering if I’m looking right at him?

  Is he in pain while we clear the furniture? Cook the meals? Watch the sun crawl across our slit of sky?

  Does he know we’re looking for him?

  Or—with every hour that passes—am I getting him killed?

  22

  SANTINO

  The concrete floor is like a hammer to the back of my head, but I don’t sit up.

  The remaining fingers on my left hand ache with the loss of their brother. The pain that shoots all the way to my shoulder is like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Putting pressure on my skeleton to get myself up is as distant a possibility as tearing down this wall with my bare hands and running to Violetta at a hundred kilometers an hour. But not only am I horizontal, they used quick-hardening mortar between the bricks. And I can’t run that fast. I can’t do anything.

  So there’s me, and pain, and darkness, and regret.

  A lot of regret, in all flavors and colors. Regret for leaving my mother behind where I saw her last, sleeping on the side of a volcano. For treating Violetta like a doll. For withholding information because I was ashamed. For being given away in marriage. For not taking Violetta sooner. For not taking her later. For the baby we lost and the children we’ll never have.

  I regret things I’ve done and things I’ve avoided. I promise not to do things anymore and to do everything, all of it—without defining what it is—if I can just see her again. I promise God nine more fingers for Violetta’s life and offer the whole hand to spend it with her.

  There are noises. Creaking floors. Muffled speech. A kind of harmless cracking, clapping, and slamming one hears in life. I don’t realize my eyes are open for a long time.

  There’s some kind of nightlight in the adjacent room. It casts a dim glow through the little hole at the top of the wall. As much as my eyes adjust, it’s not enough to see by without giving it full attention.

  Deep breath.

  Every sin of neglect and harm has been catalogued. Every sacrifice offered. There’s nothing else to do but wait for heaven’s reply. I have the attention to spend on what I’m seeing and hearing.

  I’ve wet my beak on construction money enough times to know the difference between a property’s value and the assessment, but not enough to know what the net of pipes and conduit just below the ceiling are for.

  Dim light bursts in through the brick-sized space above. After the scrape of a chair, there’s a click and a rattle from above me.

  “Santino,” a woman whispers from the other side of the wall. It’s not Violetta.

  If she was on the other side of the wall, it would melt with shame for being the only thing standing between us. But it’s one of many things, and I don’t know how to tear down the first. I have never felt so helpless and ashamed.

  “Santino,” she says again, closer. Gia isn’t tall enough to see into the hole, but standing on a chair, she can just about put two bottles on the ledge. Looks like aspirin. I need more than that. “I got you…” She stops, huffing with strain as she puts a bottle of water sideways, so the cap looks like a diver peeking over the board. “Water.” I hear her dropping back onto the floor. “Are you there?”

  “Yes.” My head hurts from lying faceup on the concrete. Maybe it’s thirst.

  “I understand why you did what you did to Papà.”

  I let that hang in the air without telling her I don’t need her to understand, because I’ll kill her too, and none of it will matter any more.

  “Is it bleeding still?” she asks.

  When I lift my hand over my face, the shoulder bones feel as if they’re grinding together. “No.”

  “I found some disinfectant,” she says. “And I left you a surprise.”

  Above me, the floorboards creak and the pipes hiss. The shaking silver tube spanning the ceiling is the diameter of a can of tomatoes. They’ve all been making a symphony for what seems like hours.

  “Where are we?” I ask, getting my arms under me. My skull is made of lead and my brain is made of screams.

  “Damiano told me not to say.”

  “Who does he think I’ll tell?” I have to put my hand on the wall when I stand, or I’ll spin right back to the floor.

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me anything anymore. It’s like…” She doesn’t finish.

  “It’s like he doesn’t need you anymore.”

  I reach for the water and pill bottle. I put the label in front of the basement light to read. Advil. Medicine for women’s problems. Fine. Beggars can’t be choosers. If it’s good enough for Violetta, it’s probably too good for me.

  After popping the cap, I shake some into my hand. One falls in the new space between my pinkie and middle finger. Three are left. I swallow them.

  “If I ask you a hard question, can you answer honestly? Even if you think you’ll hurt my feelings?”

  “I will not protect your feelings, Gia.”

  The other bottle is white plastic with a pump top. The name of what’s inside has worn off. When I spray into the air, I smell the bite of hydrogen peroxide. Disinfecting the wound is pointless. I’ll be dead before infection has a chance to set in, but I hold the sprayer over the space where my finger was and douse it.

  “Was I a good waitress?” she asks.

  “Cosa?” The sting hits my open wound and burrows up my nose, clearing my sinuses. I drop the bottle.

  “It’s that…when I was little, you said you’d always protect me. And you did. You always took care of me… Ciro Sirigu. Remember?”

  Of course I do. Gia and Ciro were in school together. They both got a math problem wrong in the exact same way. The teacher—a middle-aged woman who needed her pussy licked more than any woman I’ve ever met—called them in. Gia denied cheating. Ciro fluctuated between blame and paranoia. The teacher blamed Gia for copying Ciro, and—at the same time—giving him the incorrect answer.

  Marco had dragged Gia out by the hair. I asked Emilio to step in before Gia went bald. Like a king, he strode into the school and demanded they both retake the test. My adopted sister got the same problem type wrong again, proving she was lousy at math, and Ciro got it right, proving he was a cheater.

  “The customers liked you,” I say before draining the last of the water.

  “I always wondered if you regretted letting me work at Mille Luce.”

  “No.” The hissing of the pipes above stops, so my denial sounds like a shout.

  “Because I liked it. I really did. And I was extra careful with adding up the checks. I thought this morning, ‘I’m late for work,’ but then I realized…”

  “You may not have your job back.”

  “I figured. Dami’s been talking about burning it down, but I don’t know if he got to it yet.”

  I should be sad or something, but I don’t care about the café. I don’t care about my house—he can put burning that down on his to-do list. I don’t even care about having my finger cut off.

  A part of my body was used to hurt Violetta. That’s what I care about.

  “You missed these,” she says.

  From the brick-sized hole at the top of the wall, a pack of Marlboros and a small, red Bic lighter drop to the floor.

  Smoking will make the headache worse, but I light one anyway. The nicotine clears my head despite the way the smoke puts a knife in my skull.

  “Where is she?” I ask. “My wife. What’s happening with her?”

  “She’s up at Torre Cavallo, I guess? I overheard Dami saying he’s waiting for all the guys to come down to find you, or he’ll go up.”