That won’t go well. Altieri Cavallo put his mistress there for a reason.

  The ceiling rattles rhythmically. The smell of dry, hot air fights the cigarette smoke.

  “Santi?” Gia says. “Can you tell her to come down with it? The crown? You could write a note or something. She’d listen to you.”

  There’s no use saying we don’t have the crown. None of them believe it.

  “I’m not in charge anymore.” I flick the lighter, watching it spark. The flame doesn’t add much light.

  “What if I talked to Damiano? Maybe I could convince him to free you? Take this wall down so you can reason with her and all this could be over?”

  It’s tempting to encourage her just for the chance to get out of this little room, but she can’t deliver on the promise. Damiano will attack Violetta before letting me out to convince her to give up a crown she doesn’t have. Gia may as well be suggesting Santa Claus can come through a silver vent the width of a tomato can, drop a hammer and chisel wrapped in a bow right in front of me, and ho-ho-ho his way back up to the fucking reindeer.

  That same silver vent has a tiny slit in it, opening and closing like a mouth that doesn’t know what to say. The hot, dry smell is coming through there. Poor Santa would be cooked like a Christmas turkey.

  “She has her own mind, Gia. Just like you.”

  When I bend over to right the folding chair, my headache doesn’t protest. When I stand on the chair, the pain stays a dull throb. The Advil must be stronger than I ever gave it credit for.

  “Tavie’s not answering his texts,” Gia says.

  Damiano really isn’t telling her anything at all.

  I touch one of the hissing pipes. It’s warm and vibrating as if something’s flowing through it. Water. “He’s dead, Gia.”

  “No!”

  “He was shot by one of your guys.”

  “They’re not mine!” she protests loudly.

  I don’t mind. On the other side of this wall, I would have imposed the correct version of the situation on her. But here, on the dark side of the wall, her delusions are her problem.

  “If you say so.” I move the chair to reach another pipe. “He’s still dead.”

  “Oh, my God, no…” She breaks down into sobs.

  The second pipe is cool and still. If the rhythmic rattle of the floorboard is a washer spinning, then Santa’s silver vent hose is for dryer steam. There’s a way out.

  All I have to do is be stronger than any man before me.

  23

  VIOLETTA

  If I’m up in the cupola for meals, I take them as I watch the men at the gate and the town below. I crane my neck toward the line of rock above and downward to the edges of the lawn. I don’t look for his face or his body, but a sense of him, somewhere in the world with me. A direction. An arrow pointing to the center of the universe.

  The stairs creak. Someone’s coming up.

  “How’s Dario?” I ask, recognizing the pace and weight of the footsteps.

  “Polite,” Loretta says.

  “Should we let him up?”

  She stands next to me and looks over the city, watching the streetlights go on. At the front gate, the floodlights drown the top of the road in blazing light.

  “He’s like a rattlesnake,” she says. “He’s courteous. He’ll rattle his tail to let you know he’s going to strike, but you’ll die just the same.”

  “We can’t keep him down there much longer.”

  “Probably not.”

  “By tomorrow”—I turn away from the valley to look at her—“we’re going to need to make him into a friend or shoot him.”

  “Well,” she says with a shrug. A flash of light—fast as a blink—lights her cheek then disappears. “You can’t shake hands with a snake, so—”

  We’re interrupted by a pop in the distance, then nothing. The sky is still glowing orange as a pillar of black smoke rises over the horizon, blooming into a gray mushroom cap at the top.

  “The bridge,” I gasp. “They hit the bridge.”

  I run downstairs and out the back door, to the lawn where men run and shout, where the smell hits like a wall made of tar and asphalt and grit, following the flow of traffic to the gate.

  A cry goes up from the station atop the guardhouse. I climb the ladder in the back of the structure, scrabbling to the top before anyone can tell me not to. Gennaro is up there already with a pair of binoculars.

  The bridge is burning. The dots of flame peek out from the smoke then disappear.

