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Chapter Thirty-Four

LUNA

My mother—the new one—is like a possum, except instead of dropping dead whenever she’s scared, she disappears on light waves.

“You gotta stop doing that,” I say, getting up to peer through the crack where the door and jamb aren’t meeting. It’s Nunzio, who’s in motion, shoulder first, coming toward me.

I pull the door open, which he wasn’t expecting. Now unimpeded, he is a rush of forward thrust into the room. The wild, heavy emotions of a man fill the space. His breath. His smell. The hormones of rampant violence.

His arm bangs against the draining table. A bowl falls, releasing a dozen figs to roll unevenly to the far corners of the room.

“ Jesu , Luna.” He drops to his knees, clutching his arm. When he removes it, there’s blood on his hand.

“Yikes, I’m sorry.”

“It’s nothing.” He moves his hand. It’s just a few drops, but the bruise around it will be monstrous. “What are you doing in here?”

“I was talking to… I don’t know.” The person I was talking to is gone. I pick up figs and decide not to look as if I’ve lost my mind. “Myself.”

“You all right?” Nunzio holds out the bowl.

“Depends what you mean.” I drop the figs in the bowl and chase one that rolled under the table.

“Just say if you are.”

“I’m fine.” I drop it in with the rest.

He takes a deep breath with his eyes closed, as if I just told him his mother survived brain surgery.

“Let’s go.” Bowl under his arm, Nunzio leaves and waits for me on the grass. When I don’t join him right away, he gets impatient, waving his arm to me. “Luna. Please.”

I go out and follow him toward the burned-out villa across the field.

“I’m supposed to be watching you in the day,” he says. “He said anything that happens to you, happens to me. Then he turned the thrall up, so I can’t even kid myself into anything but obedience. Unless you’re sleeping, then I figure, how much trouble can you get into?”

“Where do you need to go when I’m asleep?”

“I have to make sure Corrado eats.”

“What’s wrong with him? Is he sick?”

“Yes.”

I have to keep up a trot to stay with him. “How’s the snake?”

“Puzzo’s fine. Getting used to being here. My sister brought him right after you went to sleep, and before the Scangas started shit.”

“She left the hats home, I guess.”

He opens the door to the Strega house and I wonder, is this the door my mother kept a sprig of rue on? It would be gone now, but I notice there’s a nail just above eye level. It proves nothing, but it doesn’t disprove her story either.

What it does prove is that I still don’t trust what she tells me.

Nunzio leads me to the stairs Ferrante led me down ages ago. Welcoming yellow light flickers against the walls and illuminates the creaky stairway.

Blindsided by what I see from the bottom of the stairs, I gasp so hard the air hurts my throat.

I am witnessing my future.