rocks, the rows of evergreen trees just ahead. With my strong arms, my wide feet—I had been made for these mountains.
When I reached the top of a ridge, I turned to see how far I had come. Nevenero was below, abandoned, a single stream of smoke rising from a single stone house. The castle, tucked into the valley, lay like a cold tile against the snow. The whole world was at my feet. I didn’t know how I would get out of there, but it didn’t matter anymore. I was free of them—Dr. Ludwig Feist, Justine and Pierre, Sal, Vita. My childhood isolation and my failing marriage and the miscarriages. Free. And I knew, as I stood there, looking over the vast mountain ranges, something that I had never known before: I was powerful. Strong enough to survive in the mountains. Strong enough to survive in ice and wind. Strong like my ancestors.
I turned back toward the mountains, ready to climb even higher, when suddenly the crack of a rifle rang through the air. A burst of heat rushed through my thigh, sending waves of fire up my spine. I staggered forward, the hard, cold granite breaking my fall. As I tried to pull myself up, I knew: I had been shot.
Sal carried me down the slope and put me in the snowcat, where he bound my leg with dish towels from Justine’s kitchen, creating a tourniquet to stanch the blood. It didn’t work. I lay across the seat bleeding, the pain of the wound shooting through me. The bullet had torn a hole through my jeans and into my flesh, creating a mess of blood and skin and muscle and bone. Nausea overcame me, and I buried my head in the seat, closed my eyes, and tried to make it all go away.
From the sound of it, one would think Dr. Feist had been shot. He whimpered and pleaded from the back where he had been tied up with Justine and Pierre’s hiking ropes. The pain in my leg was too much to bear, and his whining only made it worse.
“Shut up,” I said. I glanced back and saw that his glasses were gone, and a line of blood dripped from a cut above his eye. Gone, too, was the clinical assurance of his position. Now that the roles were reversed, he wasn’t so calm. He looked at me with pure terror. “Please, Madame Montebianco,” he whimpered. “Please.”
Sal drove up the hill, toward the castle. “Is he bothering you, madame?” His voice was kind, deferential. “I can shut him up, if you want.”
Hearing this, Dr. Feist’s terror grew. “Take my camera. Destroy it. I will have no proof of anything. I will never breathe a word of this to anyone. No one would believe me anyway. Just let me go. Please.”
“Yes, Sal,” I said. “Shut him up.”
Sal jerked the snowcat to a halt and pulled Dr. Feist into the snow. “She told you to stop talking,” Sal said. He shot Dr. Feist once, twice, the sound of the shots echoing through the mountains as he climbed behind the wheel and drove up to Montebianco Castle.
Twenty-One
“Bernadette is good with knives,” Sal said by way of introduction.
I looked up to see the cook looking down upon me. She had a plump, cheerful face with round, rosy cheeks, huge eyes, and a double chin, giving her the appearance of a ghoulish child. She stood next to Sal, her skin glistening with candlelight.
“Ready?” Sal asked Bernadette.
Bernadette nodded and held up a short, sharp kitchen knife.
I gasped and pulled away, but Sal held me down. Pinned, I took in my surroundings. I was on a mattress in the mews, near the dog cage. It was dark except for candles burning nearby. Greta stood by Bernadette’s side, a bottle of Genepy des Alpes in one hand and a shot glass in the other. She filled the glass and gave it to me. “Drink,” she said, pushing it to my lips. “Now. Before Bernadette begins.”
I later learned that Genepy des Alpes is distilled from the herb genepy, or artemisia, known in English as wormwood—the primary ingredient in absinthe—and was used in the Alps to cure any number of maladies—altitude sickness, wound disinfection—and as a digestive aid. But unlike commercial Genepy des Alpes, with its regulated quantities of the psychoactive element of wormwood, thujone, Bernadette’s homemade version caused hallucinations and had the power to put me out cold.