All Chapters of Death Bliss: Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

9 Chapters

Prologue

Masseria Armenise — Six Years EarlierI wind my father's watch by candlelight, because the generator has been down since Tuesday and my uncle says a man who cannot live without electricity has already surrendered something he will spend the rest of his life trying to buy back. It is the kind of thing my uncle says to make thrift sound like philosophy. I have stopped correcting him. I am twenty-six years old and I have learned that some men mistake correction for challenge, and my uncle is one of the men in this house who cannot tell the difference, and telling him so would only prove his point.The watch is heavier than it looks, gold-cased, the crystal cracked in the corner where I dropped it running from a wasp's nest when I was eleven. I never had it fixed. My father wore it whole for thirty years, and I like that mine tells a different story even while it keeps the same time.Domenico is asleep two doors down, on top of his sheets in the heat, one arm flung over his eyes the way h

Last Updated : 2026-08-31

Chapter 1

I set the coffee cup down on a stack of Sicilian land deeds and watch the steam curl upward into the morning light that cuts through the kitchen window. The cup is the same one I have used since I was fifteen, a heavy ceramic thing with a hairline crack running from rim to base, and I know exactly where to place my thumb so the heat does not reach the fracture. Below me, through the worn linoleum, the catering kitchen is already alive. Garlic hits the hot oil in the big steel pans, a sound I have been hearing since I could stand on a stool and watch my father work, and the smell rises through the floorboards the way it always does, sharp and familiar and a little tired.The deed in front of me is from 1923. I have been translating it for the better part of an hour, my pen moving in the margins, turning the formal Italian of a long-dead notary into English that a Manhattan lawyer can bill for. The property in question is a small vineyard outside Marsala, and the clause I keep circling

Last Updated : 2026-08-31

Chapter 2

My father comes up the stairs from the catering kitchen, and I hear him before I see him. He climbs the way he does everything now, with the distracted gravity of a man whose body is in one place and his mind is in ten others, all of them on fire. He is sixty-one years old, and the last three years have carved lines into his face that I do not remember from before. When he reaches the kitchen doorway, he stops and looks at me, then at Enzo, then at the pan of burned eggs."You're burning the eggs," he says."I know," Enzo says.My father does not say anything else. He crosses to the table and sits down across from me, and I can smell the kitchen on him, the garlic and the fry oil and the clean sharp scent of the bleach he uses on the counters at the end of every shift. He folds his hands on the table. His knuckles are swollen, the way they get in winter, but it is June and the heat is already pressing against the window glass."You're working," he says. It is not a question."Sicilian

Last Updated : 2026-08-31

Chapter 3

The unpaved road rises through the olive groves like a scar that never healed right, white limestone dust and broken stone, and I stand in the shadow of the gatehouse arch watching the black sedan climb it. I have been watching for an hour. I knew it was coming before dawn, when the air still held the night's chill and the swallows had not yet begun their work in the eaves, because my uncle's people called from Bari to say the American had landed and was on her way, and because in the three days since I returned to this place I have learned to listen for the things that are already in motion before they arrive.The sedan moves slowly. The driver is one of ours, a man named Rocco who has been with the family since before I left for Buenos Aires, and he knows the road well enough to avoid the worst of the ruts. But the American does not know the road. She is a shape behind the rear window, dark hair and a stillness I can see even from this distance, and as the car climbs the last rise I

Last Updated : 2026-08-31

Chapter 4

The blood oath I swore at his grave in Palermo is still fresh in my mind, the words I said with my hand on the stone and my uncle's hand on my shoulder, the promise to use the family's machinery to find the men who killed him and make them answer for it. I believed, when I swore it, that the oath was a straight line from my grief to justice. I believed the syndicate was still the thing my father built, a structure of loyalty and obligation and blood that held its shape because everyone inside it agreed on what the shape was. I am beginning to understand that ten years is a long time to be away, and that the shape may have changed while I was not looking.I walk through the courtyard toward the study. The study is at the back of the house, a small room with a window that looks out over the olive groves and a desk that belonged to my father, and on the desk there is a telephone and a ledger and the leather folder that Matteo placed there three minutes ago. I open the folder. I take out

Last Updated : 2026-08-31

Chapter 5

The chair is wrought iron, painted white once and now flaking in long curls that catch on my skirt when I shift my weight. I have been sitting here for twelve minutes by the angle of the shadow the north wall throws across the flagstones, and I have spent every one of them cataloguing what I can see.Three doorways open onto the courtyard. The one Matteo led me through is the smallest, an arched service entrance half-hidden behind a row of terracotta pots filled with rosemary that has gone woody and untended. The main house rises two storeys to my left, its windows shuttered against the afternoon heat, and the north wing stretches away from it at a right angle with a covered loggia running its length. The stone under my feet is the same white limestone as the walls, bleached so pale it hurts to look at directly, and the olive trees beyond the low perimeter wall are silver-green and motionless in the still air.I sit the way I learned to sit in deposition rooms. Spine straight. Hands v

Last Updated : 2026-08-31

Chapter 6

Domenico follows my gaze and half-turns. The woman does not flinch or step back. She stands in the doorway with her gnarled hands folded in front of her and waits."Carmela," he says. It is not a greeting. It is an acknowledgment, the way you acknowledge a piece of furniture that has been in the house longer than you have been alive."I came to see if the guest needed anything," she says. Her voice is quiet, the dialect thick and rural, the kind of Puglian Italian that belongs to villages too small for maps. But her eyes stay on me, and I understand that she did not come to see if I needed anything. She came to see me."She is not a guest," Domenico says. He does not turn around. "Bring coffee. Two cups."The woman nods once and disappears back through the service entrance, and I hear her footsteps retreating across the flagstones, slow and uneven, the gait of someone whose joints have been worn down by decades of stone floors and stairs."Nonna Carmela," Domenico says. "She has been

Last Updated : 2026-08-31

Chapter 7

The key turns in the lock with a sound like a bone resetting, and I push the archive door open with my left hand, the scar across my knuckles pulling white against the iron strap. Two mornings have passed since I showed her this door and left her standing outside it. Two mornings of watching her eat breakfast at the long table in the servants' hall, her spine straight, her fork moving from plate to mouth with the mechanical precision of someone who has decided that food is fuel and nothing more. Two mornings of Matteo reporting that she asked no questions, attempted no doors, spoke only to Nonna Carmela in the kitchen and only in Italian, and that the old woman answered in dialect and watched her with the same sharp attention she gives the olive harvest accounts.The archive room smells of old paper and the particular dry heat that builds in stone chambers with only one window. That window is high in the north wall, a narrow rectangle of iron-framed glass that admits a slab o

Last Updated : 2026-08-31

Chapter 8

It is a small thing. The pen halts mid-stroke, the tip resting on the paper without moving, and her shoulders go still in a way that is different from her working stillness. This is not the pause of someone checking a date or deciphering a faded stamp. This is the pause of someone who has just recognized a name she was not expecting to find.I do not move. I do not lower the newspaper. I keep my eyes on the column of figures I have been pretending to study for the past twenty minutes and I wait.The name, I know, is on one of the 1980s purchase deeds. Matteo pulled those deeds from the shelves yesterday morning, on my instruction, and I reviewed them myself before Serafina entered the room. They are stamped with the name of a Calabrian broker who handled the intermediary clauses on the transactions that funded this estate. I know the name. I have known it since I was twenty-four years old, standing in my father's study while he explained, in the same tone he used to ex

Last Updated : 2026-08-31

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