Sold To The Devil's Son

CHAPTER 14

"You don't have to do that."

Alessandra kept folding. "I know."

"Guests don't fold linens."

"I'm not a guest."

The woman at the stove finally turned. Fifties, forearms thick from decades of the same motion, a black dress gone gray from washing.

"Maria."

"Alessandra."

"I know who you are."

"Everybody keeps saying that like it answers something."

"It does. It answers whether I need to ask your name."

"Fair."

"Fold the pillowcases first. Little ones panic if the pile's not right by dinner."

She folded. A girl came through with a tray and left without a word. A man grabbed bread off the counter mid-stride and vanished before Alessandra could place his face. Nobody looked at her twice. She let herself enjoy it for as long as it lasted.

"Everybody who comes through that door their first week asks me a hundred questions," Maria said, not turning around. "You've asked me none."

"Should I?"

"I want to know which kind of woman you are before somebody else decides it for me."

"Which kind's there to be?"

"The kind that asks because she's scared. Or the kind that asks because she's already three steps into a plan and wants to know if I'll get in her way."

"And if I don't ask anything at all?"

"Then you're a third kind, and that one worries me more than the other two put together."

Alessandra set a folded pillowcase on the pile, squared the edge. "Which guards take money?"

Maria's spoon stopped in the pot.

"I'm not going to use it against anyone," Alessandra said. "I want to know who's actually watching me and who's just standing there because somebody told him to."

"You say that like there's a difference that matters."

"There's a difference between the man who'll shoot me because it's his job and the man who'll shoot me because he's bored and wants something to report. I'd like to know which is standing at my door."

Maria turned around fully. Studied her.

"Gio's on the east gate," she said finally, voice dropped low, quick, like she wanted the words gone from her mouth fast. "Likes his cigarettes more than his job. Won't notice you walk past twice if you time it right. Pino reports everything he sees straight to Vanelli, word for word, thinks it makes him somebody. The rest keep their heads down, same as I told you to keep yours."

"That's a lot of free information for a woman who didn't want to answer."

"It's the last free thing you get from me. Don't come back tomorrow expecting a second round."

"What do I owe you for it, then?"

"Nothing. This one's a gift." Maria pointed the spoon at her. "The next one's going to cost you, and I haven't decided the price yet, so don't ask."

"Fair enough."

"You say fair enough a lot for a girl who's been here five days."

"It's a useful phrase. Keeps people talking."

Maria actually laughed at that, short and dry, more air than sound. "Somebody raised you smart. Doesn't usually work out well for girls in this house. Smart ones either end up running things quietly from the kitchen like me, or they end up gone before anyone learns their name properly."

"Which one are you hoping I'll be?"

"I haven't decided that either. Ask me again in a month."

"Understood."

A girl came in through the side door with a crate of vegetables. Younger, maybe seventeen, an apron cinched too tight at her waist. She set the crate down without a sound, didn't look at either of them, started sorting through it.

"That's Rosa," Maria said. "Doesn't talk much. Talks less around family."

"I'm not family."

"You're married to the eldest son. In this house that makes you family whether either of you wanted it."

"Does Rosa know that?"

"Rosa knows more than she says. That's the whole point of her." Maria lowered her voice, though the girl was well out of earshot, sorting vegetables with her back to them. "Watch her sometime. She hears things nobody thinks she's listening for. Kitchen girls are furniture to most people in this house. Nobody minds their mouths around furniture."

"Is that useful to you?"

"It's useful to everybody who knows how to ask her the right way. She doesn't hand things over cheap, and she doesn't hand them to people she doesn't trust. So if she ever gives you something, it won't be nothing."

Alessandra looked at the linens instead of answering that. "The east wing," she said. "Nobody mentions it. I asked one of the guards and he looked at me like I'd said something obscene."

Maria's shoulders went up and stayed there.

"The old Don's wife," she said. "Lucia. Whole wing was hers. The sitting room, the music room, all of it. After she died the Don locked every door in that wing and never said her name again. Fifteen years. I worked in this kitchen the whole time and never once heard him say it."

"How did she die?"

"I don't talk about that."

"Maria."

"I said I don't talk about that." Her voice thinned to almost nothing. "Walls in this house have ears, cara. Some of those ears belong to people who'd hurt you for the question you just asked me. Ask something else, or ask nothing."

"Okay."

"I mean it. Not tonight, not next week."

"I heard you the first time."

Maria held her eyes a second longer, then turned back to the stove. Alessandra folded the last pillowcase, smoothed it flat, didn't push. You didn't pull a thread the second you found it. You marked where it was and came back later with better hands.

Rosa passed behind her on the way to the pantry. Something small and hard pressed into Alessandra's palm, there and gone, no change in the girl's pace, no glance exchanged.

Alessandra closed her fingers around it and kept folding.

"You're good at that," Maria said, watching her.

"At folding?"

"At not reacting."

"Years of practice."

"At what?"

Alessandra looked up. "Sitting still and looking pleasant while people decided things about my life in the next room."

Maria didn't answer that. She turned the heat down under the pot, wiped her hands on her apron. For a moment the kitchen was just water running and a knife going through something on a board.

"You have a sister?" Maria asked, out of nowhere.

"No. Why?"

"You remind me of somebody. Way you hold your shoulders. Like you're waiting to get hit and refusing to give anybody the satisfaction of seeing you flinch first."

"Who was she?"

"Somebody who worked here a long time ago. Before your time. Before mine too, really — I just heard about her." Maria shook her head, like she was shaking the thought loose. "Never mind. Old woman talking. Dinner's at eight. Don't be late. Dante doesn't like waiting, and this house doesn't need you giving him a reason to notice you twice in one day."

"Is that a warning?"

"It's a fact. Same as the other one."

Alessandra picked up the empty basket. At the door she stopped.

"Maria."

"What."

"Thank you. For the guards. For the rest of it."

Maria didn't look up from the stove. "Don't thank me. Thanking me makes it a favor, and favors get remembered by the wrong people. It was just talk between women in a kitchen. Nothing anybody needs to write down."

"Understood."

"Good girl."

The words landed strange — soft in a way nothing else in this house had been since the gates closed behind her. Alessandra carried them out into the corridor along with the basket, and didn't let herself examine why they'd stuck.

---

She waited until her door was shut and the lock had turned before she opened her hand.

A heel of bread, torn open at the seam. Wedged inside, a scrap of paper folded down to the size of a coin, the handwriting careful in a way that told her it had been written slowly, checked twice before it left someone's hand.

'The consigliere's office isn't soundproofed. Third window from the east corner, ground floor. Don't stand under it after dark, they'll see the shape of you against the glass.'

Below the words, a rough sketch. Hallways sketched in shaky pencil lines. A scatter of small x's she didn't understand yet. One mark, heavier than the rest, circled twice near what she was almost certain was the east wing.

She sat on the edge of the bed and turned the paper under the thin light of her phone, angling it until the lines resolved into something she recognized -- and then didn't.

It wasn't the floor plan Carmine had walked her through that morning, room by room, door by door, his voice flat and instructive the whole way. This was a second house laid under the first one. A door into the east wing that had no business existing, tucked behind a stretch of wall she'd been told twice, by two different people, was solid stone straight through.