Introduction

From the New York Times, USA Today, and internationally bestselling author of the Angelology series comes a bewitching gothic novel of suspense that plunges readers into a world of dark family secrets, the mysteries of human genetics, and the burden of family inheritance. It feels like a fairy tale when Alberta ”Bert” Monte receives a letter addressed to “Countess Alberta Montebianco” at her Hudson Valley, New York, home that claims she’s inherited a noble title, money, and a castle in Italy. While Bert is more than a little skeptical, the mystery of her aristocratic family’s past, and the chance to escape her stressful life for a luxury holiday in Italy, is too good to pass up. At first, her inheritance seems like a dream come true: a champagne-drenched trip on a private jet to Turin, Italy; lawyers with lists of artwork and jewels bequeathed to Bert; a helicopter ride to an ancestral castle nestled in the Italian Alps below Mont Blanc; a portrait gallery of ancestors Bert never knew existed; and a cellar of expensive vintage wine for Bert to drink. But her ancestry has a dark side, and Bert soon learns that her family history is particularly complicated. As Bert begins to unravel the Montebianco secrets, she begins to realize her true inheritance lies not in a legacy of ancestral treasures, but in her very genes.

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Excerpt

One

To discover you are the heir to a noble title in the twenty-first century is like winning a fortune in the lottery, the Mega Millions or a Powerball jackpot, only to find your prize will be paid out in francs or liras: suddenly you are rich, but rich in a currency that has no value in the modern world.

Or so it seemed to me upon learning that I was the last living descendant of the ancient house of Montebianco, a family whose power, from the Middle Ages to the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century, was immense; whose sons—because only sons mattered in those unenlightened times—had fought religious wars and married minor princesses and sired noble children, but whose fortunes (and fertility) had diminished as the modern world rose, leaving me, Bert Monte, a twenty-eight-year-old American woman with few social graces and zero knowledge of European history, the sole blood heir to an ancestral domain in the mountains of northern Italy.

It all began early one Saturday morning just before Christmas. I was living alone, although Luca’s things were still at the house. He’d been taking clothes to his new apartment slowly, week by week, a pair of jeans here, a T-shirt there, in an effort to keep our lives intertwined. His plan was working: we saw each other often, and had even gone out for dinner and a movie the month before. While we’d been separated for six months, and it had been my idea for him to move out, I found it comforting to have my husband around. We’d been together for nearly ten years, and despite the problems—which were mostly my problems, as we both would agree—it was hard to imagine life without him. My parents were both gone, and I had no brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles or cousins. Luca was the only family I had.

Until, that is, the letter arrived from Italy. A knock came at the door, and I left off decorating the Christmas tree—a three-foot fir festooned with tinsel and blinking lights—to answer. It was a cold, sunny December morning, the sky so bright that the envelope glinted like a mirror in my hand. I signed my name on an electronic pad, wished the delivery man “happy holidays,” and was back inside before I saw that the envelope was addressed not to me, Bert Monte, but to someone named Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco.

I sat down at the kitchen table, pushing aside tinsel and glass bulbs, so that I could get a better look. The return address was from Torino, Italia. A parade of bright Italian stamps floated at the top right corner of the glossy envelope. The words “Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco” were scrolled across the center. Although everyone called me Bert, my given name was Alberta, so that part made sense. The other names, however, were a mystery.

I was hesitant to open something that might not belong to me, but Alberta was my name, after all, and the address was my address, and so without further debate, I ripped the envelope open. A sheaf of thick, A4-sized pages fell into my hand. The top page was covered in calligraphy, and in the bottom right corner, gleaming like a first-place medal, shone a golden seal of a castle floating above two mountains. The paper alone was something to behold—heavy bond linen stock, creamy and thick, with an ink signature pressed into the fiber by the nib of a fountain pen. The text was dense and entirely foreign. Turning the pages, I tried to find something I could understand, but aside from the name Montebianco, which appeared about every other line, it was entirely incomprehensible. Holding up the envelope, I said the name out loud, “Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco,” fumbling over the syllables as if I were a child learning to read.

My first thought was to call Luca. He always knew what to do. Logical, reliable, sane—these were the qualities I loved about him, and the qualities that bound us still, even after all the rough times we’d been through. I’d known Luca most of my life—we had attended the same schools; we had practically grown up together—and he knew me better than anyone. He had grieved with me after the last miscarriage, and he was the one who suggested we go to therapy, volunteering to join me, even when it was clear that I needed it more than he did. Luca had always believed that with a little work and preparation, we could survive anything. But one thing was certain: neither of us could have prepared for a letter like the one from the Estate of the Montebianco family.

I remember sitting there, in my kitchen, turning the envelope over in my hands. A strange feeling came over me then, clear as a voice whispering in my ear. It was a warning, a premonition of danger. I wonder now, after all that I’ve learned about the Montebianco family, and all that has happened since that snowy December day, what my life would be like had I tossed the envelope into the recycling bin with the junk mail and old newspapers. But I did not throw out the letter, and I did not pay attention to the creeping sense of danger slithering up my spine. I simply slipped the papers back into the envelope, grabbed my jacket, and went out into the cold, bright morning to find Luca. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1.Have you, or anyone in your family, ever taken a DNA test?

2. What does your DNA and family heritage mean to you? Do you identify with the culture of your ancestors? What does that mean to you?

3. Alberta learns that she has inherited a title and an estate in the Italian Alps, and that her family is utterly different from what she believed it to be. How much does honesty around inheritance (both genetic and financial) matter to you? Have you had conflicts or surprises around this issue?

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