Free The Obsession and the Fury by Nancy Barone Wythe

CHAPTER ONE
    Island of Panarea, Sicily, 1951.

    The sway of her hips was enough to make any man lose his head.
    Every day at noon she would cross the sun-bleached piazza. Like clockwork, all the men on the island of Panarea would be there to witness the apparition. To them she was a God-sent, Satan-driven beauty.
    Whenever she stopped to toss her black glossy mane down her back, her thin dress outlined her exquisite curves, no man was safe from the sinful thoughts she triggered. Not the old men sitting in the piazza playing with their dog-eared cards, nor the young parish priest hiding away and praying for his tempted soul in the cool depths of his church. The church that was more and more deserted each day.
    No one could resist the wild, feral look in her eyes. On the small Sicilian island sin was afoot, and at the age of eighteen, Rea was the embodiment of temptation. She had no origin, no family, no surname, but it didn’t matter. She was named after the island of Panarea because that was where she was found one misty morning six years earlier. At siesta time the men would lie back onto their makeshift beds and dream of her beauty.
    The women hated her and shunned her, lest her lewd savagery rub off on their own virtuous daughters. Or worse, lest the gypsy, as she was also called, rub herself up against their innocent husbands. Either way, Rea was an outcast in a close-knit society that believed in work, honoring their Lord Jesus Christ, and respect towards their fellow townsmen. But most of all, they believed that ‘skin’ equaled ‘sin.’
    To them, Rea was the dirt on the last rung, at the very bottom of society, if you didn’t consider bandits, but those only arrived occasionally by sea and left in a flurry as Panarea was too small to offer a permanent hiding place.
    Her man had been a middle-aged outlaw who had briefly wooed her. He had publicly claimed her by dragging her into his shack up in the hills and later, as was custom on the first night of proper marriages, emerged proudly exposing for all to see the bloody sheets that vouched for her innocence.
    The return of a rival bandit from Agrigento sent him into hiding soon after, and he hadn’t returned since.
    That had been three years ago, and still she feared his return to their shack on her own. Rumor had it she survived by selling her body, but strangely no woman’s husband nor, God forbid, son was ever indicated as one of her patrons.
    Rea was also infamous for another gift. During the hot afternoons she would sit in her home with her Tarot cards splayed before her on her makeshift table and read out the future to those men that had mustered the courage to climb up the steep path to her abode.
    If only they had known that the fortune-telling didn’t come from the cards, but from her dreams.
    Her nights were filled with images of the future, and while the happy events such as births and christenings comforted her, she was terrified of dreaming someone’s death, for, as sure as the sun always rises, that person would be dead within the week.
    To the people she was a witch, a whore and everything in between. Every death on the island was ascribed to her. She had foreseen them all, in her sleep, and she would watch from afar every accident, every death, every funeral parade.
    But the dream that had left Rea distraught was of the death of a handsome foreigner. He was kind and passionate, genuinely in love with her and together they were happy- until a kind woman showed up with a wedding dress. In that moment he would fall to his death down the cliff, into the sea, lost forever.
    Rea always woke up screaming, praying she would never meet him.
    This morning she entered the cool deserted shop during siesta time when no one was around. The shopkeeper, Don Antonio, was waiting for her with a bag of groceries and a filthy toothless smile. When she offered him her money, he grabbed her by the hips.
    “ Bella…sei bellissima,” he rasped, burying his sweaty face