I lift it out. It’s heavy, but it’s also iron. Iron’s a heavy thing.

  The crown doesn’t shine or glitter. It’s a dull gray with an uneven texture, as if ripped from the earth by ancient gods and twisted into shape by hand. Three points spread across the front, with the center one being tallest. The circle completes around the back, where it’s held together with a long, sideways T that’s covered in rust.

  The nail from the One True Cross.

  It’s real.

  It’s really real.

  I decide right there that I will never touch that part of the crown. I am too mortal. Too fucked up. Too broken to come into contact with that kind of power. So when I put my thumbs on the front to lift it, my fingertips don’t go all the way around the back, which is when the size of it becomes clear.

  Though the metal is rough hewn, the crown itself is feminine and small.

  This does not go on the head of a king.

  The Corona Ferrea is a diadem. It is meant to be worn by a woman.

  I lift it from the shadow of the box so I can see it in the light, and everyone around me shifts. Arms up, I take my focus off the crown to see what has changed.

  In a circle around me. Everyone—even Nazario Corragio, leaning on his cane—is kneeling with heads bowed in reverence to a twenty-year-old woman holding up an ancient inheritance.

  Santino, I wish you were here.

  I need you here.

  I’m not ready for whatever this is.

  A square of butter sits in an oily puddle at the center of my pastina, and it’s melting so fast I know it’s too hot.

  I am five. I asked Zia Saveria for the pastina. Now I have to eat it, but she’s ignoring me to whisper to some other women I don’t know. There are a lot of people in Nonna’s kitchen.

  Rosetta sits cross-armed in front of the grown-up cappuccino she asked for because Nonna would let her have it.

  Last night, I went to bed, and now I am awake at Nonna’s house. Mamma’s mother. There are so many people. The grown-ups are upset. I don’t have my Raggedy Ann, so I am upset too.

  “Eat,” Nonna says after she blows on the pastina a couple of times.

  It works like magic. The porridge is cool enough. I should save some for Raggedy Ann. I want to ask for her, but there are too many people to focus. Nonna with the kerchief and scapular and Nonno with the swagger and beedi smell are here too. They are Papino’s parents. It’s not Sunday. It’s not a holiday or birthday.

  “When are we going home?” I ask.

  “Never.” Rosetta’s crabby. She’s been like that lately. But she’s never seemed so sad and angry at the same time. She’s scaring me.

  “Is it true?” I ask Nonna from Mamma’s side. She’s not as free with the candy as Papà’s mother, but she’s gentle with us.

  “Hush, Rosetta,” Nonna answers, looking out the window. She sees something—a bird maybe—and whispers to an older cousin.

  “I will not hush!” Rosetta slams her hand on the table so hard the spoon rattles.

  “You’re scaring your sister.” Nonna turns toward us with the expression of a wild animal.

  “She should be scared.” Rosetta spins in her seat to face me. “Mamma and Papà are dead! They were killed. Papà’s brother and Mamma—!”

  “Basta!” Nonna’s arm is made of lightning, grabbing my sister by the hair on top of her head.

  “Ow!”

  “Say only what you know!”

  “But—”

  “Never, ever, ever say those lies again.”

  “Siena Orolio told me—”

  Nonna slaps Rosetta. I don’t know why. It’s loud. I cry before Rosetta does, but we’re both sobbing now, holding each other under Nonna’s kitchen table. I can’t make words.

  What does Rosetta not know?

  That Mamma and Papà are dead?

  Or that they were killed by Papino’s brother?

  We don’t have an uncle on that side.

  My brother will kill for it no matter where it is.

  Our father has two sisters. So if she’s got that wrong, then all of it must be a bad dream she had. A bad, upsetting nightmare. So no brother. No murder. Our parents are fine.

  There’s a secret uncle if they’re dead, and I can’t let them be dead.

  I am five. I collect data and store it in places so dark, I’ll never find it.

  Nonna and the rest of the adults get called into another room on some serious and probably boring matter.

