by Sarah Ahiers
Behind the mask her eyes narrowed. “You snuck out, put yourself, the Caffarellis, our Family in danger.”
“Family,” I said slowly. It tasted strange in my mouth, the word. Or maybe it was because I was speaking with Lea. I looked at her again, at the bleak starkness of her mask. “I was thinking about entering Ravenna.”
“You . . . what?” Lea asked. I’d had rare opportunity to see her so shocked before this moment. “How could you do that? You could have been killed.”
I shook my head. “No. And don’t pretend like you believe that, either, especially not after that little skirmish.”
“That little skirmish could have ended with you or me dead, so maybe try not to treat it so cavalierly.”
I shrugged. I couldn’t find it in me to take it more seriously. I felt strangely empty and raw, like my insides had been scooped out. “It wasn’t me they were trying to kill.”
And I’d suddenly had enough of all of it, of talking to Lea, of dancing around the point of everyone and everything.
I strode to the house.
“Allegra!” Lea snapped, but I ignored her and pushed my way past the front door.
It was cool and dark inside. The lamps needed to be lit.
Lea stormed into the house beside me and I could practically hear the anger in her sharp breaths. Les came down the stairs at the same moment and when he saw me his shoulders slumped and he closed his eyes.
“Ghosts weep, Allegra.”
“She was on the Ravenna border,” Lea practically spat. She strode around me and yanked off her mask, setting it on the table.
“What?” Les asked, caught between shock and anger. “How could you do something so careless? What if the Da Vias had found you?”
“They did.” Lea rubbed her face.
And then because this little event hadn’t been enough, Emile entered from the back door, smiling. But when he saw the three of us, he stopped. “What’s wrong?”
“We have to leave,” Lea said.
“What?” he asked. Even Les looked at her in surprise.
“We have to leave. Immediately. We can’t stay here any longer. The Da Vias . . .” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “The Da Vias breached the Caffarelli territory to try to get to Allegra and me. If they did it once, they could do it again. We can’t take that chance and we can’t let the Caffarellis face such a burden on our behalf.”
“But what about Elena?” Emile asked, and he sounded so worried that for a moment I felt guilty, until I remembered that none of this was my fault.
“She’ll come with us. We’re leaving at first light. Sooner, if we can pack fast enough. If I have to keep ghosts off us, I will.”
“I just . . .” Emile looked between Lea and Les, bewildered. Then he settled on me. “What happened?”
“It’s complicated,” Lea said. “There have been some developments with Allegra.”
“With Allegra?” he asked.
“Emile—” Lea started to say but something bubbled up inside me and I couldn’t contain it anymore, couldn’t stand that they were talking about me like I wasn’t there, couldn’t stand the rage coursing through me.
I screamed. Loud and long and it felt so good just to let it out.
When I stopped, everyone stared at me, shocked.
“What the hells?” Emile asked.
I whipped around until I was facing Lea. “You stole me.”
She closed her mouth, pinching her lips together. Silence echoed around us.
“Allegra . . .” Les finally said.
“Your stole me from my mother,” I continued.
“It’s not what it seems,” Lea said.
“Don’t lie to me!” I yelled. “You’ve lied to me my entire life. Everything about me is a lie and you kept it secret from me for eighteen years. Eighteen years! All this time I thought I was an orphan, that my father had died in the fire and my mother had died in childbirth, but she’s alive and you’re the one who killed my father and now you want to stand there and tell me it’s not the truth?”
I was panting, staring at her, daring her to deny it.
Emile looked at all three of us with wide eyes.
Lea exhaled slowly through her nose. “I took you,” she said. “I took you from your crib and we walked out of that house and I never once looked back and never regretted it. You want to call me a child thief, then go ahead, but it was the right thing to do and I would do it again.”
Her words hit me like a bucket of canal water. I closed my eyes and rocked back on my heels. Dumb. I was so, so dumb. All my life I’d been living a lie. I was a stolen child, and now to have any sort of relationship with my mother, with the Family I’d been stolen from, I would have to give up the Family I was raised in, give up the people I’d spent my entire life loving.
It was unfair.
But I’d never fit with them. And I never would.
I took a deep breath, then walked up the stairs to my room. No one tried to stop me.
As I turned the corner, Emile finally spoke up. “Allegra has a mother?”
I couldn’t even take any satisfaction from knowing he’d at least been in the dark. Hells, maybe he had a mother somewhere, too. Nothing would surprise me anymore.
In my room I looked at my things. I hadn’t brought much. I hadn’t thought I wouldn’t be returning home. I hadn’t thought this would be the end of my time as a Saldana. I would have said good-bye to Marcello, Faraday, and Beatricia if I’d known. Now I would have to send them letters.
I remembered the letter Tulio Maietta had given to me at the ball. I found my purse and pulled it out, setting it carefully on the table. They could bring it back with them.
I needed to pack my things. I picked up my gown from where I’d left it on the floor and spread it on my bed. It was beautiful, but I would never wear it again. I would forsake Saldana black for Da Via red.
