Assassin's Heart (Assassin's Heart, #1)(65)

“My father didn’t bring about his death. The Da Vias did.” And me. My fault.

He rubbed his forehead, smoothing out the lines, before he ran his fingers through his hair. “What do you know about me, Lea? How did your father speak of me?”

This was an odd turn of conversation. “He didn’t speak of you. Only my mother did, and that was to tell us to never bring you up.”

He nodded slowly. “Your father was a great many things. He was my brother and I loved him, but sometimes he believed in peace too much, saw the good in people even when it was nothing more than a mirage. It was your father’s misplaced belief that the Da Vias could be reasoned with that led to the death of your Family.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t believe you. What could you know of it anyway?”

“What could I know of it? Everything.” He settled in his chair, his hair resting against his shoulders. “The Da Vias killed the Saldanas because of me.”





twenty-seven


HIS WORDS WERE A SLAP TO THE FACE. HE WAS RESPONSIBLE for the Da Vias’ attack on us? That couldn’t be true. “I don’t . . . I don’t understand.”

“When I was younger, much younger, I was married to Estella Da Via, as you know. It was not a marriage of love. It could not be, from me, but the heads of our Families wanted a child from our union, of Saldana and Da Via lineage, and peace between us, if only for a time, and I was nothing if not obedient.”

He shifted in his seat. “No child came, even though the years passed as they do. And any ease between us rotted away until the core was nothing but resentment and blackness. And so I found someone else.

“He was a Maietta, and he was beautiful and full of grace and wit, and never before had I loved someone so well.”

My uncle’s eyes sparkled as he remembered his long-ago lover. The memory smoothed his face, made him appear younger.

“We kept it secret, of course. I was married, and the head of the Saldanas, my uncle Gio, was not tolerant of men who desired other men. But they found out, of course. My wife. My Family. Such anger from them all. My wife blamed me for the lack of child she’d been promised. Of course, how could she know who was to blame? Sometimes children are not born to a married union, and it is the way of Safraella. And I don’t think our scarcity of love for each other helped.

“I blamed her for wasting some of my best years, for sinking her talons in and dragging me into the dark pit she had created. It was she who had driven me elsewhere. I refused to reconcile. No threats from her Family or mine would make me turn away from Savio.”

He rubbed his jaw with the palm of his hand, lost in the tale. I thought about how it must feel, to love someone so well but to be told to turn away from them. I’d kept Val a secret purely because of that reason. But maybe it hadn’t been love between us, or at least on his part. Not if he could betray me so easily. Maybe I didn’t really understand true love, like Marcello described. Maybe love was less about feeling wanted and beautiful and more about feeling safe.

I glanced at Les, asleep on his bed.

“I don’t know who planned it,” my uncle continued. “Probably my wife. I do know, though, that it was her brother, Terzo, and my uncle Gio who murdered Savio. They didn’t even try to disguise it. There were witnesses, and they were in Maietta territory.

“I’d never felt such pain. And anger and grief. And never since. My uncle Gio thought that would be the end of it. That by removing Savio, he had effectively ended the problem. So confident was he that when I approached him in our home it never occurred to him I’d come to kill him.

“It was much easier than I thought it would be, spilling the blood of my family. Truly, I felt nothing. And I certainly felt nothing when I killed Terzo, my wife’s brother.

“After that, things were a little . . . complicated.” He waved his hand in the air. “Dante took over as head of the Family. The Da Vias felt their honor had been damaged, and the Maiettas were calling for a blood price for the death of Savio. I probably would have left on my own if Dante hadn’t disowned me. There was nothing left for me anyway.

“As far as I know,” he said, “Dante paid the Maiettas their blood price.”

A blood price to the Maiettas would have been a large sum of money. Maybe that was where much of the Saldana fortune had disappeared to.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He paused and appeared taken aback. “For what?”

“For Savio. For the way you were treated by people who should have loved you and stood by you no matter what.”

He grunted. “Yes, well. Family before family, of course. There was no real way to ease the Da Vias’ anger. They are quick to cast blame and slow to forget. Even if Dante tried to smooth things over, I don’t see how that would have worked. Estella felt I had personally shamed her, and nothing less than my head would’ve appeased her. She blamed Dante for letting me leave instead of turning me over to them. And then she started to blame Safraella.”

“Estella Da Via is a lunatic,” I said. “And now she’s the head of the Da Vias.”

“That’s unsurprising. She was not all that stable when I left. I heard she never did produce any children, to her eternal shame.”

“How did you hear that? And how did you know my name and know of my brothers? We weren’t even born.”