  Red-faced, Rosetta sobs into my collar, a nest of hair on top of her head. I place a chubby hand on her shoulder.

  “It was just a bad dream, Rosie.”

  “It’s not.” She snaps her hand back, eyes scanning the room at floor level to see if we’re really alone. “It’s real. The sooner you learn that, the better.”

  “Well, but Daddy doesn’t have a brother.”

  She makes her hands into fists on the linoleum. “Half brother.”

  I never heard of that. Is he cut in half? Long ways or across the middle? Does it hurt?

  My two Nonnas come back in. I see their shoes first, then my father’s mother lifts the table cloth to find us. I can ask them, but they sit in the chairs and wait for us to come out. When we do, every question I have about my father’s family is washed away with the news they deliver.

  Rosetta never tells me what she meant by half a brother, and so much changes that I never ask.

  This crown I’m holding up was not meant for me. It was my mother’s. It is Rosetta’s.

  I drop it back into the box and slap the lid shut.

  The circle rises. They’re standing. Things will be said. I am not ready. All I can think about is Santino suffering.

  With a quick turn and a lowered head, I walk away, up the stairs, and—without asking myself why—I go up another flight to the cupola. Knowing I’m trapped by mountains and men, I want to get far away from what just happened.

  The glass is spotted with water-diamonds reflecting the floodlights and the moon—cold and damp against my palms. The rain should blind me to the city below, but it encloses us like a cocoon, fights the fire on the bridge in my stead, and falls on everyone equally. Me. Il Bocco. Damiano. Santino.

  I need to scan this city like a hawk. I need to put my hands on the window and listen for his voice.

  “Violetta,” Loretta says from the stairway.

  “Leave me alone.”

  When I open my eyes, I’m trapped in a room of glass, looking over my world in three hundred sixty degrees. The rain, the burning bridge, and the country beyond it. My home city in the valley. The lawn and the people scurrying around it. The gate that opened to let the limousine inside.

  “Violetta.” Loretta’s disembodied head breaches the floor, then the rest of her rises.

  Santino left me with her when I was a blood-covered American girl who tried to run, but was nearly captured instead. She fed me and gave me a place to rest. She tried to tell me things I ignored.

  “What happened out there?” I demand. “Why did you kneel?”

  “I don’t know.” She sits on one of the benches that line the room. “I had to.”

  “Santino told me about this. It’s a mass delusion. That’s all it is, and it’s distracting. Now everyone’s dusting off their pants when we should be getting the hell out of here and finding him. We need to take this entire city apart brick by fucking brick. I’m sick of waiting here—eating, sleeping, pretending everything’s okay—while my husband is somewhere getting his fingers cut off. I can’t bear it!”

  My fists are white-cap tight, shaking in front of my chest, ready to punch through any stone wall that separates us before they pulverize whoever built it.

  “I wish he was here,” I say, dropping my hands.

  “I know.”

  “I can’t…Whatever this is…with the crown…I can’t do it without him.”

  “You have to. You’re the queen now, and everyone knows it.”

  Overwhelmed, I sit on a bench on the opposite side of the room from her. “I’m not. I’m just a regular girl, and I’m scared.”

  “Sure, you are.” Loretta sighs and leans back on the uncomfortable seat. “When I met you, right…” She gets up and points out the window to a house on the side of our mountain. “Right there.” She taps the glass twice. “You had blood all over you and a little bit of maybe brain in your hair, and I said right away…pfft. ‘She is nothing. Poor Santino, with this…nothing. She doesn’t even have the sense to be frightened.’”

  “You didn’t let on you felt that way.”

  “I was being a bitch, and I knew it. He was never mine.” She sits on the bench, closer now. “You learned about the gods and goddesses in school here, yes?”

  “Zeus and shit? Yeah.”

  “Like Athena, goddess of war?” After I nod, she continues. “The Greeks carved Athena’s face to look like a man. They put breasts on a man’s body. But our war goddess, Minerva…she was a woman. She was fierce, and feminine, and mad as vinegar. That was you that day, and when he took you back, I realized that. I said, ‘One day, she will be queen.’ And here you are.”

