"She stopped being my mother a long time before she stopped letting me stay."
I want to ask him what that means. I don't. I've learned that with Nico, pushing before he's ready just makes him go quiet, so I let it go.
The boat cuts closer to the island. Salt spray needles my cheek. Under it, so faint that it’s almost not there, is Nico’s cologne as he adjusts himself while the towering cliffs of Capri grow larger and larger.
"What is she like?" I ask anyway, unable to help myself.
Nico looks at the water for a long moment. His hands are loose on his knees, but the muscle at his jaw hasn't stopped moving since we left the dock from Naples.
"You'll see," he says.
That's all I get.
Martina's housesits low and white against the cliff, walls the color of bone, a garden running right up to the edge of nothing and stopping abruptly, the drop just beyond it.
A woman waits for us at the far end of it, framed by a stone balustrade and an entire sky behind her.
Dark hair streaked silver, pulled back hard enough to hurt. High cheekbones, all the softness gone out of them years ago. Amber eyes, exactly Nico's amber, looking out of a face simultaneously familiar yet new. A blanket, folded neat, sits across her lap even in the morning heat. Her hands rest on top of it, perfectly still. She decided a long time ago that stillness was its own weapon, and she's never put it down since.
It takes me a moment to realize that she’s sitting in a wheelchair.
Suddenly everything in the silver frame starts making sense. But I don't dare open my mouth to ask. Something in the set of her shoulders tells me that's not my place to ask.
"Mamma." The word comes out of him smaller than anything I've ever heard him say.
His shoulders drop half an inch. His chin comes down. For one second he isn't the Don of anything. He's a boy standing in front of a woman who used to be able to hurt him with a look, and some part of him never stopped expecting it.
"Nico." She doesn't smile.
Something in my chest twists sideways.
"Step away, so that I might speak to your wife alone.” She pauses, and then when she speaks again, there’s an unmistakable bitterness in her voice. “One D'Ambrosio wife to another."
Nico's whole body goes still. Then he steps back, out past the balustrade, down toward the water, and doesn't look at either of us again.
"Sit," Martina says once we’re alone, and I take my seat in the iron chair across from hers.
The sea drops away behind her shoulder.
"Do you love him?"
The bluntness of it stops me cold. I don't answer. And that was all the answer she needed.
"My father didn't want me to marry Leo D'Ambrosio," she says. "He said no, of course. So Leo put a gun to my father's head while his loyal men held a knife to my sister’s eye, and asked him to reconsider." Her mouth flattens. "He did."
I go cold, fast, from the inside out.
“Nico won’t hurt me.”
"That wasn’t what I asked," she replies. "One day, you'll realize he's got a chain around your throat."
"He's not..." I start, and stop, because I don't actually know how that sentence ends.
"Once a D'Ambrosio man gets what he wants out of you, he'll throw you aside like a used condom. Never forget that, girl."
Those words settle under my ribs and stay there. I want to defend him. I open my mouth to do it and nothing comes out, because some ugly, cowardly part of me has lain awake wondering the exact same thing at three in the morning with his arm around me.
Martina watches me not answer. Something old moves behind her eyes. It's older than cruelty. She's carried it for thirty years and never once put it down.
