Let's Start Over

The blood on her knuckles had dried to a rust-brown crust by the time Valeria Cruz walked out of the cage.

Nobody cheered for her. They never did, not in this part of Naples, where the underground fighting circuit was less a sport and more a controlled bloodletting — a place for men to spend money they shouldn’t have on girls like her, girls who had nothing left to sell except the damage they could absorb and dish back out in equal measure. The crowd was already drunk. Already talking about the next fight. Already forgetting her name.

That was fine. She’d rather be forgotten than watched.

She wrapped her hands in a dirty towel and shouldered through the back corridor, past the stink of sweat and ammonia, past the promoter’s booth where Gio—who was not her friend, had never been her friend, and owed her two weeks’ payment—sat counting cash with the focused tenderness of a man in love. She didn’t stop. She’d learned a long time ago that stopping in front of Gio only gave him an opportunity to invent new reasons why she owed him more than he owed her.

The alley behind the warehouse was cold for April, the kind of cold that came off the bay and got into your teeth. Valeria leaned against the peeling wall and tipped her head back and breathed it in—the salt, the exhaust, the distant fry-smoke from the street vendors on Via Marina. Naples at midnight smelled like something that had been burning slowly for centuries and had simply decided to keep going.

She understood that. The keeping-going part.

Her phone had two missed calls from her sister and a voicemail from a number she didn’t recognize. She listened to Lucia’s messages first: the first was a reminder to eat something that wasn’t espresso, delivered in the tone of a sixteen-year-old who had been forced by circumstance to become ancient; the second was the same message with more urgency and the addition of “and please don’t come home bloody again, the neighbors are starting to talk.”

Valeria smiled, which pulled at the split in her lip and made her wince.

She played the unknown voicemail.

The voice was male, precise, and entirely without warmth. “Ms. Cruz. My employer would like to arrange a meeting. Tomorrow, twelve o’clock, at the Caffè dell’Oro in the Chiaia district. You will be compensated for your time regardless of the outcome of the conversation. It concerns a matter of mutual benefit.” A pause, as if the speaker had been instructed to soften this part and found the concept personally offensive. “Please be punctual.”

She played it twice. Then she stood in the cold alley for a long moment, her split lip throbbing gently, and thought about who in this city would call her a matter of mutual benefit and mean it as a good thing.

She couldn’t think of anyone. She went home anyway.

—

The apartment on Via dei Tribunali was three floors up a staircase that smelled permanently of someone else’s cooking and slightly of mold, and it was the most expensive thing Valeria had ever made herself responsible for. Two bedrooms. A bathroom with hot water four days out of seven. A window in the kitchen that looked out on a narrow slice of sky between buildings, which Lucia called their view and Valeria called evidence that optimism was genetic and had skipped her entirely.

Lucia was awake. She was always awake when Valeria came home late, sitting at the kitchen table with her schoolbooks spread around her like a small barricade, her dark hair twisted up in a knot and her reading glasses—which she refused to admit she needed—perched at the end of her nose.

She looked up when Valeria came in. Her eyes went, in order, to the split lip, the bruised jaw, the knuckle wrapping, and then back to Valeria’s face with an expression that had long since graduated beyond alarm into something quieter and more tired.

“The other guy,” Valeria said, “is considerably worse off.”

“The other guy,” Lucia said, “was probably also a guy.” She pushed her chair back and went to the cabinet under the sink where they kept the first aid kit. “Sit down. You look like a shipwreck.”

Valeria sat. She let her sister clean the split lip with the careful efficiency that came from four years of practice, and she said nothing about the call from Dr. Marcello’s office that had come through that afternoon—the one she’d listened to standing outside the mechanic’s shop where she picked up extra work on days when her body hadn’t been recently rearranged. The one that said: the surgery is approved, pending deposit of the first installment, which must be received within forty-five days.

Two hundred and twenty thousand euros.

She had, at that moment, three thousand, four hundred, and sixty-two euros in a savings account she’d been feeding for two years. She had a fighting contract worth, at best, eight hundred a month before Gio took his cut and invented new expenses. She had her uncle’s old tools and a second-hand motorcycle and a sister with a heart condition that three doctors had now confirmed was going to kill her if it wasn’t corrected surgically before she turned seventeen.

She had forty-five days.

Lucia pressed a small bandage to the cut and smoothed it down with her thumb and then held Valeria’s face in both hands, the way she’d done since she was small, studying her with those dark serious eyes.

“What’s wrong?” she said. Not what happened. Not okay. Just: what’s wrong. Because Lucia had always been able to tell when Valeria was carrying something she hadn’t said yet.

“Nothing,” Valeria said. “I got a strange phone call. I’m going to a meeting tomorrow.”

“What kind of meeting?”

