MasukPOV: Matteo“Sit, Matteo, and do not ask me anything until I finish this row. If I stop now, the whole sleeve will unravel, and so will I.”I am Matteo, and Rosa said it on Sunday morning in her kitchen, with her needles clicking like tiny swords and a pot of coffee going cold on the table. She looked smaller than I remembered. Her hair had gone white as salt, and her fingers, which once kneaded dough for half the harbor, now moved in short stiff jerks. But her eyes were as sharp as ever. They flicked up at me and down again.Nico sat across the table, big and gray and silent, his hands folded around a cup he was not drinking. He had not met my eye since I came in.“I will wait,” I said.“You are a good man.” She clicked a stitch. “You are also a terrible sneak. You have been looking at the clock since you sat down.”“I have not.”“Twice. Nico counted.”“Three times,” said Nico, to his coffee.I laughed. I could not help it. For a moment the kitchen was warm, and smelled of cinnamon a
POV: Isabella“You are going to love it, Lady Isabella. We took thirty years off your face and the cane out of your hand, and the whole city will weep. Please say you are pleased.”I am Isabella, and young Fabrizio Orsolo said it on Saturday afternoon, bouncing on his toes beside a tall white cloth in the Hall, with his hair in his eyes and his whole heart in his smile. He is twenty six, the clerk of the council, and Orsolo’s grandson. He is so eager to be liked that it is painful to watch. I find I cannot dislike him. It is one of my weaknesses.I sat in my chair at the front, with Matteo at my right and Renzi glaring from the second row. Renzi had allowed one hour of this nonsense and no more. A crowd packed the benches behind me. Giulia stood at the foot of the cloth with her finger raised. Elia stood near the pillar in the plain dark coat, looking uncomfortable, as if the whole event were a boot a size too small.“What is under the cloth?” I asked.“A portrait. For the Founders Wa
POV: Matteo“Sit down, Matteo, and eat. You have the look of the Hill on you, and the Hill has never once come to my door without a promise it forgot.”I am Matteo, and Pina Bellandi said it on a gray morning in the salt district, in a one room house that smelled of fish soup and damp wool. I sat. I did not argue. In forty years I have learned that the quickest way to lose a woman’s respect is to stay standing in her kitchen.I had not meant to come. Isabella had slept badly after the Hall, her hand trembling on the quilt, and at dawn she had sent me out of the house with a push. “Walk,” she said. “You are making the bed nervous.” Then Giulia’s runner had met me at the corner with a folded note. A petition from the Bellandi family has been declined. Their son asks for you by name. I stood in the street with the paper in my fist. I knew the name. I had known it for a very long time.Santo Bellandi. He had stood beside me at the harbor gate on the worst night of my life, in the rain, wi
POV: Isabella“You knelt at the Speaker’s chair, Matteo. Do not lie to me. I know the dust of that Hall, and I know the face you make when you are protecting me from the truth.”I am Isabella, and I said it in my own bedroom at seven in the morning, with a cup of cooling tea in my hands and my husband standing in the doorway like a boy caught stealing plums. His canes were crooked. His good coat had a gray smear on the knee. He looked as if he had run a mile, which he could not do, and aged ten years doing it.“I was only walking,” he said.“Matteo.”“I was walking, and I knelt to tie my boot.”“You cannot tie your boot. You have not tied your own boot in three years.” I put the cup down, carefully, because my hand does not hold things as it used to. “Sit. Please. I have been dying of boredom for six months, and I will not be handled.”He sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress sighed. For a long moment he did not look at me, and I watched the sun move across his white hair, and I lo
POV: Matteo“The knot is wrong, Matteo. Isabella ties like a sailor, and this is a bow, the kind a child ties on a shoe. Somebody has been under my chair, and I want you to tell me who.”I am Matteo, and Giulia said it at dawn, in the empty Hall, with one lamp hissing between us and the smell of cold stone in my nose. I had come on my two canes through the wet streets, because her boy had pounded on my door before the sun was up. Isabella was still asleep. I had left a note beside her pillow and a kiss on her hair, and I felt like a thief for both.“Show me,” I said.Giulia is not a woman who trembles. She has stood against ministers and gunmen with the same flat face. But her hand shook as she pointed under the Speaker’s chair, to the shallow space where the box sat. Plain wood. Flat and square. Bound in twine, with a drop of black wax at the knot.I lowered myself to one knee. It cost me. My bad leg screamed, and I let it.“The seal is whole,” I said. The little lantern in the wax w
POV: Isabella“Tell me honestly, Isabella. Does it frighten you that the whole city is down there, and nobody has climbed the hill to ask your opinion? Because I would be furious, and I would hide it very badly.”I am Isabella, and Matteo said it in the soft gold light of an April evening, six months after the telegram, on the bench beside the stone. The lantern hung on its iron hook, unlit, waiting for dark. Below us, spread out like a map, lay Marabella. The harbor. The salt pans, flashing white. The Hall with its tall doors thrown open. And everywhere, in every street, shutters standing open to the spring.I had kept my promise. For six months I had lain in bed, and sat in chairs, and been fed soup. Two months of it, and then another four, because Renzi had discovered he enjoyed ordering me about. I was thinner. My hand still shook. But I could climb the hill now on Matteo’s arm, slowly, stopping at every bend, and no one carried me.“I am not frightened,” I said.“You are lying.”


![Fallen From Grace [Married to the Mafia Novel]](https://www.goodnovel.com/pcdist/src/assets/images/book/43949cad-default_cover.png)