My eye caught the brown stain of one of the underlayers and I remembered the blood I had wiped there, and the way Nev’s hands had felt against my ankle when he thought I’d been injured. Which made me remember the way the rest of him felt, too, in the darkness of his room.
He’d sung that nursery rhyme about the Three.
We sing a song about the Three, of Meska, Culda, and Boamos. Boamos gives us wealth and thievery while Culda sings us safely home. And great Meska, with her animals, wraps us in our mother’s warmth.
And then he’d told me that story about Nula and Bema, wrapped in each other’s embrace after they had drowned, loving each other endlessly, even in death.
Soon I would be with my own mother. I wondered if I would love her as much as Bema had loved Nula. Or was it too late for that? Had Lea stolen that chance from me, too?
I turned away from the dress and pulled out my empty bag from under my bed. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.
Flour still coated me, except in spots where I had rubbed it away. Tears had traced vertical lines down my cheeks. I hadn’t even realized I’d been crying. But the white powder and the tear tracks made it almost seem like I was wearing my bone mask. I’d always thought of the water droplets decorating my mask as rain, but maybe they’d been tears all along.
I took a rag and scrubbed the flour from my face and throat and neck. I probably needed to bathe, but I just didn’t care enough to make the effort.
Someone knocked on my door. I studied it, wondering how to respond. The choice was taken from me when Lea pushed the door open.
I stared at her and she stared at me.
“What are you doing?” She finally broke the silence.
“I need space,” I said. “Can’t you just once give me space?”
“You were attacked by the Addamos mere hours ago, and you think it’s a good idea to go off on your own because you want some space? I thought you were smarter than that.”
A cold flame of anger burned through me. “Yes, well, I thought you were someone who didn’t steal children and lie to them, so I guess we’re both
disappointments.”
Lea made a noise, some sort of angry, exasperated groan. “What do you want me to say? I did what I thought was right.”
“How could it have been right?” I shouted at her. “You stole me! You stole me from my mother and you killed my father, your own brother! How could any of that be right?”
She shook her head. “I hope and pray that you never have to understand what it’s like to have your hands coated in the blood of your family, Allegra. None of the decisions I made were easy. And I’ve certainly made mistakes in my life. Mistakes based on love. On anger. Mistakes that had grave consequences. But taking you out of that home was not one of them.”
She paused and sighed. “Do you hate your life so much? Did we treat you so poorly?”
She sounded honestly concerned and sad and for a moment the anger inside me melted. But then I remembered the sound of Claudia screaming as Val dragged her away from me.
“How can you ask me that?” I asked. “I have nothing to compare it to, because you took me away from the life I was supposed to lead.”
“This is the life you are supposed to lead.” Lea jabbed her finger at her feet. “Safraella is not a god of fate. You can’t look at the past and imagine how your life would be if things had been different. That way lies madness and no comfort comes from it. Believe me, I know.”
“Believe you?” I raised my eyebrows. “How can I ever believe you again? My whole life has been based on a lie.”
Lea glanced around the room. “Maybe. Maybe we lied to you—”
“There’s no maybe!”
“Fine. Yes, we lied to you. We lied about the manner of your father’s death. And I lied about your mother and your heritage. And I lied about taking you. But I did these things because I wanted to keep you safe. Because the Da Vias were a nest of vipers, and I couldn’t stand to leave you with them.”
I shook my head. “But I’m a Da Via,” I said. “And if you hate them still, after all these years, then you must hate me, too. Because I’m one of them by blood. I’m Allegra Da Via as much as I am Allegra Saldana.”
“I can never forgive the Da Vias for what they did,” she said. “For what they took from me. From Emile. From you, even. It’s why we kept you confined. Why we didn’t want to bring you to Lovero. I knew the Da Vias would find you. I can’t let them take something else.”
Everything in my body stilled. “You were going to continue lying to me?”
Lea shook her head. “It’s not that simple. We hoped you would find something to ground you, to take your edge off. If you had found a reason to keep you with us—marriage, a child maybe, devotion, anything—we would have told you the truth.”
“You would have told me the truth only after I was forever trapped, you mean,” I said. “You speak about what the Da Vias took from you, but here you are, taking from me.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Allegra—”
“I’m done.” I cut her off. I was done listening to her lies. Her excuses. “When you leave, to go back to Yvain, I’m not going with you.”
She paused, her eyebrows a sharp V as she tried to reason through what I had said. “You can’t just stay in Lilyan with the Caffarellis.”
I grabbed my bag. “I’m not staying in Lilyan.”
I pushed my way past her, out into the hall.
“No,” she said after me, racing to catch up. “Allegra, no!”
I walked down the stairs and dropped my bags at the bottom. Les and Emile had lit a fire in the hearth and their conversation fled when Lea and I appeared.
“I’ll come back,” Emile said, and glanced at me quickly before heading for the front door.
“What’s going on?” Les asked.
“Tell her that she’s coming back with us when we leave,” Lea said, pointing her finger at me.
Les looked at me, eyes wide in surprise.
“Umm,” Emile said from the front door. “There’s a package out here if someone wants to open it . . .”
“Not now, Emile!” Lea snapped.
