Page 149 of Valentino

Valentino

The car stops inside the gates, and Amanda is out of her seatbelt before the tires finish settling on the cobblestone.

I don't blame her.

Three women stand in the doorway of the main house. Aria in the center like the queen she never stopped being, Vittoria already crying, my mother beside them with both hands pressed to her mouth.

Amanda gets the door open and runs.

Vittoria meets her halfway, and the sound the two of them make carries across the drive. They collide and hold on, talking over each other at full volume, neither one listening, both of them understanding anyway.

Women have a language for this. The rest of us stand nearby pretending we aren't emotional while hoping nobody asks us to say something meaningful.

I get out slower.

Everything I do now, I do slower.

My mother comes to me with tears in her eyes. She doesn't say anything. She just opens her arms.

She comes up to the middle of my chest, which means I have to bend. My back hates bending more than anything.

I do it anyway because I would never deny her this. Some things matter more than pain. Hugging Carmela Conti after she's spent weeks praying for me is one of them.

She grips the back of my neck the way she did when I was twelve and my father died in the street. Her fingers find the same place.

"Figlio mio," she says into my shirt.

Nothing else.

The pain in my back flares.

I let it.

What I don't tell her about is the mirror in the farmhouse outside Rome. Two weeks ago. The first time I stood still long enough to see what the rope had left behind.

I've never cared much about my appearance. But a man's body is still his own, and mine now bears the marks of the night I almost left Amanda alone in the world.

My mother pulls back and looks up at my face.

She knows.

Of course she knows.

Then she grabs my arm with both hands and starts hauling me toward the house.

"Inside. You eat."

"Mamma, I have things to settle first. Bruno is waiting, and there is still⁠—"

She stops on the steps and turns with one finger raised.

Thirty-eight years old, tied to blood and business and men who would kill if I gave the word, and I still shut up when my mother points at me.

"You will eat first," she says. "You haven't eaten properly in a month. Don't lie to me. I can see your ribs through that shirt. Business waited two weeks. It can wait one more hour while my son sits at a table like a human being."

Men have died in Sicily after negotiating harder than I am about to.

"One hour," I say.