Blood Ties

Chapter 1

Italy, November 1924

Damiana stopped to catch her breath and wiped the rain from her face.

Fiorenza, her squad leader, was waiting, leaning against a tree, rifle cradled in her arms. "Come on," she called. "It's just up ahead."

Damiana hauled herself up the track. She'd caught a bullet in the leg during the fuckup in Sarzana, and now it hurt with every step. A trip that could have taken four days had taken six, but the squad wouldn't leave her behind, not when that meant leaving her for the blackshirts.

Carmina, who told everyone that she was older than she was, had said that Damiana might be spared on account of her pregnancy, but the others had seen enough of the blackshirts to know differently.

They're thugs, Lotta, who was both a widow and a communist, had snarled. They wouldn't give a fuck. A traitor's a traitor's a traitor, bourgeoisie bastard's baby in her belly or not.

After Sarzana, their squad had headed east through Carrara and up into the mountains. They had crawled through fields and woods the whole way, hiding from the ordinary people who might have turned them in. Every house they passed had a portrait of the Duce in the kitchen.

"Are you sure this is safe?" asked Damiana.

"Of course," Fiorenza slung her gun over one shoulder. "It's abandoned. No-one will come here."

Lazaro would have liked it, Damiana decided. Years ago, after the doctors had forbidden him from leaving his room, she had smuggled her brother out in his wheelchair, wrapped in coarse white linen blankets.

I feel like a leper, he had croaked, squinting in the sunlight. His skin had been paper-thin, even then, blue veins showing through it like stained glass. They had gone to the old family chapel, a building hidden from the manor by the estate's landscaped garden.

It had been a grand thing once, before the fire, but all that remained of that were the flakes of gold paint that clung to the walls, indistinguishable from the lichen. The remnants of the roof jutted into the sky like a ribcage, and the marble Christ that hung from the far wall had no eyes anymore, its face washed away by the rain.

What's the matter? Are you scared? Lazaro had asked her as she pushed him into its shadow, his face for a moment that of older brothers everywhere.

Of course not, she had told him, and she had sat by his feet, pulling the grass from between the tiles. Lazaro weighed next to nothing, but his chair had a comforting bulk.

Lazaro had stayed, lips moving slowly, just staring at the building as the shadows grew longer, until one of his coughing fits had forced them back inside.

What did you see there? she had asked him as she wheeled him away.