  She’s saying I’m a queen, but queens don’t feel small and incapable without their king.

  “I didn’t think I’d let myself love him this much,” I admit, and she nods.

  For a second time, light flashes on her face. The sound that follows is not thunder, but a scream.

  25

  VIOLETTA

  I burst into the kitchen, Loretta following close behind. The door out of the kitchen is open, letting in the wind and windswept raindrops.

  Nazario Corragio and his driver are in the same position I left them in. Celia’s holding a coffee pot, but not moving to pour it or put it down. Gennaro is stock still and Carmine is the same, but shaking his head slowly. They’re all looking down, and I follow their gaze.

  The crown is on the floor.

  “What the hell happened?” I ask.

  The consigliere shrugs and turns to Celia, making a tsk to the espresso pot. She shakes the bees from her head and pours.

  “Dario,” Gennaro says, coming back to himself. “He tried to get the crown. Steal it.”

  I pick up the crown, careful not to touch the nail. The driver watches me, wide-eyed, and makes the sign of the cross.

  “What?” I ask, putting it back in the box.

  “It’s not hot?” he asks.

  “Of course not, you testa di cavolo.” He calls him a dickhead, scoffing and sipping from his coffee cup. “It’s hers.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” I close the box and latch it. “It’s the same temperature for everyone. It’s a piece of dumb metal. You all need to stop treating it like it’s got magic.”

  “Tell that to Dario,” Gennaro says.

  “Where is he?” I ask, suddenly panicked that he’s gathering enough men to put me in the basement.

  “Ran off,” Gennaro says.

  “Like a kitten when the vacuum’s turned on,” Celia adds.

  “The rest of the guys chased him but—”

  “Why?” I interrupt Gennaro. “Why did he run out like that?”

  “When he touched it”—he waves at the box—“he was struck by lightning.”

  God save us all from stories about God.

  “It’s fucking thunder and lightning out,” I growl. “And if—by some miracle—a lightning bolt came through the roof without breaking it, then through the second story of this house without making a hole in the ceiling, the floor right here would be black. So stop it. Everybody, cut it out. This crown is magic, but not the way you’re saying. We have the thing Damiano’s coming for, and we can trade it for Santino.”

  The consigliere laughs into his espresso, clicking down his cup. “More of this, please.”

  “What’s funny?” I ask.

  “Do we have a place to talk privately? Or is it all”—he waves at the room with distaste—“gossiping?”

  He means women’s space, but I let it slide because he’s old and he brought me the crown.

  “If you can get up a flight of stairs.” Maybe I’m not letting it slide as much as I think.

  The driver cuts in. “He can.”

  The consigliere holds his cane against his chest and between his knees as his driver—whose name is Sam—carries him up the stairs and places him in a chair facing Santino’s desk. Sam and Gennaro take opposite corners of the room.

  I place the box on a side table and sit where my husband usually sits. The chair is still too big for me, but I don’t feel as small. On the desk to my right, an ivory-faced teak clock with Roman numerals and brass feet ticks away my luxury.

  With his cane planted in the carpet between his feet and both hands resting on the brass head, Nazario looks at the old box on the side table and sighs. “I am done.”

  “I accept your resignation. Anything else? Because I have to find Damiano Orolio and give him that crown.”

  “No,” he says, facing me. “You will not do that.”

  “If it gets me my husband back, I will.”

  “It will reject Damiano.”

  “I don’t care,” I say with dead seriousness, letting him anthropomorphize the crown just for the sake of argument.

  He sighs again. “You’re the first one who can truly use it to rule without being subject to a man, and of course…you want to trade it for your husband. Che ironia.”

  My Italian isn’t great, but I know irony when I hear it. Outside, lightning flashes and—three seconds later—thunder rolls. Santino is under the same rain, suffering in ways I can’t imagine. I don’t have time to pick apart the paradox between my desires and his superstitions.

