“It wasn’t my intention to attack you,” Enzo replied. “We just needed to keep you here.”
Keep her here? Jess’s mind raced. “So it was you that texted me from Giovanni’s phone?”
Enzo frowned. “Text?”
“Yes, the messages to my phone. You texted me from Giovanni’s phone? Told me to come back to the castle.”
His face brightened. “Ah yes, I was text to you.”
Did he just not understand English very well? She didn’t bother to correct him. “Why?”
“Why?” Enzo took a step toward Jess, their faces not more than two feet apart. “So he never told you? The Baron never told you?”
Jess was beyond tired of this. “Told me what?”
Enzo leaned toward her, waved a hand between them. “There has been a fight between our families for hundreds of years. The Ruspoli wiped us out, and it was here on Gigli that they signed the papers that took our villa a hundred years ago.”
Jess grimaced. “So what, this is that feud? Some kind of vendetta?”
“A vendetta! Yes.” Enzo’s face lit up. “Our family was forced into disgrace, forced out of the Saline valley six generations ago.”
A light bulb went off in Jess’s mind. “So that villa across from Castello Ruspoli, the one connected by a cable car across the valley, that’s your family’s villa?” Giovanni said it was a new addition, just added to the family a hundred years ago.
“Yes, yes!” Enzo’s face lit up.
His face was right in Jess’s. She smelled garlic and the sour stink of alcohol. Taking a step back, she demanded, “What does this have to do with me? And why do you keep saying ‘our’?”
“Our family, the Tosetti.” Enzo punched his chest. “We are family. You and I.”
Jess took another step back and slumped against the stone wall by the window. Seagulls squawked. A tingling dread crept up her spine. “What?”
“Your mother is one of the last in the direct blood line of the Tosetti.” Enzo stepped toward her again, trapped her against the wall. “We have been planning this for a long time, to avenge the cruelty inflicted on our family by the Ruspolis.” His eyes glittered, sweat beading on his forehead. “But now, we were forced to act.”
Jess remembered her mother saying her family moved out of the Saline valley, to America over a hundred years ago, part of the immigration wave into New York. But this, this was crazy. “There’s no way I’m related to you in any—”
“Oh no?” He put one arm on the wall beside her head, raised a finger to an inch from her nose. “Tell me that vengeance doesn’t flow in your veins? I’ve seen it in your eyes.”
Jess tried to squirm away, but there was nowhere to go. The room spun, Jess’s vision swam. “But now, you choose this moment, with Nomad coming…?” She stole a look out of the window at the setting sun. “This is insane!”
Enzo slammed the wall by her head with his fist. “This is the divine hand of GOD! It proves the Tosetti are the favored ones. That He smiles on us. It is a sign, no? There will be no more Ruspoli.”
“And no more Tosetti,” Jess whispered. She pushed along the wall away from him. Taking deep breaths, she steadied herself and looked down at the floor. “So that was you?” She looked at Enzo. “That was you who sent my mother the Facebook message?”
The whole reason they came to stay at the Ruspoli Castle, back to the Saline Valley, was the Facebook message her mother received, from a long lost relative. But the person hadn’t responded after they arrived in Italy.
Enzo nodded. “Yes. I Faced her.”
Somehow Jess doubted Enzo even knew how to send an email, but he kept nodding his head. Jess watched his eyes carefully. “And this is all a coincidence, Nomad—?”
“I told you, not a coincidence. This is divine. This is GOD!” The tendons in Enzo’s neck flared out, his face burning crimson.
“Okay, okay,” Jess held her hands out, appeasing him. He looked psychotic. “It’s God.”
She glanced out the window at the setting sun. Less than twelve hours. “What about Hector? He doesn’t know about all this. Why don’t you let him go?”
Enzo laughed. “There is a plan for him.”
Jess closed her eyes, the vision of the little boy’s face, ringed in white, swallowed by the black hole. She opened them, took a step toward Enzo. “What if we”—she pointed at him, then at her chest—“took him, raised him as our own?”
“We?” For the first time, Enzo looked unsure.
“Yes, you and I.” She took Enzo’s hand. “We’re family. That would be sweet revenge, no? To take the final Ruspoli heir, turn him into a Tosetti?”
A scowl passed across Enzo’s face, slowly replaced by a menacing grin. He laughed. “You see, I told you that you were a Tosetti.”