He learned that Tessa was twenty. That she’d grown up in the Sicilian village of Altofonte. When she was sixteen, a powerful man named Primo Alieveri, had seen her bicycling past the café where he sat with his associates. He’d made inquiries and then arranged to meet with her father. Federico was a music teacher in their village, famous for speaking three languages but also rumored to be going pazzo, having married so late in life. Tessa’s mother had passed on when she was ten, and her father raised her alone, with no brothers or money to protect her. And so a deal was struck.

Tessa and her father made the trip to Collesano at the base of the Madonie Mountains on the Tyrrhenian coast, arriving the day after Tessa’s seventeenth birthday. Federico had hired guards to protect Tessa’s dowry, mostly jewels and coins passed down from her mother’s side of the family, and their first night in the guesthouse of Primo Alieveri’s estate, the throats of the guards were cut as they slept in the barn and the dowry was taken. Primo Alieveri was mortified. He scoured the village for the bandits. At nightfall, over a fine dinner in the main hall, he assured his guests he and his men were closing in on the suspects. The dowry would be returned and the wedding would take place, as planned, that weekend.

When Federico passed out at the table, a dreamy smile plastered to his face, Primo’s men helped him out to the guesthouse, and Primo raped Tessa on the table and then again on the stone floor by the hearth. He sent her back to the guesthouse where she tried to rouse Federico, but he continued to sleep the sleep of the dead. She lay on the floor beside the bed with the blood sticky between her thighs and eventually fell asleep.

In the morning, they were awakened by a racket in the courtyard and the sound of Primo calling their names. They came out of the guesthouse where Primo stood with two of his men, their shotguns slung behind their backs. Tessa’s and Federico’s horses and their wagon were gathered on the courtyard stones. Primo glared at them.

“A great friend from your village has written to inform me that your daughter is no virgin. She is a puttana and no suitable bride for a man of my stature. Be gone from my sight, little man.”

In that moment and several that followed, Federico was still wiping the sleep from his eyes. He seemed bewildered.

Then he saw the blood that had soaked his daughter’s fine white dress while they slept. Tessa never saw how he got to the whip, if it came from his own horse or from a hook in the courtyard, but when he snapped it, he caught one of Primo Alieveri’s men in the eyes and spooked the horses. As the second man bent to his comrade, Tessa’s horse, a tired, orange mare, broke from her grasp and kicked the man in the chest. The horse’s reins raced through her fingers and the beast ran out of the courtyard. Tessa would have given chase, but she was too entranced by her father, her sweet, gentle, slightly pazzo father as he whipped Primo Alieveri to the ground, whipped him until strips of his flesh lay in the courtyard. With one of the guards (and his shotgun), Federico got her dowry back. The chest sat in plain view in the master bedroom, and from there, he and Tessa tracked down her mare and left the village before dusk.