Page 33 of The Vow

“He be back soon, Signora.”

I rolled my shoulders back and took another step closer. “Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“Of course,” I murmured under my breath. Damon didn’ttell anyone anything; it was how he worked. How he survived.How he thrived.

“Do you have a way to contact him?”

Beady eyes scrutinized me now. “Only for emergency.”

“What about Patrick?” The large Irishman had been equally as scarce, but for some reason I felt I’d have a better chance breaking him down than this frail old woman who clearly idolized her boss.

“With Signor Damon.” She went back to her task.

I moved to the counter, resting my elbows on the granite. “Is gnocchi on the menu for tonight?”

“Tomorrow.”

I stilled, noting the subtle change in her voice. “What’s for dinner tonight?”

Her silence was too long to be anything but suspicious as she pressed the tines of a fork into the small potato dumplings.

“Nonna…”

“No cook tonight,” she said.

Jackpot.“Why not? Is something happening? Are we going somewhere?”

“Don’t know. Signor Damon told me to have night off.”

I straightened, banding my arms over my chest. Something was going on, and Nonna might not know, but I was going to figure it out. Looking over my shoulder, my gaze passed and then snapped back to Damon’s bedroom door.

Was it locked?

Maybe the answers were inside.

“He’s a good man, Signora.”

My head swiveled back to the older woman, biting into my cheek to stop my instinctive response—well, then you don’t know him—because she did. She was here every day. He trusted her to be here every day, knowing who he was and what he did. But she clearly had no idea what he’d done to me.

“How did you meet Mr. Remington?”

Damon bargained for his name, but I never agreed to feign that intimacy in front of everyone.

“Signor Damon?” She paused, stubbornness livening the worn creases on her face.

“Yes.”

Grabbing another ball of potato dough, she rolled out another length to be cut into fresh gnocchi.

“In Sicily, my daughter got involved with wrong men. La Cosa Nostra.”The Sicilian Mafia.“Signor Damon was there when they came to take her from me.” Nonna turned her arm, the long scar clearly a result of the confrontation. “He stopped them. Save her. Save Me.” The emotion in her voice carried, and I fought against the tightening in my throat. Stepping back from the counter, Nonna patted her hand to the side of her stomach. “Signor Damon hurt to save us.”

The scar.I revisited the memory of the puckered streak across his side that had been on display that night in the kitchen. As soon as I started to feel something dangerously close to admiration, I caught myself and locked it away.

“You know he’s a criminal, right?” I asked her bluntly. “Mr. Remington used La Cosa Nostra to launder money. He was working with them. He’s no better than them.”

Nonna let out a hiss, her hand starting to tremble on the counter, her loyalty to Damon baked into her bones. “And he ruined all that to save us. Strangers to him.”

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