Chapter 2 - THE GIRL IN THE RED COAT
I showed Dante the message.
He read it once.
Then again.
We know he’s there. Get him out now—or we finish what we started fifteen years ago, beginning with the girl.
The man who had walked into our apartment like he owned every room in Sicily suddenly became very still.
“Beginning with the girl,” he repeated.
My mother made a sound behind us.
Not surprise.
Recognition.
Dante turned toward her.
“Elena?”
Mom’s hand gripped the blanket.
“Close the shutters.”
I stared at her.
“What?”
“Aria, please.”
Dante was already moving.
He closed the bedroom shutters, checked the hallway, then crossed into the living room.
I followed.
“What are you doing?”
“Seeing what they can see.”
“Who is they?”
Neither of them answered.
That frightened me more than the message.
Dante stood beside the front window without touching the curtain.
“Did anyone know you were bringing me here?”
“No.”
“Restaurant staff?”
“No.”
“Your landlord?”
“He knows I have a sick mother. That’s all.”
“Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Anyone from Canada?”
I folded my arms.
“You’re interrogating me again.”
“I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“Then start explaining.”
Mom appeared in the hallway.
She had pulled a robe over her nightgown.
The oxygen tube ran beneath her nose, and one hand steadied her against the wall.
“Dante.”
He crossed the room immediately.
“You shouldn’t be standing.”
She ignored him.
“You came alone?”
“Yes.”
“No one followed you?”
“I made sure.”
Mom gave a tired, bitter smile.
“That is what Salvatore used to say.”
Dante stopped.
His father’s name changed something in him.
“You knew my father.”
“I worked for him.”
My mouth fell open.
“You told me you were a translator.”
“I was.”
“For a mafia family?”
She looked at me.
“I translated shipping contracts.”
“That is the most technically truthful answer you have ever given me.”
Pain crossed her face.
“I wanted you to have a normal life.”
“Well, someone just threatened to finish killing you and start with me, so I think normal has officially resigned.”
Dante almost smiled.
Almost.
Then Mom began to cough.
I helped her back to bed.
As I adjusted her oxygen, Dante remained by the door.
He looked uncomfortable.
Not with sickness.
With helplessness.
I knew that feeling.
I had lived with it for months.
Mom reached beneath her nightgown and pulled out a silver rosary.
I had seen it a thousand times.
One bead near the crucifix was black instead of pearl white.
She held it toward me.
“Take this.”
“What is it?”
“Something I should have given you years ago.”
I accepted it.
Dante’s eyes narrowed.
“That belonged to my mother.”
Mom nodded.
Another impossible sentence.
“Why do you have Mrs. Valenti’s rosary?” I asked.
“Because she gave it to me the night she left Palermo.”
Dante’s expression hardened.
“My mother died in Florence.”
“Yes.”
“Three years before the warehouse fire.”
“Yes.”
“Then what does she have to do with this?”
Mom looked at him.
“More than your family told you.”
I sat beside her.
“Start with the fire.”
She closed her eyes.
For several seconds, all I heard was the oxygen machine.
Then she said, “You were there, Aria.”
My body went cold.
“No.”
“You were eight.”
“I lived in Toronto.”
“Most of the year.”
I searched my memory.
School.
Snow.
My father grilling hamburgers in our tiny backyard.
Mom taking me to Canada’s Wonderland.
But the summer I turned eight—
Nothing.
A blank space.
I had always assumed childhood blurred like that.
“You brought me to Naples?”
“My mother was dying. I came back to see her.”
“And I was in that warehouse?”
Mom nodded.
“Why?”
“Because I made a terrible decision.”
Dante stepped closer.
“What decision?”
“Salvatore asked me to review accounts no one inside the family could be trusted to see.”
Dante’s face changed.
“What accounts?”
“Cargo that never existed. Companies that never existed. Millions moving through Valenti warehouses without your father’s approval.”
“Who was stealing?”
“Not stealing.”
Mom looked toward the shuttered window.
“Building something.”
“What?”
“A second organization inside yours.”
Dante’s jaw tightened.
“Who?”
She looked at him.
“I didn’t know then.”
“That isn’t true.”
“I suspected.”
“Who?”
Mom’s eyes filled.
Before she could answer, a shadow passed beneath the front door.
Dante saw it.
One second later, he had a gun in his hand.
I stopped breathing.
The shadow paused.
Then moved away.
Dante crossed to the door and looked through the peephole.
“No one.”
“How can there be no one?”
“There isn’t now.”
He opened the door carefully.
The hallway was empty.
But something lay on the floor.
A child’s red mitten.
I stared.
Dante picked it up with the edge of his jacket.
Mom began to cry.
I had never seen that mitten before.
She had.
“Where did they get that?” she whispered.
“What is it?” Dante asked.
Mom looked at me.
“You wore a red wool coat the night of the fire.”
A memory struck so suddenly I gasped.
Smoke.
A metal door.
My mother screaming.
Someone carrying me.
A man’s jaw bleeding against my cheek.
The scar.
Dante.
I backed against the wall.
“You carried me.”
His face changed.
“What?”
“You carried me out.”
Another flash.
Fire climbing metal shelving.
A young man coughing.
His white shirt black with ash.
My arms around his neck.
I touched Dante’s scar.
Not quite.
My hand stopped inches away.
“That’s where you got it.”
He stared at me.
Then his own memory arrived.
I watched it happen.
“A little girl.”
His voice cracked.
“I pulled a little girl through the loading door.”
Mom was crying openly now.
“I thought you were dead,” Dante whispered.
“I told Salvatore we had escaped.”
He turned toward her.
“My father knew?”
“Yes.”
“And he let me believe you both died?”
“He had to.”
Dante looked almost angry enough to shatter.
“Why?”
Mom struggled to sit straighter.
“Because the person who set the warehouse on fire was looking for me.”
“Who?”
“He knew I had copied the accounts.”
“Who, Elena?”
She looked at the red mitten.
Then at Dante.
“The man wore the Valenti family ring.”
Dante’s face went cold.
“That does not narrow it down.”
“He had a burn across his right hand.”
It did.
Dante stopped breathing.
I had seen that burn.
Not in person.
In photographs displayed in the private dining room at La Perla.
Dante beside his uncle.
The man who had helped raise him after his father died.
Lorenzo Valenti.
Dante shook his head once.
“No.”
Mom’s voice softened.
“I’m sorry.”
“My uncle saved my family after my father died.”
“I know.”
“He kept the business together.”
“I know.”
“He would not—”
“He ordered the fire.”
Dante turned away.
For the first time, I saw the difference between a dangerous man and a wounded one.
It was smaller than I expected.
Mom reached for his hand.
He let her take it.
“There is something else.”
He looked at her.
She swallowed.
“Your father discovered what Lorenzo was doing before the fire.”
“Then why didn’t he stop him?”
May you like
Mom’s eyes filled again.
“Because Salvatore helped him cover it up.”
