Papa left for his shopfronts shortly after the carriage took Mamma Lucrezia with Maria and Filippo to Palazzo Palagio. Once she was alone, Luna went to the main hall. It did not matter where she spent the rest of her day, she could roam the house freely, though she did not feel any of her usual delight in having time to fill with her own desires. She stood in the centre of the hall where her father greeted important visitors and where she’d entertained them with her rhetoric. Today, it was empty of most furniture, save for serving tables set back against the walls. It was a room always waiting to be filled with people. She turned full circle, remembering the thrill of the audience’s applause and her father’s pride. This would be where the family feasted to celebrate Maria’s wedding to the man who had attacked Luna and she knew she must be there as Maria’s loving sister. She saw, with a jolt, that her portrait was mounted on one of the walls, the painted shoes on view, as was her dutiful smile. She stopped and let out a long anguished sigh and with it all the breath she felt she’d been holding in since her step-mamma pressed her into her embrace. She looked up to the fresco far above. There was adoration and strength in the painted Mother Mary’s love of her baby. Luna thought of the mother she’d never known. She would have spoken in her daughter’s defence. Her true mother would have protected her from Guido Palagio. She sighed again, forcing her breath out to the point of choking and it became a loud, ragged sound. She bent over with the exertion, but then she lifted her head and the sound came again. It was guttural and base, and she could not stop its power escaping, weaving around the muscles of her tongue at the back of her throat, and from deeper still it came, from the dark spaces amongst her organs that worked the life into her woman’s form and where her pain lived. She howled.