Sold To The Devil's Son

CHAPTER 15

"Sit down. We're playing."

Alessandra hadn't even said a word yet. Nonna Rosa was dealing cards onto the tiny table between two high-backed chairs, looking serious like Alessandra was already late.

"What are we playing?"

"Scopa. Do you know how?"

"My grandmother taught me," Alessandra said. "Badly, I must add."

"Then I'll teach you properly." Nonna Rosa replied. Moving her hands fast, as the cards snap down in neat rows. "Sit."

Alessandra sat.

The room felt strangely warm. She'd been here for five days and all she's felt was cold stone and steel. Photographs crowded every surface. Books were stacked deep on the shelves. A heavy shawl was thrown over the arm of the second chair like someone had just stepped out of it.

Nothing in this house had felt lived-in until now.

"You keep looking at the walls instead of your cards," Nonna Rosa noted.

"It's just the first room here that looks like somebody actually sleeps in it."

"I've slept in this house for forty-one years," Nonna Rosa replied. "You'd think I'd have earned a proper room by now."

She dealt the last card and set the deck down.

"Pick up your hand."

Alessandra did. Nonna Rosa watched her sort them, watched her decide what to lead with, and then reached straight over and rearranged three of the cards herself.

"Wrong," she said. "You're playing to win the hand. Play to win the table."

"Isn't that the same thing?"

"No." Nonna Rosa tapped the bare wood between them once. "Winning the hand means you take the most cards this round. Winning the table means the person sitting across from you stops seeing you as a threat. You can lose every hand for a month and still walk away owning the whole game--if you're patient about it."

"That sounds like a long way to win."

"It's the only way that actually works in this house." She slapped a card down face-up. "Go on. Play something."

Alessandra played a seven.

Nonna Rosa's eyebrows shot up.

"You're capturing. You want the cards in front of you."

"Isn't that the point of the game?"

"It's the point of the game they teach children. Watch."

Instead of playing the eight that would've captured, Nonna Rosa tossed down a two.

"I gave that away. Now you think I'm careless. Or weak. Or just not paying attention. Which one was it?"

"Careless."

"There it is." Nonna Rosa offered a thin, quick smile. "You'll spend the next four hands underestimating me over one bad card. That's the whole lesson. People decide who you are in the first five minutes and then they stop looking. You just have to survive the five minutes."

"And after that?"

"After that, you can do whatever you want right in front of them. They've already stopped watching."

Alessandra played again. Wrong, apparently--Nonna Rosa made a small clicking sound in her throat and swept the trick without a word. They kept going.

"This family has run the exact same game for three generations," Nonna Rosa said, dealing out a new hand. "The rules were written by men, for men. A woman who plays it their way is going to lose every time. The cards are stacked before she even sits down."

"So how do you win?"

"You don't play their game. You learn to be invisible inside it, and you win a completely different one." She glanced up, her eyes sharp despite her soft voice. "I came into this house the exact same way you did. As collateral. A debt somebody else owed."

Alessandra's hands went completely still over her cards.

"Whose debt?"

"Doesn't matter now. He's been forty years dead, and I outlived every reason anyone had to remember his name."

"How old were you?"

"Nineteen. Younger than you."

"Did you think about ... climbing out? Escaping?"

"Every single night for a year." She said it completely flat. "Then I stopped thinking about the window and started thinking about the door. Doors open for people the house trusts... so I made the house trust me."

"How?"

"I survived by disappearing. Not literally--I just made myself the kind of woman nobody bothers watching. And once nobody's watching you, you hear everything. You see everything. You become the only person in the house who actually knows what's going on."

"That's not invisibility," Alessandra said. "That's power wearing a disguise."

Something shifted in the old woman's face--not a smile, but something much more careful.

"Now you're playing the table," she said. "Good."

They played another hand in total silence. The only sound was cards hitting wood and the ticking clock hidden somewhere behind the clutter of photographs.

"Why are you teaching me this?" Alessandra asked.

"Because you're not the first bought bride to sit in that chair. And you won't be the last either, if this family keeps running the way it always has."

Nonna Rosa set her hand down, folding her fingers flat over the cards.

"The question was never whether you'd survive. Women like us survive. It's what you become while you're doing it that matters. Some become nothing... just furniture with a pulse. Some become me."

"And if I don't want to become either?"

"Then you'd better decide real fast what the third option looks like. This house doesn't wait around for a woman to make up her mind."

"You never answered me," Alessandra said. "What actually happened to the man whose debt bought you?"

"I told you. He's forty years dead."

"That's not what happened to him. That's just when."

Nonna Rosa stared at her. The silence stretched out way longer than it should have.

"You ask questions like your grandmother must have been proud of you," she said softly. "And worried for you, in equal amounts."

"She was. Both."

"Smart woman." Nonna Rosa gathered the deck and tapped it square against the wooden table. "He drank himself into the ground eleven years after the wedding. I didn't push him there. I just stopped pulling him back the way a 'good wife' is supposed to. There's a difference the law never bothers to find, and I never bothered to explain it to anyone who asked."

A quick knock rattled the door, and it pushed open before either of them could answer.

Matteo stood in the doorway, one hand still gripping the frame. His eyes darted from his grandmother to Alessandra, then back again.

"Sorry. I didn't know you had company."

"Come in or go, Matteo. Don't stand in my doorway like you're asking for permission to breathe."

"I'll come back."

"You said that yesterday. And the day before."

"I have things to do, Nonna."

"You have things you're running from," Nonna Rosa shot back.

"Sit down. Play a hand."

"I can't."

"You can buy you won't." She looked at him. "Go, then. But eat something today. You've gone thin."

"I eat."

"You pick at your food like a man who's forgotten what it's for." She waved a hand at him, dismissive, but fond. "Go."

He was already backing away. Gone.

"That one carries too much," Nonna continued. "More than his brother ever will, and Dante carries plenty. Matteo is either going to break under it, or he's going to become the one thing his brother's never managed to be."

"Which is?"

"Kind."

The word seemed to cost her something just to say out loud.

"Ask me again another day. Not everything gets answered in one sitting."

She gathered the rest of the cards, squared the deck, and slid a single card face-down between them.

"That's enough for today."

"What's the card?"

"When you're ready to know what this house actually is, come back and ask me the right question. Not this one. The right one." Nonna Rosa kept her palm pressed flat over the card, hiding it completely. "You'll know it when you find it. Go on now. Dinner's soon, and you don't want to be the reason it's late."

Alessandra stood up. She had nothing to gather, having brought nothing with her. She made it all the way to the door before she let herself look back.

Nonna Rosa had already flipped the card face-up.

She was staring down at it, both hands resting still on the table. The old woman's face had gone somewhere else entirely. Somewhere that looked like grief with nowhere left to go.

Alessandra didn't ask what the card was. She just slipped out and shut the door quietly behind her.