  We’re trapped.

  All of us. Not just those of us on Torre Cavallo, but Secondo Vasto. My church, my school, the pork store, and the playground. They’ll starve us all until they have what they want.

  I wish I had the crown. I’d shove it up Damiano Orolio’s ass.

  But that’s not what Gennaro is looking at through his binoculars. I follow his sights to a car coming up the hill. It’s shiny, black, expensive. Not quite a limousine.

  “What is that?”

  Gennaro snaps around, not expecting me to be standing next to him. He hands me his binoculars without questioning why I’m here.

  I put them to my eyes. The Lincoln Continental has its headlights blazing as if it’s on the way to a funeral. The windows are tinted so dark they’re opaque, and I wonder, and hope, and pray that Santino is in that car, coming up the mountain in victory.

  Then another pop comes from the bridge. An explosion. More fire.

  “Violetta!” Carmine says from the ground. “Get down! You’re going to get killed!”

  They won’t kill me. Not as long as they think I have the crown.

  I take out the gun Santino gave me, holding it ready at my shoulder the way he taught me, and watch the black car make its way to us.

  “We should get Dario,” Carmine says.

  “Get Dario,” I reply, “and I’ll shoot you myself.”

  He glances at the car, then back to me. The only reason he’s not running to free Dario from the basement is the possibility that Santino is in that car. If that’s the case, I’ll say “fuck the ladder” and float down to him like a leaf in the toxin-scented breeze—but it’s not. If my husband was coming toward me, I’d know it.

  They’re all looking at me. I can read their minds. They’re wondering what this looks like if Santino’s in that car. What will it look like to have his wife so exposed? What are the consequences of not taking her down and putting her away like a china doll? What will the king do if his wife is touched? And what won’t he do if she’s hurt?

  They’re asking the wrong questions. They need to ask themselves what I’ll do if they don’t get behind me.

  “Vito, behind them.” I make a half-circle with my hand.

  He returns a quick salute, gathering four men into the brush on either side of the road.

  When the car crests the last rise, I point my gun at it. It’s a command. A call to action. I’m telling the men to take their eyes off the threat to themselves and direct their attention to the threat we all face.

  There’s still an indent in the dirt where Armando fell off his moped. This is exactly where the car stops. It clicks into park. The engine shuts. Carmine’s men come from the brush and line up behind it.

  Gennaro succumbs to his panic and yanks me back.

  I elbow him off me and glare. “Do not.”

  He holds his hands up in surrender, apologizing, but I have no time. No one does. Everyone holds their gun at the ready as the driver’s door opens. A blond man with thinning hair and a doughy build gets out with his hands up. He’s wearing bright white gloves in the August heat, but not a jacket to hide a holster.

  “Occhio, che arriva il Blocco!” he shouts, announcing the arrival.

  The Lock? What does that mean? Another dead man? Is it Santino this time? Or just another part of his body?

  If it’s a single royal toenail, I’m killing the messenger and putting his head on a pole.

  “Nazario Corragio,” Gennaro mutters with relief. “He’s one of us.”

  “He needs to be disarmed,” I say without raising my voice, yet I’m heard.

  Men come to push the driver against the car. They take his gun and rifle through his pockets, then back off. He stands and looks up at me, indicating the back door as if asking if he can open it.

  “Vai!” I shout, telling them to get the hell on with it. “Sbrigati!”

  The driver opens the back door. From my angle, I can only see his back as he takes a cane, and the stretch of his shirt across his shoulders as he strains to hoist the passenger to his feet. Then he moves enough to reveal an old man in a suit it’s too warm for. He gives the man the cane and reaches into the back seat again.

  It could be a submachine gun. A bomb. A body. And all I can do is lower the gun from my shoulder and aim it at the end of my extended arms. I suck at this. If I have to shoot them, I have a better chance of hitting them if I aim at the sky. I can’t hit a soda bottle, and I’m just a girl who wanted to spend her summer on the beach.

