You mafia brats who mistook your mother — kneel before your real mother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Crown
Adriana walks into Bianca's coronation and lifts the Donna's crown off her head; Cesare asks Ruggero if his mother ran off with him, and Ruggero says yes.
Bianca Corvi lowered the Donna's crown onto her own head at four o'clock on a Sunday, and my four sons applauded.
Three hundred people stood in the Montalto banquet hall to watch.
I stood at the back by the coat check, still wearing the gray coat I had bought at an airport.
The crown was gold, set with seed pearls, and older than the family's money.
My husband had put it on my head twenty-eight years ago, when I was nineteen and already carrying my first son.
Now that son stood at the microphone in a black suit and told the room what his father had wanted.
"My father said the woman who raised us would run this house after him," he said. "Donna Bianca raised us. She stayed."
The hall roared.
Bianca bowed her head and pressed one hand flat against her stomach and the other over her heart.
Beside me, the man who had brought me did not clap.
His name was Ruggero Lombardi.
He stood with his left hand in his coat pocket, as he had stood for the whole flight from Lisbon, and watched the stage.
Four days ago he had knocked on my door and told me my husband was dead.
Twelve years ago he had put me on a plane at midnight and never called.
"Wait until the toast is over," he said quietly. "Nobody in this room will touch you while you're with me."
I didn't trust him.
I trusted what he had told me about my youngest, and that was the only reason I was standing there.
On the stage, my second son, the one with the tattoo up his neck, kissed Bianca's cheek.
Tommaso, twenty-two, wearing his father's wire glasses, pulled out her chair.
Dario stood at the end of the line with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the floor.
He had been seven the last time I saw him.
He was nineteen now, tall, with his father's jaw.
Bianca had spent twelve years telling him what kind of woman his mother was.
So I walked up the aisle.
Heads turned as I passed. A woman near the front said my name and her husband told her to hush.
Tommaso saw me first.
"Cesare," he said.
My eldest, Cesare, looked up from the microphone and stopped talking.
I climbed the three steps to the stage.
Bianca turned, and her whole face opened into a smile.
"Adriana," she said. "Oh, thank God, you're alive."
She took both my hands in hers and held them.
"You're so thin. Boys, it's all right. Let her breathe."
For one second I was almost grateful.
Then I took my hands back, reached up, and lifted the crown off her hair.
"This is mine," I said.
Nobody in the hall moved.
Cesare crossed the stage and closed his hand around my wrist.
It was his father's hand, big and hot, and it hurt.
The last time I saw him he was fifteen and crying.
"Put it down," he said.
"Cesare."
"You lost the right to touch anything in this house the night you ran."
"I didn't run," I said. "I was taken out of this house."
"You left a note on my pillow."
"I never wrote you a note."
"I have it," he said. "I've kept it for twelve years. I know your handwriting."
I opened my mouth, and there was nothing true I could say to that in front of three hundred people.
The second son took a step toward me, then stopped when Cesare shook his head.
Tommaso had gone pale behind his glasses.
At the end of the line, Dario finally looked up.
He looked at the crown in my hand and then at my face, and I saw that he did not know me at all.
"Cesare, let her go," Bianca said gently. "She's tired. She's come a long way."
She touched his sleeve.
"And Adriana, honey, you don't have to hide it anymore. Tell them yourself who you left with."
She looked past me, down the length of the hall.
Three hundred heads turned to the coat check.
Ruggero had not moved.
His right hand was in plain view and his left was still in his pocket.
Cesare let go of my wrist.
"Lombardi," he said into the microphone, and the speakers carried it to every corner. "Did my mother run off with you?"
Ruggero looked at me for the length of one breath.
Then he looked at my son.
"Yes," he said.
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