that he tracked down Apollonio. And that the meeting didn’t turn out well for him.” Trevini cleared his throat. “However, all this is pure speculation.”
“Do you think Florinda knew about it?”
“If so, she never mentioned the subject.”
But how else, if not from Florinda, could Zoe have known? What had the connection been between her father and TABULA—the link that Zoe had been talking about just before she died?
“Is that all?” asked Rosa.
“I respected your father’s wish. Apollonio was his business, not mine anymore.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
Trevini’s voice was icy. “You don’t like me. I can understand that. But don’t cast doubt on my loyalty. I haven’t worked for your family for thirty years only to have you insult me now.”
“Do you seriously call it loyalty to have kept something so important from Florinda?”
“What I do is done for the good of the clan. Your father, Rosa, might have been a good capo. That’s why I was on his side. The way things are now, however, there’s only one side in this family, and it’s yours. That ought to be enough to persuade you to trust me.”
“If I ask you to find out more about this Apollonio—to continue where you left off eleven years ago—will you do it?”
“I can’t promise you results, but yes, of course.”
“I’d be very grateful.” She managed to say it without grinding her teeth.
“We had better end this conversation now,” he said. “But one more thing: I hope you’re aware that you must not talk to anyone else, anyone at all, about what you found in the cellar.”
“By ‘anyone’ you mean Alessandro Carnevare.”
“Whatever you may think of him, whatever you feel for him—don’t trust him. This is not just about you, Rosa; it’s about the fate of your clan. Everything that Costanza and her predecessors built up.”
And it was about him, Trevini, as well. That was what he was saying.
She didn’t reply.
“Don’t make the mistake of seeing him as only a young man in love,” Trevini warned her, with a note in his voice that sent a shiver down her spine. “Alessandro Carnevare is much more than that. He’s ambitious. He is angry, and implacable. And he’s dangerous. Please keep that in mind, in everything you do.” He was silent for a moment, and then he said again, “Don’t mention any of this. You have to promise me that.”
She didn’t have to do any such thing.
“Please,” he said forcefully. “Not a word.”
Rosa ended the call.
THREE WORDS
“A FEW hundred?” ALESSANDRO exclaimed.
“The entire freezer is full of them.”
He slowly shook his head, unable to take it in, and for a moment she was afraid that this could all backfire on her. Suppose he thought she was just like her grandmother? Suppose he began to believe what everyone had been telling him for months? That she was bad news for him, bad news for Cosa Nostra as a whole, and it was a mistake to have anything to do with an Alcantara.
Rosa was sitting beside him on the battlements of Castello Carnevare in the evening twilight, looking out at the plain below the mountain where the castle stood. The land was not as flat as it looked at first sight. The farther you went from the Castello, the hillier the country became. Here in central Sicily the landscape was bleak and inhospitable, a sea of ocher undulations in the ground, with dry riverbeds spanned by ancient stone bridges running across them. The sun had sunk below the horizon in the west. A solitary car was driving along a road a few miles away. Its headlights were two lonely stars in the darkness.
Rosa and Alessandro were nestling close together, enveloped by blankets. Both of them had drawn up their knees and wrapped the thick wool tightly around them. They were sitting on the very edge of the abyss; if anyone were to push them from behind, there would be no stopping their fall. Forty-five feet to the bottom of the castle wall, and nothing in the way to slow their progress along the rocky slope.
But Rosa wasn’t even uneasy. Nowhere had she ever felt as safe as she did with him, her shoulder against his, their fingers closely entwined.
“I love you,” he said.
Just three words—but it was so sudden that she swallowed. Whatever they had been talking about just now, their emotions were in tune. They both felt equally ready to be there for each other, forever.
She didn’t say anything. She still couldn’t do it, couldn’t bring the words