  “You wanted a place to talk,” I say. “Not gossip. We’re doing neither.”

  “Capo.” He smiles at me like a proud father, calling me a boss in the traditional, non-mob sense. At least, this is what I believe.

  “You brought the crown to me. I’m grateful. But I can’t sit here all night waiting for you to tell me what you want out of me.” I flip the clock around to face him. “You have ten minutes.”

  Instead of blurting out his intentions to fit it all into ten minutes, he pauses. There’s a light knock on the door, and Celia comes in with a tray of coffee. He wastes two full minutes waiting for it to be poured.

  “Signora,” he asks her, “do you want Damiano to have the crown?”

  She hesitates. “It’s not my place.”

  “You can tell him,” I say.

  “He killed Armando. A good man. My friend. He shouldn’t get rewarded for that.” She glances at me. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine.”

  She nods, turns on her heel, and leaves.

  “She has a sense of justice you lack,” Nazario says.

  I remind myself that he doesn’t know me or what I’ve become since I was stolen from my home and forced to live a life I didn’t ask for. I’m different in ways I haven’t had time to name.

  “The summer I was ten.” I lay my hands flat on the desk. “My uncle took my sister and me to the Signorile Oxbow Lake, where San Vitus Boulevard ends. There’s a dock you can dive off. He set up a picnic, and Rosetta and I went out on a blow-up raft with a horse’s head. He packed Zia’s granita al limone—my favorite. All I wanted was to spend a few minutes in the lake, then go back and eat it before it got mushy. But there were boys on the opposite bank, and Rosetta was fifteen, so she found this more interesting than her little sister. Her and one blond kid were—I don’t know what you’d call shouting across an entire lake.”

  “I think it’s called flirting.”

  I smile at him and continue. “She paddled us into the center to meet him. I was smaller, so I couldn’t fight it. I couldn’t do anything but scream louder and louder that she had to stop. I was making a racket. And she turns to me, with all these raging teenage hormones, and says, ‘Swim back if you don’t like it.’ I thought…yes. I could do that. I was an okay swimmer. It wasn’t that far away. I was going to get off this thing and swim to the dock. And so I stood, grabbed the horse’s head, and froze because I realized I wasn’t leaving the safety of the blow-up raft thing. I’d rather be miserable watching my sister flirt with this stupid boy than go to the effort of swimming back.”

  “So you ate mushy granita.”

  “It was worse… liquid.” I wrinkle my nose. “I was mad, but I never questioned my decision. I always did the easy thing, even if I was miserable. Until Santino took away all the easy choices. Being in his house was hard. Accepting his kindness was hard. Obeying him was impossible. Loving him… It changed everything. So before you say I don’t have a sense of justice, you need to know that Santino DiLustro is my only justice. Before him, I was nothing. I dreamed, and I worked, but I wasn’t alive. I was asleep. The walking dead. I stayed on the raft, and if he hadn’t pulled me off, I’d still be floating around, protected from my own life. So fuck the crown. It’s a raft in a lake. I’ll jump off and swim to him. I’ll give the crown to whoever returns my king to me.”

  The old man blinks slowly, and with a groan, he turns the desk clock around to face me. The ten minutes are almost up. He drops onto a seat with the sigh of easily-emptied lungs.

  “You are worthy,” he says. “But you know that.”

  “I don’t want to be worthy of anything but him.”

  Leaning on his cane, Nazario Corragio gets up with cracking, grinding bones. Sam holds him straight. I stand with him.

  “Santino DiLustro,” Nazario says when he’s upright, “is in the sub basement of a nightclub. Under a laundry room.”

  Hope is a fuse that—once lit—can set a soul on fire and consume every last breath of reason.

  “How do you know?” My voice cracks.

  “It’s my job to know.”

  “Is he all right? Who’s guarding him? How many?”

  “No, Violetta Cavallo, my job begins and ends with the heads who share the crown. You are the last of a line of women sold to men for it and the first able to wear it without a man to tell you not to. Use its power to get the DiLustro boy.”