Days of insane tilting had put the world in an alignment unlike any barbaric. There I was on the floor of the study with one hand holding a tiny portrait of my father and the other grasping Isabella's frantic letter. My father. A serpent. The man I remembered as a debt-laden, failure-ridden, hollow shell was, not long before, the daring lover of a Moretti. The man who sold me to settle a score was the very person who made the score in the first place.
My mother, Elena, was not a villain who betrayed her friend. She was a loyal confidante; a woman so brave she probably risked everything to help her two friends in a love utterly forbidden and impossible. The shame I had been made to feel for her transformed into something fierce and burning with pride. The pity I had felt for my father somehow curdled into a bewildering combination of awe and rage. He had loved so ferociously that he had taken on the most powerful family in the city. And he had lost so completely that the defeat haunted him until the end.
But what happened? If they were in love, why did he end up with Elena? Why did Isabella die by the hand of her husband? The letter presented me with another clue, another puzzle. I have hidden the letters where only a mother's love can find them. It was not a physical location; it was conceptual. A location only Isabella would think of as a mother.
Number one on my list was my survival. This new truth was infinitely more dangerous than the last. At first, I held secrets of a Moretti crime. Now I held the secrets of a Romano-Moretti love affair, a truth that would not ever clear my family name in Dante's eyes but would justify his hatred tenfold. My hands were shaking when I put the miniature and the sole letter back into the locked drawer. I returned the key to its secret hiding place behind the Madonna statue in the chapel, moving fast, and silently, bathed in dawn light. I had to obliterate all trace of my finding.
Later on that day, Dante found me in the drawing room before the portrait of his mother. He appeared pleased to be finding me quiet and contemplative, mistaking my stunned silence for a token of submission. Indeed, he shifted into a strangely easy mood, maybe affected by the sea breeze and the return to his sanctuary of a mother.
"She looks happy in this painting, don't you think?" he said as he joined me.
This was my opportunity. I had to pry to know more about the one truly holding the key to this enigma: his father.
"She does," I agreed quietly. "But she looks lonely too." I turned to look at him, my face a carefully composed mask of sorrowful curiosity. "You speak so much of her. But tell me about him. Your father. Were they happy?"
The change in his attitude was immediate. Whatever warmth, however slight, had fled from his eyes, replaced instantly by an icy, carefully guarded facade. "My father is a man of honor," he said, flatly and protectively. "He gave her everything. This house. A life of luxury. His name."
"Then did he give her his heart?" I pressed on, loading the question with feminine romantic interest. "In her diary...she wrote so little of him. It was always about you, her son, or her gardens."
Dante's jaw tightened. "My mother was a sensitive woman. My father is a practical man. He loved her in the way he knew how. He protected her. He provided for her. And when he was betrayed by her most trusted friend—your father—he endured it with strength. He held this family together. He is the reason the Moretti name still stands."
His fierce, almost mechanical defense of his father told me all I needed to know. He was utterly blind. A son defending his mother's murderer would see any question, any suggestion of doubt, as an attack on the very basis of his existence.
I finally ventured, cautiously. "I'm sorry," I said, looking down, "I never mean to imply..."
"What did you mean to imply?" Dante interrupted, his voice dangerously low. He stepped in front of me, obscuring my view of the portrait, and an air of menace was suddenly radiating from his body. "Why are these questions about my father? The villain in this story was yours, wasn't he?"
His eyes searched mine then, no ghost was seen here, but a potential traitor. An atmosphere turned unnaturally electric.
"I..." I stuttered, trying to force a terrified expression on my face. "I just... want to understand. To understand her, I have to understand her life. Her husband. That's all."
He sat for what seemed to be an eternity, eyes boring holes into me. I held my breath, the blood hammering loudly in my ears. I had brushed too close to the truth, and he could sense it, like an animal sensing a shift in the wind. I felt I had gone too far with the serpent. One more wrong move, another misplaced question, and he would strike.