  I’ve never been so terrified in my life.

  From the back, the driver lifts a box the size of a six-pack cooler.

  Could be a bomb.

  Could be a body part.

  Could be a trick to get us all killed.

  Turning around, I see Celia and Loretta holding hands on the dining room patio, hanging back as if negotiating a battle between fear and curiosity.

  No one’s going to die for me today.

  I rush down the ladder and reach the bottom, behind the locked gate, just as the strangers approach the place where the gate opens.

  “Get back,” I hiss to the men who encroach out of a sense of propriety over my safety.

  The old man is stooped and slow, bent at the waist in a summer hat and a suit cut for bad posture. His metal-tipped cane is unsure on the ragged ground. The driver does not rush the old man, but walks reverently beside him, holding the box by a handle on either side. No one is rushing them. Especially not me. I don’t want to see what’s in that box.

  They stop at the gate, a few feet away, separated by wrought-iron bars spaced far enough apart to get an arm or a bullet through.

  “Speak,” I bark with a confidence I don’t feel. “Before I let them shoot you.”

  The driver answers in a boom. “We’ve come for the daughter of Camilla Cavallo.”

  I’m the wife of Santino DiLustro and the sister of Rosetta Moretti. But I am also my mother’s daughter, and I don’t know why that’s important.

  Il Blocco’s face is blotted with a patchwork of brown age spots, and the long, gray hairs of his eyebrows cover dark indents where the floodlights cover his eyes in shadow. His bottom lip sags, but one edge of his mouth turns up in a smirk.

  “I am Nazario Coraggio.” He speaks Italian. “I was your mother’s consigliere.”

  Mamma? She worked the register at my father’s grocery store. She was a wife and a mother. A daughter to my bossy and controlling Nonna. She loved my father, who probably had a consigliere—long ago, when this man was just beginning to be old.

  He must have advised my father, and now his brain is addled with age. The secrets he’s kept all these years are breaking his brain. He may be powerful or rich, but he is also elderly and confused.

  “You’re mistaken,” I say. “My mother didn’t need a consigliere’s advice.”

  “Probably not,” he says, rocking his cane back and forth. “But she got it anyway.”

  Carmine and his men approach the consigliere from behind, ready to turn this violent with half a word from me. I should have them grab these two before Il Blocco’s dementia gets someone killed.

  Except this old man isn’t confused.

  He hasn’t been confused a day in his life.

  I take a step back and issue a command.

  “Open the gate.”

  24

  VIOLETTA

  My mother’s name.

  It echoes as the gate creaks open.

  It’s a pretty lemon sour on the tongue. Ice water hitting a sensitive tooth on a hot day. The itch of a healing wound. It’s unbearable, and I don’t know why.

  Turning, I pace to the house and stop in the kitchen. I don’t know why I stop here because everyone’s going to follow. The men who are doing what I ask of them, and the two invaders at the gate. I should go upstairs to Santino’s office. Whatever is in that box should be opened in the place of power, where the tributes to the throne are made.

  Celia rushes in. “They’re coming.”

  “Make coffee.”

  She grabs the pot and turns on the water.

  They’re coming through the dining room. Box and cane. I should go up to Santino’s office now, but his throne is too big for me.

  “In here,” I say.

  The cane clicks on the marble floor five times before the visitors stand on the other side of the kitchen island.

  “Bring a chair,” I say, eyes on the old man.

  “No,” he says, inspecting me in the light for the first time. “I stand for Camilla’s daughter.”

  The driver puts the box on the counter. His gloves are still on. They have a silvery shine in this light and an unexpected thickness. Utilitarian. Not fussy. The top of the box is a mosaic of tiny tiles arranged into a mermaid, framed with vines and seashells.

  When I turn back to the consigliere, he’s still looking at me carefully.

  “I know,” I say. “I look like my father.”

  He tsks the same way Santino does when he wants to dismiss something.

