Page 1 of Deadly Confessions
PROLOGUE
The Night God Looked Away
Valentina (age 10)
The first sound is glass.
Not a window. A picture frame. Mamma's wedding portrait above the console table in the foyer, the one she straightens every morning because Papa hangs it crooked on purpose to make her laugh.
It hits the marble floor and the glass breaks. The laughter that should follow doesn't come.
I sit up in bed. My nightgown is twisted around my waist. My stuffed rabbit, Signora Bianca, is on the floor where she fell during the night. The clock on my nightstand reads 11:47.
Voices.
Not my parents' voices. Low. Male. Too many of them.
Then Mamma screams.
The sound goes through me like voltage. It penetrates through the mattress, through my bones, and through the walls of the apartment that have kept me safe for ten years. A scream that doesn't sound like her. That sounds like something being torn from the inside out.
I throw the covers off. My feet hit the cold tile. I take two steps toward my bedroom door and stop because my hand is on the knob. Something tells me not to open it.
I hear Papa's voice. Loud. The voice he uses when he argues with Father Domenico about politics at Sunday dinner. The voice that fills a room.
"Non lei. Non lei, vi prego."
(Not her. Not her, please.)
Something heavy hits the floor in the hallway. The sound a body makes when it falls on marble.
I know because I fell last winter running in the corridor and hit the same marble and cried for twenty minutes and Papaput frozen peas on my elbow and called mela mia guerrieraand I wasn't a warrior. I was ten years old with a bruised elbow. And the sound my body made when it hit the floor was small.
This sound is not small.
I back away from the door. My bare feet make no noise. I go to the closet, push past the dresses Mamma bought me for school and crawl among the winter coats that smell of mothballs and her perfume. Jasmine. She wears jasmine in her hair on Sundays.
I pull the coats over me and sit with my knees against my chin and put my hands over my ears.
It doesn't help.
Mamma is screaming words I can't make out. Then I hear,"La mia bambina. Per favore, la mia bambina."(My baby. Please, my baby.)
She is begging for me.
I should open the door and run to her. Be brave, the way she tells me to be brave when I don't want to go to school or when the other girls are mean. When I cry about stupid things that don't matter.
I don't move.
Then I heard a loud bang that sounded like a gunshot.
The screaming stops.
Silence fills the apartment the way water fills a glass. Complete. Heavy. Impossible to breathe through. Then a second gunshot. I flinch so hard my head hits the closet wall and I bite my tongue until I taste copper.
I stay in the closet. I count my heartbeats because counting is the only thing I know how to do. I count to six hundred and twelve. That is ten minutes and twelve seconds if my heart beats once per second. I know it is beating faster than that, so it has been less than ten minutes, but it feels like ten years.
The front door opens. Closes.
