Page 112 of Deadly Confessions
He is asking me to forgive the man who murdered my mother and father. Who fabricated the evidence that put them in the ground. Who carried me out of their blood and told me he'd keep me safe and then spent fourteen years turning me into a weapon aimed at the family he'd framed for the crime he committed.
He is asking me to forgive him.
"You want forgiveness," I say.
"Yes."
"From me."
"From you."
Something detonates behind my sternum. Not grief. Not the analytical cold I've been operating in since Niccolo showed me the folder. Rage. Pure. Volcanic. The rage of a ten-year-old girl who hid in a closet and listened to her parents die, who bit her tongue and counted heartbeats, who took the hand of the man who orchestrated it because she was ten years old and covered in blood and he was the only person left.
The rage I've been holding for fourteen years. The rage I didn't know had a target until tonight.
"You won't get forgiveness from me," I say. "Not tonight. Not ever. You want to be forgiven? Ask God. Get on your knees in front of that crucifix and beg the God you claim to serve, because I am not Him and I don't have what He has and even if I did, I wouldn't waste it on you."
"Valentina, please, there is something I need to—"
I close the distance in one step.
The knife comes off my thigh. The buckle releases. The bone handle settles into my grip the way it has settled a thousand times before. The blade is thin from years of sharpening. The edge catches the candlelight.
I drive it into his chest.
Below the sternum. Angled upward. The technique he taught me when I was thirteen. The anatomy lesson in the bell tower. The diagram on the chalkboard showing the rib cage, the intercostal spaces, the angle required to reach the heart without catching bone.
He taught me where to put the blade. He taught me how deep to push. He built the knowledge into my hands the way he built everything into my hands. With patience. With precision. With love.
The knife goes in to the handle.
His eyes widen. Not shock. Recognition. The look of a man seeing the outcome he calculated as possible but did not believe would arrive. His mouth opens. The word he was trying to say, the thing he needed to tell me, the truth that changes everything, dies in his throat.
His hands come up. Not to the knife. To my arms. He grips my elbows. Holds on.
The rosary beads hit the marble. The sound is small. Wooden beads on stone. A scattering.
His legs give. He goes down. Not falling. Lowering. His hands still on my elbows, his weight pulling me with him. I follow him to the floor. My knees hit the marble. He is onhis back. The knife handle protrudes from his chest. Blood spreads through the black cassock in a stain that looks like nothing because black absorbs everything.
He looks up. At the crucifix. The bronze Christ in the votive light. Then at me.
His mouth works. Blood on his lips. Red on his gums, his tongue, the spaces between his teeth. He is fighting the damage the blade has done to the structures that produce speech, pushing words through tissue that is failing, through lungs that are filling.
"Sono tuo padre."
(I am your father.)
The words come out wet. Broken. More breath than voice. I hear them the way you hear a sound through water. Distorted. I must have heard wrong. I must have misunderstood, because the words don't make sense, because they can't mean what they seem to mean, because my father died fourteen years ago with his arm reaching toward my bedroom door.
"What did you say?"
He coughs. Blood sprays in a fine mist onto my shirt, my hands, my glasses. His face contorts. The pain has arrived.
He says it again.
"Sono tuo padre, Valentina. Tuo padre."
(I am your father, Valentina. Your father.)