  “You are a Cavallo.” He regards me coldly, with an unveiled interest, which is enough to make me uncomfortable. But more than that, there’s something deeply unnerving about how he’s speaking to me.

  “What do you want?” I ask. “We’re a little busy having a war here.”

  Nazario laughs, but it sounds more like a series of heavy breaths accompanied by bouncing shoulders. “You are like your mother.”

  Am I? In what way? My words? My voice? My carriage? There are moments when I feel as if I never knew her, and this is one of them.

  “This a family reunion?” a man says from behind me.

  It’s Dario. Fuck. Someone let him out—probably Carmine—and I can’t scream about it, or I’ll look like a loser to everyone lining the room.

  “Don’t rush me, Mr. Lucari,” the old man says. “Half of New York wants you dead. The other half thinks you’re already in your grave. I can tell one where you are or prove the other right. That’s up to you.”

  What would Santino do?

  I have to admit I don’t know. But I know what I’d want him to do, and that’s good enough. Dario isn’t my favorite person in the world, but at this moment, he’s on my team, in my care, and I don’t like him being threatened.

  “He’s with me,” I say.

  “Is he?” Nazario asks.

  What is it about the way he’s speaking to me that seems so disconcerting?

  “He is.” I cross my arms.

  “As am I,” Nazario says. “Before you laid a foot in America, I was with you.”

  When he smiles, his teeth are a wall of white caps sitting too far in front of his shrinking jaw. Under bushy eyebrows, his glassed-over eyes may be green or brown. He is capable of lies, but right now, he’s sincere. He sees himself as an ally. Whether or not he actually is remains to be seen.

  “You believe him,” Dario says from behind.

  I turn to face him. “Do you?”

  “I don’t believe anyone. Least of all the consigliere of a dead man.”

  The lawyer leans on his cane at his center with both hands, a smile playing on his spotted lips. “When the box is opened,” he says to me, “step away from this man. Respectfully.” He nods slightly. “In case he’s struck down where he stands.”

  This old Italian person is speaking directly to me, as if I’m the authority here, not the nearest man. That’s what’s so disconcerting. His respectfully paternal, yet playful manner is straight out of the old country. But I’ve never seen a guy from the other side direct deference to a woman under the age of eighty.

  “Let’s open it and see,” I say.

  “Bene.” He nods to the driver, who reaches for the box’s metal latch.

  “Let me just warn you,” I say, putting my hand on the driver’s to still it. “If this box has a hair of my husband’s head in it, I’m going to rip both your hearts out, put them in here while they’re still beating, and send it back where it came from.”

  “Americans.” Il Blocco scoffs, then stands up straighter, his chin high. “Violetta Cavallo, I have brought you your inheritance.”

  Without saying the words to myself, I knew that had to be what is in the box, and yet—when he says it—I’m still surprised.

  The driver reaches to the front of the box and opens it.

  I expect a few pieces of a broken crown. But it’s not that at all.

  “What is this?” I whisper.

  This thing… It’s not a few sections of holy junk. It’s not even broken.

  And it’s not quite a crown either.

  “Yours,” the consigliere says. “It’s yours. Take it.”

  I don’t know if I can trust him. The hammered silver circle on the threadbare red velvet bed could be a trap. A bomb with points at the front and a thin band around the back. A trick to get me to claim what belongs to someone else. It could be a decoy sent to distract us from the pillar of smoke coming from the bridge.

  Santino already told me what to do.

  NO RULES

  Love rules without rules. But maybe Santino meant to tell me that the lines drawn around my actions and experience really aren’t there. I can step over them and take what’s mine. Or that could be what I want it all to mean.

  I wish he was here with me. He should be…after everything we’ve been through over this box.

  What would Santino want me to do?

  L’amore governa senza regole.

  He’d say there’s no worn path here. This hasn’t been done before.

  He’d say that the only rule is our love. We write the rest of history.

  I touch the metal. It’s warm, but it’s also August. Everything’s hot.