I strode to the front door.
Emile gave me a tight-lipped smile, and then left, heading off to find Elena, no doubt.
A small package sat on the front step. It hadn’t been there when Lea and I had returned so it must have just been delivered.
It wasn’t very big, the size of a large block of salt, maybe. It had been tied with a string, but there were no markings on it and it wasn’t addressed to anyone. There was a small, single hole on the side where a postman had mishandled it.
I picked it up and walked back inside, setting it on the kitchen table. I took a seat. Les sat beside me.
“What thoughts are tangling in your head, kuch nov?” he asked me quietly. Les never yelled like Lea, or got angry like Lea. He just got calm, and quiet. And maybe disappointed.
“I have to leave this Family.”
Lea threw her hands up in the air, and stomped up the stairs to busy herself in their bedroom.
Les looked at me, not trying to hide the pain in his eyes. “You would go to them? You would become a Da Via?”
“Did you really think you could hold on to me forever?”
He shook his head. “You were always a wild one. Always breaking the rules, wanting to play the games your own way. But if I pictured you leaving, I thought it would be with the Caffarellis, maybe. So you wouldn’t be lost to us forever. If you go the Da Vias, we will never see you again.”
“I could write letters.” And though I meant it mostly as a joke, Les shook his head.
“Letters are just empty shells of the person you really miss. Ask Lea about that. She can tell you.”
I didn’t need to ask Lea. All I had to do was think about the letter Tulio Maietta had given me for Marcello. That letter was just an echo of Marcello’s long dead lover. That letter would not return him to Marcello. “I don’t want to ask her anything.”
Les sighed. “You can’t shut her out forever. She raised you. She loves you.”
“Does she?” I asked. “She stole me from my mother. She killed my father.”
“No,” Les countered. “She didn’t.”
My face must have registered my doubt because he continued.
“Your father, Matteo Saldana, died that night in the Da Via’s home, yes, but I killed him, kuch nov, not Lea. I’m not sure Lea could have brought herself to do it.”
I closed my eyes. I felt like I was drowning in a canal, that no matter how much I stretched, I couldn’t reach the glassy surface above me. “I don’t believe you,” I said. “You’re just trying to protect her. Cover for her.”
“Lea Saldana has never needed my protection,” he said. “And I’m not lying to you in this. Your father attacked us. Lea didn’t know who he was at first, but when she discovered the truth, the fight drained away from her.”
“So you killed him. My father.”
I grabbed the package on the table, twisting it around, looking for the knot in the string to open it.
“Yes. I killed him to save Lea. To save her life. To save her from the grief of doing it herself. But also I did it because Safraella told me I would have to.”
I paused, the package forgotten in my hands as I looked at him and saw he was earnest. Les never spoke about meeting Safraella the night they’d been killed, but here he had given me something, a small truth from his experience.
“We didn’t go there to steal you,” he continued. “We went there to save Marcello. And to kill the Da Vias. But after your father was dead, we found a nursery with you and Emile inside. And Lea couldn’t leave you there. You were so tiny. And you and Emile were all that remained of her brothers, of her family. I think she would have rather died than leave you there.
“So we freed Marcello and went back for you.”
“And then you killed all the Da Vias,” I snapped, slamming the package on the table. Something shifted inside it, sliding across the inside of the box. “Let’s
not forget that slaughter.”
“Safraella took the Da Vias. If they hadn’t turned to another god, the ghosts would have never been able to enter their home. The deaths of the Da Vias are on the Da Vias alone. We would have left them alone had they not tried to stop us.”
“I don’t believe you,” I whispered.
He leaned closer to me. “I didn’t grow up with parents,” he said. “I never knew my father. My mother died when I was very young. All I had was Marcello, and you know how he is. But I tried to do my best by you and Emile. More than anything we wanted to keep you safe. To keep you free from heartbreak. I didn’t want you to grow up knowing I had killed your father. That I didn’t even hesitate. That I would do it again. I didn’t want you to grow up thinking there was something wrong with you because you were a Da Via, a member of a ruined Family. We wanted . . . we wanted better things for you.”
“You still could have told me the truth. You have no idea what it’s like to find out that you have a mother you thought was dead.”
My whole life I’d wanted to know about my mother, and in reality I could have actually known her.
“You’re right,” he said. “I don’t. And I’m sorry for that. But I know how you often act or make decisions before you fully think things through.”
“This is not one of those times,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it since I learned the truth the day we got here.”
He paused, seemingly collecting his words before he continued. “At the very least just know it was a rash decision that made us take you from the Da Vias that night.”
I tugged at the knot securing the string around the package.
“If you’d had time to think about it,” I said, “would you have changed your mind? Or would you have still taken me?”
“I would take you,” he said. He didn’t even hesitate. “I would take you a thousand times over, kuch nov.”
The knot securing the package came apart. The string tumbled off and coiled on the table. I flipped open the lid.
Sound.
A slither, maybe. Or a hiss.
A flash of movement.
A white stick sprang from the box. Les grabbed my hand and jerked me away.
The stick hit Les on the wrist.