far as Sergio was concerned, his older brother had it all, the title, the money, the looks, the palazzo that had been in the family for seven generations, the artwork, the importance, the charm, and Graziella, of course, which had been the final spark to ignite his hatred for his older brother.
He hated her father most for possessing Graziella, the golden fairy queen with the incredible green eyes and spun-gold hair. She had been exquisite, and he had loved her since he had been a boy. He had loved her always … always … when they all spent their summers together in Umbria or San Remo or at Rapallo, when she was a little girl. But she had always loved Umberto. Everyone had loved Umberto … everyone … especially Graziella.
Sergio had knelt, sobbing, at her funeral at Santa Maria Maggiore, asking himself why it had all happened. Why had she married Umberto? Why had she run to him after he was dead? No one at the funeral had fully understood the part that Sergio had played in his brother's and sister-in-law's deaths. To their friends, he had always seemed ineffectual, a weakling. And now no one knew the truth, except Serena's grandmother. It was she who prodded and pried and inquired and pressured in all the right places, she who pressed everyone she knew until she learned the truth. Only she had been brave enough to confront him in a rage of horror and grief so overwhelming that when it was over Sergio understood as never before the nightmare of what he had done to his own flesh and blood. And for what? A white marble palazzo? A woman who had died at the feet of her husband, and had never loved anyone but him in any case?
For what had he done it? his mother had screamed. For the love of Mussolini? “That pig, Sergio? That pig? You killed my firstborn for him?” He had trembled in the wake of his mother's rage, and knew that he would spend the rest of his lifetime trying to live with the truth. He had denied everything to his mother, denied that he betrayed Umberto, denied that he had done anything at all. But she had known, as had Serena. Those brilliant green eyes of hers had bored into him at the funeral, and he had been grateful to escape at last. Unable to fight the tides of Mussolini, and unwilling to expose the horror of her son's fratricide to the whole world, the elderly Principessa di San Tibaldo had taken Serena and the oldest of the servants and removed them from Rome. The palazzo was his now, she told him as she stood for a last moment in the brilliantly lit black and white marble hallway. She wished never to see him, or the house, again. He was no longer her son, he was a stranger, and for a last moment she had gazed at him with tears filling the wise old eyes once more. She shook her head slowly then and walked silently out the door.
She and Serena had never seen her uncle, or the house, or Rome again. She had been twelve the last time she walked out the richly ornate bronze doors on the Via Giulia and yet even as she stood in the chill air of the Alps two years later she felt as though they had left Rome that afternoon. It had been a difficult two years, years of fighting off the memories of the sounds of her father being beaten by the soldiers in the courtyard, the frantic look of her mother as she had run out of the house the next morning, her hair barely combed, her eyes wide with fear, a red wool coat clutched around her, and the sight of their bodies when the soldiers had left them at the gate, sprawled on the white marble steps, their blood trickling slowly down into the grass … and Serena's endless screams as she saw them … saw them lying there … even as she said good-bye to her grandmother. The memories were not yet dim, and now she was losing her too. Losing her by being sent away, to safety, her grandmother had insisted. But what was safe now? Nothing was safe, Serena knew that at fourteen. Nothing would ever be safe again. Nothing. Except for her grandmother, she had lost it all.
“I will write to you, Serena. I promise. Every day. And when