“The kind where someone wants something from me.” She pulled gently out of her sister’s hands and stood. “Go to sleep. You have school.”

Lucia watched her go. Valeria could feel it like a hand on her back, that steady, ancient gaze, all the way down the hall.

—

The Caffè dell’Oro was not the kind of place Valeria usually went to. The Chiaia district was old money dressed in new clothes—wide boulevards, boutique windows full of things that cost more than her rent, coffee that arrived in small porcelain cups as if volume were a vulgarity. She walked in at five minutes to twelve in her cleanest jeans and the black jacket she’d bought secondhand but maintained with religious dedication, her hands shoved in her pockets, her lip almost but not quite healed.

The man waiting for her was not what she’d expected from the voice on the phone. He was young—maybe thirty—and dressed in the kind of suit that didn’t advertise its quality because it didn’t need to. Dark hair, close-cropped. An expression of professional neutrality so complete it seemed practiced. He stood when she approached, which surprised her.

“Ms. Cruz.” He gestured to the seat across from him. “Thank you for coming. I’m Marco Ricci. I represent the De Luca family.”

The name landed the way it always did in this city—like a stone dropped into still water. The De Luca family. She’d grown up hearing that name spoken in two registers: the reverent murmur of those who benefited from their proximity, and the very careful silence of those who did not.

She sat down slowly. “All right,” she said. “Talk.”

He talked. He was precise about it, the way the voicemail had suggested he would be, laying out the proposition in measured sentences while the coffee arrived and sat steaming between them and Valeria did not touch hers.

The De Luca family required a wife for their heir.

The arrangement would be a contract marriage, duration twelve months, to begin within the fortnight pending agreement. Valeria would be expected to fulfill the role publicly—events, family obligations, appearances—and to abide by three non-negotiable rules, which he would outline in detail upon acceptance. At the end of twelve months, the marriage would be dissolved quietly, all records sealed, and Valeria would receive a sum that he named without inflection, the way you named the weather.

She heard the number. Something happened in her chest that she identified, after a moment, as the specific sensation of a door swinging open.

“The heir,” she said carefully. “You’re talking about Luciana De Luca.”

“Yes.”

Everyone in Naples knew the name. Everyone in Italy knew the name. Luciana De Luca—the Black Widow, the papers called her, though not twice in the same publication if they were wise—who had taken over the family at twenty-four and remade it in her image, which was to say: colder, sharper, more dangerous than it had been before. The woman whose former associates had a tendency to disappear. Whose enemies had a more permanent tendency.

Valeria looked at Marco Ricci across the small porcelain cup and the steaming coffee and the polite fiction of a normal afternoon.

“She’s a woman,” Valeria said.

“Yes,” he said again, as if she’d observed that the sky was a particular shade of blue.

She turned this over. She was not surprised, exactly. She was recalibrating. “Why me?”

He folded his hands on the table. “My employer chose you specifically. The reasons are her own.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.” He waited.

Valeria looked out the window at the clean sunlit boulevard, at the people walking past with their ordinary afternoon faces, at the city she had spent her whole life inside and would spend the rest of it inside unless something changed, unless something arrived and altered the math so fundamentally that all the old calculations became irrelevant.

Forty-five days. Two hundred and twenty thousand euros. A sister who held her face in both hands and had always been able to tell when Valeria was carrying something she hadn’t said yet.

“Tell me the three rules,” she said.

For the first time, something moved in Marco Ricci’s expression. Not quite a smile. Something adjacent to relief.

“Rule one,” he said. “Never ask questions that you are not prepared to hear answered.”

“Rule two,” he said. “Never disobey a direct instruction from Luciana De Luca.”

He paused on the third one, just briefly, in a way that a person who had not spent years reading silence would not have noticed.

“Rule three,” he said. “Never open the locked door in the east wing of the villa.”

Valeria looked at him. He looked back at her, steady and neutral and entirely unreadable.

“You have forty-eight hours to decide,” he said. “After which the offer is withdrawn.” He rose, buttoned his jacket, and placed an envelope on the table beside the untouched coffee. “For your time, as promised.”

He left. Valeria sat alone in the expensive café in the borrowed jacket and the jeans and the almost-healed split lip, and she stared at the locked door in her mind the way she always stared at the thing she’d already decided to do, working out the exact moment when the decision had been made and by how wide a margin she’d been lying to herself about still having a choice.

She picked up her coffee. Drank it. Set the cup back down.

She thought about Lucia’s hands on her face. About the specific weight of a debt that couldn’t be paid and a door she couldn’t open and a woman everyone in this city described in the same careful, reverent, quietly terrified silence.

She thought: forty-eight hours.

She thought: I’ve made worse decisions faster.

She picked up the envelope and walked out into the April sun, and Naples smelled like something burning, and she kept going.

— End of Chapter One —