Chapter 5

I met Nero at Vincenzo's.

That's the restaurant the Marchetti family owns on Mulberry Street. White tablecloths upstairs. Underground fight club in the basement.

I was nineteen, working two jobs, and Vincenzo's paid better than anywhere else in Little Italy, as long as you kept your mouth shut about what happened downstairs.

Nero was the Don's son. Twenty-one and untouchable. He'd sit in the corner booth every night, drinking Amaro he didn't pay for, picking fights with kids from the Castellano family, wrecking the place because nobody could tell him no.

Nobody liked serving his table.

I did it because the tips were good.

Then one night in November, two men walked in wearing the wrong kind of coats.

I saw the gun before Nero did. I don't know why I moved. I wasn't thinking. I just dropped the tray and shoved him sideways off the booth.

The first bullet went through my thigh. The second went into the wall where his head had been.

I don't remember the rest.

I woke up in a private clinic three days later. Nero was in the chair next to the bed.

He didn't say anything for a long time. Just held my hand.

He changed after that.

Stopped brawling. Stopped drinking through the day. Started showing up at the restaurant just to sit at my station and watch me work. Learned which bakery on Arthur Avenue made the sfogliatelle I liked. Had them delivered to my apartment every Friday morning.

The night I turned twenty, he took me down to the harbor. Late. No one around. Just the water and the lights of the city on the other side.

He pulled me in.

"Aria mia. The whole world can come for me. I don't care. I'm going to give you everything."

That man. And the one on the helipad, smiling at another woman.

Same face. Same voice.

Different person.

I don't know how long I've been standing there when the phone rings again.

New York.

"Miss Bellini, your mother's crashing. Dr. Keller is still on site. If you can get here to sign the consent, we can move her into surgery right now."

My head empties out.

"I—" My throat closes up. "I'm coming. I'm on my way."

I hang up. My mind is racing.

Down the mountain on foot — forty minutes to the road. Cab to the airport. Wait for a flight. JFK. Cab again. Four hours if I'm lucky.

The chopper does it in an hour and a half.

I hit Nero's number.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Voicemail.

I hit it again. Voicemail.

My eyes start to burn.

Then I remember. Last spring he took me up in the chopper once. Sabrina got me off the mountain within twenty minutes — not allowed. But I saw where they land it.

Halfway up the mountain there's a shelf with the family plot. A small villa sits next to it. The pad is on the villa's north side.

I start running.

The trail up is steep. Loose stone. Thornbrush. My knees are already torn from the Sanctum steps. The brambles rip them wider. I don't stop.

Fifty minutes in, I see the rotors.

I cut across the grass toward the villa.

Twenty feet from the door I hear Sabrina's voice through an open window.

"...Nero. What happens if she figures it out? That there was never a blank in the cylinder. That you were never going to make her your real wife. What if she loses it?"

"She won't figure it out." Nero. Flat. Bored, almost. "She does what she's told. Even if she found out — she wouldn't do a damn thing."

Does what she's told.

I freeze at the wall. Nails cutting into my palms.

So that's who I am to him. Five years of eating every rule this family threw at me. Five years of smiling through cracked ribs. And in his head, all of it was me being good.

Not love. Not trust. Just a woman who knew her place.

Fine.

Whatever I had left for him, it wasn't worth much anyway.

Get Mom through the surgery. That's all that matters.

Then Sabrina can sit in the Donna's chair. She's been warming it long enough.

I reach for the door handle.

Sabrina speaks again.

"...And the baby? What about Aria's baby?"